Winners or Losers?

Ed Johnson, President and Principal Consultant, Quality Information Solutions, Inc. and Advocate for Quality in Public Education, recently posted this in a blog:

"Some years ago I once accepted an invitation to be a judge in a local middle school's Social Science Fair Contest. Wanting to know what I had gotten myself into, I made it a point to view the 30 or so student entries on display well before the judging got underway. To my surprise, I found each entry's content noteworthy, in spite of a few grease spots here and there. Each entry stood as "a class act," I said to a teacher nearby. Pleased, the teacher repeated my comment to other teachers.

Soon after the judging got underway, an odd uneasiness formed in my gut. For some reason not yet in my consciousness, I was fretting having to contribute to judging one entry "First Place Winner," one "Second Place Winner," and one "Third Place Winner." A day after the contest, the odd uneasiness in the gut gave way to this nagging question: What wisdom was there in deliberately making losers of so many children?...

That day, the Social Science Fair Contest opened my eyes and forced my ears on so that I might experience learning competition among youngsters in a new, revealing way. I suspect it was the unmistakable expressions of dejection on the faces of the contest losers that made me see and hear differently. Even the second and third place winners strained to put on a happy face, which showed me they, too, saw themselves as losers. Moreover, I plainly saw that the first place winner had attained recognition at the expense of all the other contestants, a God-awful lesson for a child to learn about learning and, perhaps more importantly, about how to esteem others...

Once they have destroyed children's intrinsic motivation and trust in school sufficiently, albeit unintentionally, educational leaders have only extrinsic motivation -- ironically, more competition, reward programs, pay for performance, merit pay, motivational speakers, role models, school reform, high expectations, finger pointing, accountability, you name it -- to address the problem.

Heavy reliance upon extrinsic motivation reflects a failure to understand that children were born motivated to learn. To see this, go get an infant, anybody's, and look in the child's eyes. Now, risk blindness by peering into the fire in those eyes! Wonderfully amazing, those neurons firing!...

Clearly, our country and today's world need as many winners as possible, not a many losers as possible. But by managing them as athletic-style competitions, and running them like businesses, with attendant rankings and such, our K-12 public educational systems cannot possibly do better than to keep turning out as few winners as possible and as many losers as possible."