First, Do No Harm
Changing Education by Centering Care
For me, this newsletter is a place for a birds-eye view of education, a wide-angle look across the K-12/higher ed divide (shocking, I know!), across regions, and across institutional mission. Why? My hope is that, by doing so, we might be able to see things anew, to find opportunities for light, for growth, for change.
Observing the broader landscape reveals just as many commonalities as differences, one of which is this: regardless of the context, education should begin from a premise of care. Students are not just numbers. They are human beings who bring with them all of their hopes, fears, dreams, and heartbreaks into the classroom. We need to take this reality much more seriously than we currently do. Schools tend to treat students as numbers, as cogs in the machine, as test scores, as graduation rates, but doing so betrays the fundamental promise that we make to children when we send them off to school for the first time—that we will care about them as learners and as people.
The historian Cate Denial has a book coming out soon called A Pedagogy of Kindness that places care and compassion directly at the center of the act of teaching. Everything else emerges from this, and without attention to care, we cannot effectively teach and students cannot effectively learn.
Care, then, is one of our most important tools for making change, and that reform begins by first acknowledging where we fall short of the high bar that care sets for us and by understanding how we can do better. Education, in other words, needs its own version of the medical profession’s credo to do no harm.1 I’m certainly not the first to hint at similarities between the two fields or the need for harm reduction in education, but I’m particularly thinking of how we use these principles to make change.
Education should be free of all types of harms—physical harm, emotional harm, psychological harm, harm to a child’s love of learning, even harm caused by reform efforts, as Bettina Love has so powerfully shown us in her new book Punished for Dreaming. It should be free of harms, but it often is not. Too many students endure all of these harms and more on a frequent basis in our educational institutions.
Care is the solution for harm. It is the antidote, and we need to strengthen our ethos of care so that it can withstand the harsh winds of public opinions and bureaucracy. As we continue our work to change education, we will need to lead with care to address the root causes of harm before we can build new models on a more solid foundation.
A Success Story to Share
I’m always excited by good news when it comes to schools and colleges changing their policies to benefit students, and we had a winner in this category very recently! Western Oregon University in sunny Monmouth, OR, has decided to move away from the traditional A-F grading scale and is instead instituting a system that retains the A, B, C, and D grades, but removes the D- and the F (i.e. the grades that fall below 1.0 on the GPA scale). Students who would normally have received one of the now defunct lower grades will be given an NC (“no credit”) and will be required to retake the course in question, but their GPAs will no longer be dragged down by D-’s and F’s.
According to reporting by Insider Higher Ed’s Jessica Blake, the university made this change for several reasons, including a need to increase retention and graduation rates. They also want to help students to rebound more quickly if they experience failure. Both of these issues are linked together, and the administration of the university believes that by providing students with opportunities to boost their GPAs, fewer will consider leaving the university before graduating.
I read a lot about grading reform for my new book Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It (that pre-order link should be available soon!), and this kind of systemic change is so difficult. Although I wouldn’t say that Western Oregon’s change here is the most progressive or dramatic I’ve seen, I do think they deserve credit for envisioning a different path forward and for doing the work to make it happen. Kudos!
What’s Next?
Next week: A review of two recent books about grades, and information about our upcoming slow-read book club on The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler. (For paid subscribers)
In 2 weeks: some thoughts about the weaponization of the rhetoric of parents’ rights by conservative groups to justify school vouchers and book bans. (For all readers)
Fun fact: did you know that the phrase “first, do no harm” is not actually in the Hippocratic Oath taken by many doctors when they graduate from medical school? If you answered yes, then you’re way ahead of where I was just a few hours ago. As it turns out, it appears instead in another of Hippocrates’s works called “Of the Epidemics.” I must admit that I was surprised by this, but I’m happy to have straightened things out.