Entering the College Lists

Well, Thursday at 5:00pm EDT has come and gone. “Ivy Day,” as it was termed for me by a student at Yale—where the current students eagerly await the news, partly because they love to woo accepted students and perhaps in part because they too watch as admission rates grow smaller and smaller at the most selective—the most absurdly selective—universities. The rates are now under 10% at almost a dozen colleges by my count, and dropping like a stone at others. Thus, “Ivy Day” 2012 yielded up plenty of pain—nearly a quarter of a million applications were submitted, perhaps by as many as 100,000 different kids around the world.

In my world the moment passed relatively quietly. Good news seems to have come to us at a roughly proportional rate, and a few kids got to dance on air through that evening as their parents reeled and marveled. It’s a good feeling—I’m lucky to say I’ve been there as a kid and a parent—but of course it’s kind of a placebo high, and all too temporary. At best it’s a momentary affirmation of the truism that hard work can pay off, and at worst it’s about winning some sort of prize; society has turned college admissions into yet another chance to bestow a five-star rating, but at least there is a substantive reality that underlies the enterprise, even though the reality is a bit less sweet than the moment of opening the email or accessing the decision website: You may get into Princeton, but somebody’s going to have to pay for it, and it will involve four years of even more hard work and new adjustments.

In our schools the impact of the news is a bit more muddled. The happy kids are happy, but keenly aware that their happiness isn’t universal—that good friends may have been devastated. Many of the disappointed students simply take their feelings underground; these are the kids who will only tell us the results of the decisions days from now, after being asked. Waitlists just confuse the issue even further.

We can say all we like about the whole process being akin to playing the lottery, but this may not be such a great consolation in a week where the MegaMillions was over half a billion dollars; it’s all too easy to overvalue having the winning ticket.

And what about our institutions? As a college counselor I’m pretty clear on the instrumental importance of my school’s “college list,” the ways in which outsiders are tempted to use the information as a proxy for the overall quality of the educational experience and current families see the list as validation (or not) of an important decision they have made on behalf of their children. Administrators sleep more serenely when their schools’ lists are tastefully dotted with the names of a particular 10 or 12 schools—you know the ones.

In my work, and at my particular school, I am not immune from these anxieties, and I’ll sleep reasonably well this spring. But my favorite list, the one I take the most pleasure in compiling, is the full list of colleges that have accepted our students—not the ones they choose to attend, but the ones that represent the full range of their interests and aspirations, the aggregated panorama of what and where this group of eighty kids saw themselves as—maybe—yearning for at some point during their senior year: business schools and art schools, engineering schools, schools in the mountains and schools amid cornfields, giant state universities and colleges nearly as small as our high school, places up the street and across the ocean.

I see our “colleges accepting” list each year not so much as data (of course it is, and it should be) but as a mandala created from the hopes and dreams of 18-year-olds glimpsing for the first time the full promise of life, the chance to explore their evolving passions and follow them toward experiences unknown but assuredly exhilarating. If they overvalue the achievement of “getting in,” they can never fully estimate the adventures—glorious and mundane, happy and sad—that await them.

I am proud that I work in a school where the emphasis is on those hopes, dreams, and evolving passions, a school in which who kids are matters at least as much as where they go. I like to think we don’t have “default” schools to which we are expected to remit certain kinds of kids or kids who didn’t spend the evening of “Ivy Day” rejoicing; every student has to figure out who they are in order to be—or become—who they are, and the college search-apply-choose process should support this by affording them the freedom of many options.

All too soon the “colleges accepting” list will be winnowed to a “colleges attending” list through a process that makes the month of April a surprisingly painful time of decision-making for kids who thought the hard work would be over when they “got in.” Simply discovering the criteria by which they make big choices—practical and fanciful, rational and emotional, private and social—is the last big lesson of the college search-apply-choose process, or at least the last lesson we get to observe in our schools; we will generally only hear echoes of the pangs of separation and the struggles of transition over the summer and into next autumn.

I'm not such a Pollyanna that I don't appreciate the inequities and injustices of the selective college admission process as practiced in the U.S. in our time. But in the lives of the students living through it the process is a reality, and on their behalf for the moment we have to make the best of it.

So all through the next few months I will occasionally pull out and marvel at the “colleges accepting” list, thinking about what might have been, and what may still be; the list is written, but the lives it represents are not. As much as we wring our hands and beat our breasts about college admission, I think it’s okay to take heart and even find something wonderful in the exploration and growth we are so often privileged to witness.

College Admissions--Agony, Ecstasy, Reality

In real life I’m a college counselor at an independent school, and if your school has a secondary division—that is, if there are seniors in your school—you know that this week is emotionally pretty intense.

As I write this a bit more than half the news is in, and there is still a gap between what kids have heard and what we have heard from kids, because we depend on them to let us know where things stand. Most of the news, so far, has been good—our Naviance app gives us a daily update on the percentage of “accepts,” “denies,” and “unknowns.”

Contrary to what many believe, we college counselors do not always know the news in advance. At best, many of the colleges that will speak to us during the process give us a kind of Magic 8-Ball reading—“she’s reading well at the moment.” Only a tiny number give us real news in advance, and some tell us nothing at all. So, like the kids, we wait, too.

And what is it we are waiting for?

For us, it’s data, of course, and affirmation of our own predictions and hopes. In our hearts we want 100% success, although we know and tell our kids and families that a certain amount of less-than-ideal news is probably a good thing; it builds character, we think, and helps kids build some coping skills around disappointment. We discipline ourselves to using the word “denied” to describe bad news, although the kids always say “rejected.” Of late we have seen more use of wait-lists and the dreaded “January admit,” which is almost always a full and unconditionally acceptance but almost always feels like a kind of, well, rejection. We rejoice and suffer with our students and put our hearts and minds into consoling and guiding where we can—focusing on bright sides and helping to formulate Plan B.

For the students, however, the moment of opening the letter, popping open the email, or logging into the decision site is probably as charged an event as they have experienced: a moment of truth. Fantasies, hopes, dreams, parental pressures, and desperate desires—along with the deepest and most secret fears and anxieties—are all mixed up in a powerful late-adolescent emotional stew that roils and bubbles throughout this long spring notification period. Many see their entire futures, as well as their self-concepts, riding on the decision made by the admission committee at some beloved college, and some will take “bad news”—denial or waitlist or even January admission—as a personal blow.

I can’t blame kids for taking it personally. We have been telling them for years about what they need to do to “succeed” and how to do it, and there is no more palpable measure of success in the world of a high-schooler than where he or she gets into college. We have created an appalling beauty pageant in which every even vaguely ambitious student—and every parent—is pretty much required to participate, cranking out good grades in every course, taking the “most demanding” courses in disciplines they don’t much like, participating at a “meaningful” level in “significant” activities, and demonstrating “leadership” and “accomplishment” wherever they can. The only thing missing is the swimsuit contest.

Universities elsewhere—Canada, Ireland, the U.K.—don’t seem to care so much about the beauty pageant. Instead of essays about why they loved their grandmother and why their service trip meant so much to them, applicants in those countries are asked to explain why they want to study what they want to study at the places they are applying; they have to submit a transcript and test scores, not an annotated resume. If they may miss outstanding prospects from time to time, these universities send a message that going to school is what matters most—not “the 253 officially recognized student organizations on campus” and the posh new student center.

There is a group of smaller U.S. universities who group themselves together under the “Colleges That Change Lives” rubric, taking their name from an excellent 1996 book by Loren Pope that focuses on a handful of lesser-known colleges with great track records at turning good but not always conventionally superb high school students into engaged, committed scholars who pursue academic passions into graduate and professional schools in disproportionate numbers. These are colleges, in other words, for kids who have perhaps opted out of the beauty pageant but whose big intellects are searching for an academic purpose that high school may not quite have fully illuminated—colleges whose holistic admissions programs seem pretty good at identifying the right kind of kids, perhaps kids that both the superselective U.S. beauty pageant and the more cut-and-dried overseas processes might have missed.

The point is that the lives of eighteen-year-olds have plenty of room for change, a lesson that only experience can teach us and that I have been surprised and generally pleased to discover is taught to us recurringly over many decades.

And so college counselors, like teachers, administrators, parents, friends, and the world at large spend this week above all other weeks in the year helping kids understand that it’s not about rejection or acceptance but about making the most of the opportunities life gives us. There’s no such thing as “deserving” in this business, because the notion turns the focus away from the essential lessons here. But it’s not easy, for us or—of course—for the kids. For some kids even good news is freighted: Did I undervalue myself? And shades of Groucho: Do I want to even go to a place that would take me?

At 5 o’clock our time on Thursday many of the Ivy League schools post their decisions, and all I can imagine is a rolling barrage of misery running westward across time zones as 90+ percent of the applicants to each of Yale, Harvard, Brown, and others find that their futures are not to be in New Haven, Cambridge, Providence, or wherever. I have been assured that many of those kids are applying to multiple schools and that quite a few will get into one or another, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that on Thursday evening and Friday I will have to have Kleenex on the table in my office.

Then, weirdly, by next Monday the flow of news—except for a scattering of waitlist changes—will be over, and we’ll enter what for many students is the hardest part of the process: actually choosing a college. All the good news becomes the previously unconsidered side of a double-edged sword, accompanied by three or four weeks of the most intensive self-discovery as kids decide whether that smaller, more rural place might serve them better than the big urban school that they had assumed would fulfill their deepest desires. (There’s also the money piece, which we know is a private agony for kids and parents but takes place largely away from our world.)

So, to high school folks everywhere: These are the weeks when so much of the pudding is being proved, and most importantly when students and their families are confronting what the whole darn pudding actually means. It’s hard on everyone, and it will have mostly beautiful results as well as a few that linger in mind as disturbing puzzles.

And please smile at your college counselor colleagues when you see them--but don't ask a lot of questions quite yet.

Real-World Issues and Our Lives as Educators

Educators and the gurus who egg us on make a lot of noise these days about making curriculum and pedagogy relevant to “real world issues.” Most effective teachers have figured out that real-world connections are a pretty powerful glue for making learning stick, and of course the public purpose of education and of independent schools is only enhanced by elevating students’ thoughtful awareness of the wider world in which we live.

Sometimes, to me at least, it feels as though the thinking I do about schools and education proceeds in a parallel universe relative to the real world issues relating to kids and schools—and not just the independent school universe—that catch my attention and often enough distract and dishearten me.

What troubles me may not be what troubles you, but, other than by staying the course of my current politics and civic interests, how as an educator am I supposed to meaningfully integrate into my thinking about kids and schools such things as

• reports of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin “pleading for his life” while a self-appointed guardian of law and order shoots him to death?
• Mitt Romney’s “I’m not concerned about the very poor” gaffe, coming just as we are digesting reports that about 20% of American kids live in poverty—while Mitt excuses himself be explaining that he was talking about "the 5%" covered by a “safety net”?
• what looks to me like a resurgence of religious conservatism that is closing some college campuses to certain kinds of free and open discussion that no one gave a thought to limiting just a few years ago? Add this to a resurgence of political interest in limiting women’s reproductive rights and such outbursts as Rush Limbaugh’s (sure, I know he lost some sponsors), and I begin to wonder where we’re going as a society.
• the current political trope that any point where policy and a particular religious perspective are in even potential conflict represents a “war on religious freedom”? Some candidates have discovered that calling any position differing from their own “a war on” their beliefs and cherished positions is a great way to make political hay—another reason to wonder where we’re headed.
• Rick Santorum’s attempt at a frontal assault on the idea of college as a universal good as a way of differentiating his ideas from those of President Obama? He backed off for now when it didn’t quite work, but someone obviously likes the idea of painting all colleges as nothing more than indoctrination stations for liberalism and a college degree, which 30% of American adults over 25 hold, as the badge of an elitist.
• the endless attacks on public school teachers as unionized, lazy, and incompetent—and the gleeful public “ranking” of New York City’s 19,000 teachers? Several states, including my own, are considering with voter-mandated teacher evaluation schemes concocted by political interests

As independent schools, we disproportionately educate, are governed by, and depend on the upper percentiles of wealth and income, and it’s not a stretch to guess that lots of our constituents are on the more economically and socially conservative side of the political spectrum; not a few of our schools are faith-based and subject, directly or indirectly, to pressures related to their tradition.

All the strange and troubling news and the increasing predominance of extreme and often hateful speech in our public discourse make me wonder how authentically and courageously our schools are actively addressing “real world issues.” Does the debasement of political speech, where extreme positions and phraseology that takes “un-p.c.” to new levels are just part of the new culture of all-negative campaigning, threaten to give our teachers, our students, and our institutions permission to step away from our highest ideals and to order the better angels of our natures to “get thee behind us”? Are hurtful words and hurtful attitudes—as long as they don’t seem like bullying, which is criminalized in schools yet celebrated as a worthy style on talk radio and cable television “news” shows—drowning out decades of work to develop truly diverse and respectful cultures at our schools?

Sometimes it’s hard to keep my eye on the ball when I get caught up in the politics and culture of the day. But this is the context in which our kids are growing up and in which we live; this is to whatever extent the world that we have made, or permitted to exist.

So whatever we do to keep improving our schools, to keep innovating if that is what we must do, as human beings we can’t really separate our work from “relevant,” real-world issues. I’m well aware that what eats at me is not going to be what eats at every reader—the very opposite may trouble you—but it’s a world of things that eat at us and that we can’t ignore in our schools. And we have to figure out how to make our work not something that happens in a parallel universe but in the real world, with real students that we care about.

Rating Our Teachers

“Teacher quality” is approaching the status of one of my least favorite phrases.

I’m all for effective teaching, teaching that reaches every student in a classroom—teaching that inspires as well as educates in some defined skill or content area.

Great teaching, we know, teaches students lessons about themselves and their world, lessons that may have little to do with X + Y or metaphors or photosynthesis. Ask a lot of folks about the best teacher they ever had, and quite a few of them won’t even mention someone who is a member of the “teaching profession.” Great teaching, and even most pretty good teaching, is as much about life lessons as academic subject matter, and most people instinctively realize it.

Ever since we all had a chance to study the full ladder of public school “teacher quality” in New York City earlier this year, I’ve been stuck on other equally shoddy and haphazard ways in which students and parents—consumers—have set about systematizing the judgment of teachers.

Five or six years ago we were all stewing over “Rate My Teachers dot com” and its curious, unregulated, and nearly libelous system that allows pretty much anyone to post an anonymous "review" of a teacher on line. When managing things like this was part of my work, I actually found the Rate My Teachers outfit to be fairly responsive to things like removing the names of teachers who had left our school or correcting misspellings, which at least provided minimal accountability, and I marveled at those schools with huge Rate My Teachers databases; I assume that at least for a while some schools tried to maintain quality control of their sites by encouraging all students to use it. I even wonder whether such schools ever discussed the meaning of the RMT categories—“easiness,” “helpfulness,” and “clarity”—or offered guidance to students in how to think about these ostensibly useful and even kid-friendly classifications.

In 2012 we can rate everything from restaurants to eBay transactions to individual airline flights, will-I, nill-I, just by clicking a star or a number or some other clever icon, and of course we can “like” our Facebook friends’ posts and “favorite” their tweets. All of this is offered to us in the name of interactivity, of course, giving us extra power, or at least the illusion of extra power, in the marketplace by adding the data from our individual experiences to the vast collective pool of commerce.

I don’t suppose that teachers can expect to be subject to such ratings any less than cab drivers or the Ukrainian guy selling me a Soviet-era wristwatch, and as long as schools don’t come up with their own clear and consistent ways of evaluating the teachers’ effectiveness, marketplace mechanisms like Rate My Teachers or politically imposed mechanisms like standardized test scores will have to do as a proxy for real quality assessment.

These days I find myself engaged in more and more conversations about assessing teacher effectiveness and building up the quality and reach of teacher evaluation systems to promote real professional growth in independent schools. My ruminations on Rate My Teacher and the ubiquitous “rate this” systems have got me thinking that we will be needing, school by school, to make the ways in which we talk about teacher effectiveness pretty transparent to our students and families, and that we may even have to do the unthinkable: invite their feedback into the system. Because if we don’t invite their feedback—these key customers who are spending BIG money on our services and whose investment is even more emotional than financial—it’s not too hard to imagine some clever 21st-century entrepreneur cooking up a way of rating our teachers, and our schools, that is just as slick and appealing and widespread as using Yelp to rate a dry cleaner or clicking on that middle star to damn an Amazon partner vendor with faint praise.

It will come, this system, and I recommend that we all start thinking about how to get out ahead of its impact by starting right now to have those frank and open discussions of what effective teaching is, not just from the standpoint of an observing administrator sitting in the back of a room or making a pay-raise calculation, but from the perspectives of our students and even their parents and guardians. (And, incidentally, if we have marketed our schools properly, their perspectives should be deeply informed by our the missions and values we espouse.)

To some this may sound like a living hell, or a kind of craven surrender to the most crass forces of the marketplace, but I think there could be an opportunity here: Why shouldn’t we be engaging all of our constituents in conversations about what effective teaching and learning means? If we’re going to be living in a world in which “giving feedback”—the marketplace euphemism for rating our everything—is a constant (and we are living in this world), should we not be educating our students (and ourselves) in the responsible, civically affirmative, application of this power? And let’s not forget to include the life lessons that our students so remember and so cherish as part of the teaching and learning that goes on and that should be acknowledged as significant.

We could have our cake and eat it, too. Imagine a school where the meaning of great teaching is clear, where the whole culture is focused on helping each teacher achieve the highest level of professional and personal efficacy, and where that goal is understood and celebrated by everyone—a school that is all about great teaching and where conversations about great teaching infuse school life at every level and elevate the meaning of learning to a whole new level.

Isn’t every school really supposed to be about this?

Now, About Those Men in Their Gray Flannel Suits...

Well, my 2012 NAIS Annual Conference is over, and I’ve come to a few conclusions. I’ve had Bill Gates tell me that technology is changing schools, and that in 10 years schools and education will change in ways we can’t imagine. I’ve heard some memorable one-liners, tweeted a couple of these, and apparently missed a great session by Dan Savage (“It Gets Better”) while I was on a scheduled call with a college admission office (damn!). I have notes and reflections enough to fuel Not Your Father’s School for a while.

I’ve even had my mind changed—or at least temporarily opened—on the word “innovation.” I still think we need to be careful lest we devalue this word into meaninglessness (and as an industry we’ve done it before), but in a great session on the subject in general, and on sources of new ideas that we should be attending to, Jonathan Martin made a pretty good point. Jonathan is no slouch—he’s the fountain of energy and good ideas behind the excellent 21k12 blog—and he noted that using the “I-word” as the conference theme this year was intended to give people the idea that 1) doing things in new ways is important—really important—and 2) that innovation doesn’t have to be that difficult. While I think that innovation is and should be difficult, or at least the product of a lot of hard and very intentional work, I decided I would deign to give NAIS a pass on having chosen the word to frame the conference.

I was excited that Jonathan’s session was SRO (click here to access the slide deck, which is one-stop shopping for great ideas), and the same held true for the session my boss, another colleague, and one of the founders of the NuVu program did. I also heard great things about another session I didn’t go to (too many choices, that time) run by the estimable Scott Looney of Hawken School on managing change. It is pretty clear that many hundreds of the attendees have a hunger, a serious hunger, for shifting the way we do things. Pat Bassett and the selection of featured speakers (well, Bill Gates was kind of a disappointment and my jury is still out on Amy Chua, much as I want to understand her) keep pushing, pushing us toward new approaches and new ways.

But there’s a long way to go. Riding up the escalator this morning in my pullover sweater and tastefully frayed khakis (few will ever accuse me of sartorial elegance) I amused myself by speculating on the meaning of the predominant dress code, at least in my part of the River of Humanity determinedly climbing the escalator: So many guys of all ages in carefully pressed dark suits with brilliantly shined shoes! It was like a refugee center for L.A. Law partner wannabes. So many women Dressed for Success, their educational vocation proclaimed by colorful, interesting scarves; C. J. Cregg couldn’t have been more professional!

I understand that there are cultures of coats and ties, and that my father and grandfather would never have gone to a conference with less than spit-shined footwear and their best Brooks Brothers togs. I know that some people use the conference to network for jobs, and that there is a certain amount of old-school membership code to be exchanged at this independent school Gathering of the Clans. I make no judgments; I can and do don the uniform and polish my shoes with pasty, smelly stuff when the occasion calls. I confess that I no longer generally consider the conference to be one of those occasions unless I’m presenting. Call me a rebel.

Innovation and snarky observations on clothing—where am I going with this?

Going here: Once I had settled into Jonathan Martin’s session I reflected on the meaning of those suits, those brass-buttoned blazers, tailored pants, and sensible shoes. And then I looked around the room.

SRO, as I have noted—but the only besuited guy in the room that I could see was Brother Jonathan, who is clearly of my mind when it comes to the presenter dress code. Where were the other Suits? Who were they listening to?

Maybe there was a radical breathing even hotter fire than Jonathan Martin somewhere else. Could be. But I know that the men and women in the gray flannel suits weren’t in the room listening to one of the most complete and concise arguments for and “how-to” presentations on authentic school change that I’ve ever heard.

I found myself wondering whether there isn’t still a pretty significant body of independent school folks who are proudly resistant to all this 21st-century stuff, who see it as the province, perhaps, of the kinds of educators who dress down for conferences and enjoy prattle about project-based learning and the like. That choir can hang out and listen to Jonathan Martin preach, but the real educators will hold out for a more refined, more disciplined way of educating whose rigor and quality are proclaimed by a dress code from the era of Mad Men. But professionalism in education is not defined by a dress code—there are things that we need to be attending to and thinking about, things that we all need to be learning.

Thing is, I missed those guys and women this morning; I really wish they had been there. They need to hear what people like Jonathan have to say, and their schools and their students need the kind of teaching and learning experiences being promoted by Jonathan and a lot of other educators who have decided to create not-their-father’s schools. Yup, it’s radical in its way, and it requires some serious application of creativity and wisdom.

I guess that “innovation” won’t truly define our work, all our work, until more of us start taking more chances on listening to new ideas—ideas and approaches that aren’t really even all that new, for the most part, even as they seem more urgent. “Innovation” was the theme of the conference, not “Innovation except for anyone who wants to opt out.” We don’t like it when teachers opt out of the strategic work of our schools, and we can’t be any more happy when schools or their leaders opt out of the strategic work of our entire profession.