January 19, 2002

YES, EFFORT MATTERS, BUT TALENT HAS ITS PLACE TOO

An educational think tank at the University of Pittsburgh has a novel idea: How well you do in school depends significantly on how hard you work. Unfortunately not all their ideas are as sensible as that.

That matters to Denver because the Institute for Learning is the outfit chosen by district Superintendent Jerry Wartgow to work on staff development for the next several months, and possibly longer, while Wartgow continues to look for the right person to be his chief academic officer.

The institute says its philosophy ``rests on the belief that all students with appropriate forms of effort are capable of high achievement and high-level thinking, regardless of background.''

The emphasis is mine, because I want to highlight the institute's focus on a systematic problem in education: the tendency to demand less of children from less fortunate circumstances. Teachers in schools with many such children may be unwilling to present truly challenging material, for fear of harming their students' self-esteem.

During the campaign President Bush called it ``the soft bigotry of low expectations,'' and it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Children who could soar never learn to spread their wings.

But the acknowledgment that effort is required is welcome also. Teachers piously intone, as they are taught, ``every child can learn.'' But they are reluctant to add what all of them know, ``but not with equal ease.''

The institute is likewise reluctant to acknowledge that reality.

The focus on effort, it says, ``challenges the traditional assumption that learning ability is predicated on innate aptitude.''

But saying that a child's achievement is not determined by the child's background is logically quite different from saying that a child's achievement is not determined by the child's innate aptitude. Both are true, at least up to a point; they're just different. What the institute should be challenging is the assumption -- more unconscious than traditional -- that background determines innate ability.

But that's not the direction it wants to take the argument. Effort ``can actually create ability,'' it claims. ``People can become smart by working hard at the right kind of learning tasks.''

To write that requires a willful equivocation between two different senses of the word ``ability.''

Is athletic ability measured by how many shots you can sink from the free-throw line? Or by how much diligent practice it took you to get to that level? Both; but they're different.

No doubt my dismal performance at anything athletic would have been improved by ``sustained and directed effort'' -- effective coaching of talented athletes being a well developed and highly valued professional skill. But I would never have achieved the levels that came naturally to some of my high school classmates, just as some of them struggled with mathematical concepts that were intuitively and effortlessly clear to me.

There's more than a hint of the ivory tower about the institute's analyses. In a published interview, institute director Lauren Resnick talked about a large school system she studied, where teachers ``give a significant number of As and Bs in English to children who are in the bottom quartile on standardized reading tests.''

Why?

``That has to mean,'' she said, ``that over a time of being isolated, teaching only a certain kind of children, teachers have virtually forgotten what it means to really do A and B work.''

Could be. But it's just as likely that they know their grades are inflated but don't want to discourage the better children in their classes by giving them Cs, even though Cs are what they've earned. Or that they know there will be hell to pay from parents if they hand out honest grades.

Putting the institute's philosophy to work in Denver will be good if it helps teachers learn how to coach children to achieve their ``personal best,'' as they say in athletics. It's likely to be bad if it persuades teachers to act on the assumption that all children have essentially the same ``innate aptitude'' -- if that were so, why would there be any need for gifted-and-talented programs? And is it really desirable to create a professional culture ``where learning is valued and celebrated above performance''? What does that mean, anyway?

People can no more get smarter by practicing than they can grow taller. But they will get better, and that's worth doing.

(723 words)