What I’ve noticed about the state of education: A parent and teacher’s honest take
It’s 4:15 on a Thursday, my classroom’s empty except for the hum of the copier down the hall and my 10-year-old son, Sam, slouched in a student desk at the back. Half a peanut butter granola bar is crumbled next to his Chromebook, and he’s been staring at a blank Google Doc for 10 minutes. I’m grading spelling tests at my chipped desk, and he finally huffs, “Mom, this is stupid. I know what I want to say. Why do I need four paragraphs?”
I walk back to look at the assignment: a 4th grade reading response to Wonder, with a printed rubric taped to the top. Four paragraphs equal full credit, two paragraphs mean a full letter grade off. Sam’s already written two solid paragraphs: he talked about how Auggie felt when kids stared at him, connected it to the new kid in his class who uses a wheelchair. It’s a good answer. It’s thoughtful. But it’s two paragraphs. I get why the rubric exists, why we need some consistency for grading. But Sam’s question stuck with me, same as a dozen other small frustrations I’ve had this semester.
Earlier that week, one of my own 4th grade students, Javi, turned in his animal adaptation project. Javi’s obsessed with birds, spends every weekend hiking and bird-watching with his dad. For the project, he built two bird feeders: one out of solid pine, one out of stacked recycled plastic bottles. He tested them over two weeks to see which stayed warmer overnight, kept his bird seed from freezing in our late fall cold. His hypothesis that plastic would insulate better was right, and he even counted how many birds visited each feeder to back up his data. But he didn’t fill out the 10-page formal lab worksheet the district posted as a requirement for the project. He scribbled his numbers on the back of an old Cheerios box, took a few blurry phone photos of the feeders, and turned that in. According to the official rules, he got a C.
I’ve been teaching 4th grade for 12 years, and I’ve watched the state of education swing back and forth during that time. When I started, it was all test scores, all the time. We got called in for meetings if our class’s reading scores were half a point below the district average, and we didn’t have time to stop for a kid who was upset before a quiz. If you had a panic attack, you still sat there and took the test, no exceptions. Now, we talk far more about mental health, and that’s a huge win. Last semester, a girl in my class had a full panic attack before our fall benchmark test, and I was able to send her straight to the counselor, let her take the test two days later when she felt ready. That would never have happened when I started. That’s real progress.
But the flip side is that we’ve swapped one kind of pressure for another. Now every assignment has to have a clear rubric, every piece of work has to be graded and documented for district records, every kid has to hit the same benchmark at the exact same time. We’re so focused on standardizing progress that we often end up grading kids for following directions instead of for actually learning something.
A few months ago, I started a small, unwritten rule in my class that takes almost no extra time. I tell kids on the first day: 90% of the time, you have to follow the assignment rules I give you. But if you can do two things, you can do it your way. First, you have to show me you meet the actual learning goal (for Javi, that meant proving he understood how animal adaptations help animals survive the cold). Second, you have to be able to explain to me why your way works better for how you learn. That takes 5 minutes out of my day, most weeks. Javi came in after school that day, brought his two bird feeders in, walked me through his numbers scribbled on the cereal box, and I changed his grade to an A. It didn’t require any big meetings or policy changes, just using the small amount of flexibility I do have as a classroom teacher.
As a parent, I have a similar small routine I follow when Sam complains about silly, box-checking requirements like four paragraphs for a short reading response. I don’t tell him to just suck it up and do it, and I don’t email his teacher to argue about the rule. We do two simple things: first, he does the minimum to get the grade he wants – for that Wonder response, that meant adding two short extra paragraphs with examples he’d already thought of to hit the four paragraph requirement. Then, after homework is done, we spend 10 minutes talking about whatever part of the assignment he actually cared about. After that reading response, we sat in the car on the way home and talked about how it felt to be the new kid, about the time he accidentally broke the gym wall at recess and was too scared to tell anyone for three days. That’s the part he’ll remember in a year, not how many paragraphs he wrote.
I don’t know if the state of education is getting better or worse overall. Some days I leave school feeling drained, like we’re pushing kids to check endless boxes before they ever get a chance to figure out what they actually care about learning. Some days I leave after having that 15 minute conversation with a kid about birds, or about how a book made them feel seen, and I think we’re doing okay. The big system isn’t going to change overnight, but that doesn’t mean we can’t shift small things every day. A 5 minute conversation after class, 10 minutes of ungraded talk after homework. It’s not a fix for everything, but it’s enough for right now.
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