“… instead of repeatedly asking why 42% did not complete high school within four years, exploring what factors enabled 58% of them to graduate on time seemed sensible and important.”
— Succeeding in the city
I can’t agree with this statement more. Sticking to the failure only turns people down while exploring the success is the best way of encouragement.
Can you tell how differently students feel about when they hear “I’m sorry that half of you cannot graduate” and “Congratulation half of you can graduate”. The hidden message from both of them is “you are probably one of them” but the ideas conveyed by the two ways are different — one discourage students while the other encourage them to keep studying. They are basically talking about the same thing, but the message that students can gain from is straightly opposite.
Repeatedly emphasizing that almost half of students of color fail in high school only implies that they may be one of the “losers” and students may unconsciously give up themselves; however, encouraging them that more than half of them successfully graduate from high school gives them the confidence that they could be one of those graduates too. The way that an authority talks about a certain thing can lead audience to totally different path. In China, there are two famous quotes from a true story — “One who tried but always failed” and “one who failed but always tried.” They were talking about the same person, but people reacted differently towards the two sayings.
More importantly, what is the purpose of keeping asking why they fail? To tell them how bad each of them is in detail and to give them another hit? “See? This is why you can’t succeed.” Moreover, this may be one reason for the stereotype that “When they show up to school (which isn’t very often), administrators and teachers should expect them to be disengaged, disrespectful, unprepared, underperforming, and violent” (Succeeding in the City, 2014, P.5). While people are consistently exposed to articles and researches about reasons why SOME students of color tend to fail in high school, they may be influenced and tend to regard almost ALL students of color perform poorly at school. It is extremely dangerous if an educator has such opinions.
We should learn from success, not failure. Why not saving the time to research why the other half succeed and apply their useful strategy to those who are on the edge of failure?
While I agree that we should always look at education through a positive lens in order to not discourage students, I do think that it is important to push students even further. To say “I know that the statistics say that 58% of you will graduate, but I know that we can raise that statistic.” We should not be encouraging keeping the status quo. Like either you fit into the graduating statistic or you fail and don’t graduate. We should not be implying that the numbers don’t change. We should take the positivity one step further and encourage students and do as much as we can to improve circumstances to increase those graduation rates. It should not be okay that only half the students in a school graduate. We should be looking at those 42%, and while we should not talk to the students as if they are or will be that 42%, we should be looking to see what those 42% of students need in order to help them move along into the 58+%. Sometimes, students seeing that their teachers are placing so much trust in them succeeding can motivate them to actually succeed or at least try harder.