All Kids Can Learn. Therefore, …

“All Kids Can Learn”

As a new school year begins, that phrase, All Kids Can Learn, or a variation on its theme, is ubiquitous, and it has been for as long as I can remember. You’ll find it in school mission statements, on bulletin boards and on attractive wall hangings in finely furnished school and district offices, in letters to staff and letters home to parents, and on websites and in blog posts like this one.

It’s certainly a nice sentiment; one that is intended to and does elicit universal agreement; particularly, as one would hope, among educators, parents, and educational policymakers, and ideally of course, students themselves.

All People Can Agree that All Kids Can Learn

Like many similar aphorisms, the sentiment may seem so obvious that it’s unnecessary to spell it out. But if the past has taught us anything it is that often it’s necessary to state the obvious, clearly, concisely, and repeatedly.

All Kids Can Learn

Also like many similar aphorisms, its obviousness and ubiquitousness come with risks. During a quick search online, I saw the phrase described (in alphabetical order) as a belief, mantra, platitude, slogan, soporific, and value.

We don’t need to develop a survey and use IRT to create a scale to order those descriptors from good to bad.

Perhaps for some, it started as a value or principle and over time became nothing more than a slogan or lazy platitude.  Familiarity breeds complacency. The road to hell…

And speaking of hell,

The Devil Is In The Details

We can all agree that at its core and at its best, All Kids Can Learn is a starting point.  It is a given, a premise, an assumption.

It is a necessary, but insufficient foundation on which to build public education.

As suggested by the title of this post, All Kids Can Learn must be a jumping off point to something more than a line in a mission statement or a hanging on a wall. It must be a jumping off point to action or as some of my colleagues might say to a theory of action.

As stated in the almost equally ubiquitous Rick Dufour quote, “Don’t tell me you believe ‘all kids can learn.’ Tell me what you’re doing about the kids who aren’t learning.”

But before we get to that question, what exactly do we mean when we say All Kids Can Learn?  What does it mean to you, to your child’s teacher, to your school, district, and state?

In addition to its positive message, one of the reasons that it is easy to get consensus around the phrase All Kids Can Learn is that it is just precise enough to sound definitive, but just vague enough to allow room for very different interpretations.

Nearly a quarter century ago, Corbett et al (2002) explored the different ways that  “All Children Can Succeed” was interpreted, and they identified three categories which signaled very different belief systems and had very different implications for practice:

• All Children Can Succeed – And It’s Educators’ Responsibility to See That They Do
• All Children Can Succeed…If They Are Willing to Try
• All Children Can Succeed…But Some Don’t Because of Their Families

In the final two categories, the statement came with an implicit qualifier external to the school and teacher. I have no doubt that if Corbett et al replicated their work today they would identify an additional external category beyond the family with a qualifier related to economic, cultural, socioeconomic and sociocultural conditions outside of the control of the school/teachers, families, and students.

As Corbett at al. noted, it not that the qualifiers are necessarily untrue, it’s that in the wrong hands, they relieve schools and teachers of the onus and responsibility of answering Rich Dufour’s question.

Ultimately, the difference between Category 1 and the others strikes at the core of our belief about public education. Are schools the great equalizer that can overcome any and all external barriers to learning?   NCLB, ESSA, and their required school accountability systems would suggest that the answer to that question is “yes,” but does anybody still believe that to be true?

Digging Deeper into the Fire

All Kids Can Learn

Four simple, monosyllabic words and we spend hours, days, years parsing and debating each and every one of them – with the possible exception of “kids,” although even with “kids” there’s debate about who should be invited to the public education table.

We’ve all been down the “Does all mean all?” road countless times. And in the past couple of decades, the phrase All Kids Can Learn has been used most vigorously not in reference to all kids generically, but by advocates working to ensure that a specific group of kids is included among the all (e.g., students with significant cognitive disabilities, students historically underserved, or if you follow certain newsletters, gifted and advanced kids).

I’ve already discussed the implicit qualifiers that can be attached to “can,” but it’s also important to recognize that “can” connotes a very different sense of urgency than “All kids must learn,” or “will learn” or even “must be given a fair opportunity to learn.”

And learn what? When? Who decides what will be learned by whom, when, and determines whether it has been learned?

Currently, the answers to those “learning” questions seem focused on individual students, as reflected in the George Evans version of All Kids Can Learn:

“Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or in the same way.” 

The focus on individuals is reflected also in all of the discussion about the importance of students being significant players, if not the primary player, in choosing what they will learn, when they will learn it, and where and how they will learn it.

Noble concepts to set upon a very slippery slope of past policy and practice.

But where else can we put learning but in the hands of teachers and students.

A Rose By Any Other Name Still Comes Back to Bloom

At the end of the day, notwithstanding all of the federal, state, and even local policies, laws, and assessments, All Kids Can Learn becomes real in the daily interactions between a teacher and their students.

No, a school and a teacher and a student cannot overcome all of the external barriers to learning, but they are able to do so much when given a real opportunity.

Yes, the qualifiers are real, but they are not insurmountable.

All kids can learn.

Image by Lasse Holst Hansen from Pixabay