On the campaign trail in 2000, George W. Bush coined the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations” while describing his “No Child Left Behind” plan. Despite my distaste for many of his policies, Bush’s speech resonates deeply. As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
My Hanover High School classmates and I have benefited from many skilled and dedicated teachers and administrators. Yet, a troubling rationale has taken hold within the district over the past few years, beginning during the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2023, parents, teachers, and administrators discussed the proposed elimination of an accelerated math program at Richmond Middle School. RMS has similarly nixed an eighth-grade English curriculum that relied on double periods four days per week to read classic literature, such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Romeo and Juliet.” Instead of those widely-referenced classics, eighth graders at RMS, ages 13 and 14, now spend two months reading “The Ogress and the Orphans” — tagged by Amazon as one of the “best books for ages 9-12.” These changes may have transpired in response to the pandemic, which created unprecedented challenges for schools, or concerns about the content of certain literary works.
While the content-related concerns may be overblown, the most unfortunate outcome is a markedly less stimulating middle school experience for many students; one that may not prepare students for high school. Lowering the bar for students is counterproductive and tantamount to giving up on educating and encouraging them to achieve a higher bar. Lower expectations hurt underprivileged students the most, as students with resources move to private schools and hire tutors to improve their performance on standardized tests. The children without resources are left to live with lower standards, which is detrimental to our society.
At Hanover High School, a committee is investigating a “heterogeneous grouping” model where honors and non-honors cohorts of students are combined into single-track classes. Another committee is contemplating withdrawing the robust catalog of English classes available to 10th-grade students in favor of a standardized English curriculum.
The National Equity Project defines educational equity as “each child receiv(ing) what they need to develop to their full academic and social potential.” Advocates for heterogeneous grouping believe they are advancing this estimable ideal. They argue that homogenous grouping often leads to students with advantages outside the classroom being separated from students without those advantages. However, such grouping is impractical if the aim is fostering an ideal environment for education. Students are most engaged in classes where teachers challenge and meet us at our level. Heterogeneous grouping relies on the students at the top of each section to support and engage their peers, a theory that does not work in practice.
Journalist Rose Horowitch recently interviewed prominent college professors for The Atlantic. She found that “Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books.” This is no surprise to me. Perhaps this happens because of a tendency to lower the bar for all students rather than raise the bar for students at every level.
In his recent book, “Chasing Hope,” Nicholas Kristof insightfully writes, “The metric of progressivism should be progress.” If colleges across the spectrum have to curtail expectations to meet students where we are, we are not making progress.
To prepare America’s future workforce to compete with global powers like China, where students face the Gaokao — a multi-day exam so rigorous that planes are rerouted to avoid distracting test-takers — we must maintain a high standard for all students. We must provide elevated instruction for students at every level. In disciplines where a subset of students are overwhelmed by the standard, we must provide them with the resources to catch up.
The same well-intentioned but impractical theories that lead to heterogenous class grouping, have delivered another linchpin of modern education: social-emotional learning. Hanover High School has implemented a social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum that many community members find tiresome and impractical. Advisories meet semiweekly, once for lunch and a second time for a 40-minute lesson. Recently, junior class advisories spent one advisory period using chopsticks to stack washers as high as possible, subsequently debriefing. While the goal was to help students learn how to cooperatively solve problems, in practice, the exercise prompted many students to disengage and mock the process.
While proponents of the advisory curriculum maintain that this practice builds the emotional intelligence sought in the workforce and enriches the Hanover High community, these skills can be taught in a traditional classroom setting. Some of my most enriching experiences this year have been analyzing the Constitution in social studies and bouncing ideas off my classmates while solving a multi-step calculus problem. An unfortunate side effect of this reallocation of school hours toward SEL is the loss of valuable teaching and classroom time.
Our schools should work to create greater equity in the classroom, but they should do this by supporting students and focusing on substance over form. We can integrate social-emotional learning into core competencies and rely on teachers to help students behind the curve achieve their goals. It is better to face the challenge of engaging all students than to paper over the inequities. Even if perfection is unachievable, it is better to take baby steps in the right direction, than to accidentally stumble backward.
Ben Hourdequin is a junior at Hanover High School. He lives in Hanover.