Not long ago, I honored Rob Miller, principal of Jenks Middle School in Oklahoma, for refusing to bow down to the Oklahoma Department of Education. A large number of parents at Rob’s school opted out of the state test, and the state accused the principal of egging them on. They ransacked his emails in search of incriminating evidence but never found any. I admired Rob Miller because he wouldn’t let the state intimidate him. I didn’t realize until I read the piece linked here that Rob Miller had been a Marine. No way was the state superintendent, until recently a dentist, going to get away with pushing Rob Miller around.
Rob sent me this very personal piece. It’s about a boy he knew very well in school. He barely scraped through. He was the kind of boy who would have dropped put of school if the Common Core had been the state curriculum.
This is a story that Rob Miller needed to share. I feel honored that he shared it with me.
I think you should read it. If you are a teacher, you have had boys like Steve in your class. If you are a parent, you may have a child like Steve.
Some people want to throw away kids like Steve. Some think that if we ratchet up the pressure and make school harder, kids like Steve will change and become college-and-career-ready.
Read about Steve and find out who you are.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As a former principal I saw many Steve’s in my school and, like Mr. Miller was frustrated with an institution that could not tap into their intellectual strengths. I was fortunate to be in a district that permitted to experiment with a number of individualized programs that were better suited to the Steve’s in the building. I have been retired for several years, but still keep in contact with teachers who run these programs. They tell me that they are now well over a thousand students who have graduated from the school due to the willingness on the part of the school to honor different approaches to learning and goal orientation. Should add, that also in these conversations, is the fear that with every increase in accountability mandates these programs are continually looked at as the weak link in the school’s drive to raise test scores.
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This is an incredibly touching and sad story. It is exactly for those like Steve, ‘average’ students who don’t have an academic bent, and who are bored and demoralized by school, that I have urged that the school-to-work transition is, along with early childhood education, the target for educational change with the greatest benefit/effort payoff.
I have argued that we need a target, a core skills evaluation at age 15, benchmarked to what the workforce needs for career track jobs. Then we need to provide diverse pathways, many though lasting post high school, which include apprenticeships and work side by side with academics. And this would include bringing these students up to the proficiency they need for success in the workplace. The contact with the real world, and mentors who can help these students find a respected place in adult life can be very powerful.
Instead of devoting effort to those students, all educational reform has been devoted to the fantasy that all children will be brought up to levels of academic excellence. They won’t and they don’t have to be. But they do need to be brought up to the point that they can function well in the adult world. I am not saying that education should be narrowly vocational; it should not be. But if it doesn’t at least lift students to the level where they can thrive in the world of work, it has failed.
I wish I could get anyone with the ability to effect change to listen, but I haven’t.
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I used to teach in Sand Springs, OK. I have taught my fair share of “Steves”, being a special education teacher. I have worked hard to buidl them up, show them the strengths that they have, while remediating academic deficits. It is wrong for our society to push students into “one size fits all” curriculm and then use high stakes testing to measure their worth. I am retiring at the end of this year, but I will continue to speak out against the harms of the current “educational reform.” Our “Steve’s” desrev no less. Thank you, Rob Miller, for sharing your eloquent story.
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All readers of this blog, I urge you, please, please read this post from Rob Miller.
It says precisely why the last thing we need in this country is a single, invariant set of standards and tests for all students.
If you are not moved by this piece, you are made of stone.
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Kids differ.
The amateurish, backward, inflexible, one-size-fits-all standards that were just foisted on the country do not.
These standards will do real harm to real kids. There is nothing abstract or theoretical about this. Read the piece by Principal Miller.
I have written a lot about this issue, but never so eloquently.
Rob Miller, thank you.
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I am one of the fortunate parents to have worked with Rob Miller in Jenks Schools. We as a district are blessed to have a man that takes a stand against the State Department of Education. As a parent, I urge you to show support to your administration that are advocates for your students. What a priceless gift to have our children be led by these amazing people.
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The United States has the most productive workers in the world. But our leaders treat labor with one’s hands and the preparation for that labor, as though it were a vile undertaking not worthy of school curricula.
I have news for the folks who want to foist a single national learning progression on every child: kids differ. They differ a lot. They have propensities and gifts and interests that it is the DUTY of the school to discover and build upon. Schools are not factories for turning out identically milled parts. They are places for developing potential, human potential.
We should be thinking HARD about how to make our schools more varied, more exploratory, more fitted to the unique interests and propensities of children, not attempting to regularize them, to make them more uniform. If we put every child through the same machine, the ones that don’t fit the openings in that machine will have pieces of their hearts and souls lopped off. They will emerge completely, irrevocably broken.
Today, our schools are in the business of telling most kids that they are failures because they are not going to be lawyers or engineers.
But guess what? We live in an extremely complex, extremely diverse, pluralistic society that needs graphic designers and people who lay tile, industrial maintenance technicians and radiologists, dance instructors and yes, shoemakers–because we need to stop consuming so much and start learning how to recycle and reuse.
The one-size-fits-all vision of the Common Core is a recipe for creating Steves.
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Jean-Paul Sartre put it this way in Being and Nothingness: “Schools are places for making people ashamed of what they are.”
It doesn’t have to be that way.
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I agree. Well said. The band-aid is going to fall off, and the problem will still exist. I feel like we should start with the communities, then build up.
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yes, yes,yes
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Before anyone jumps down my throat, I am not suggesting that early schooling should be narrowly vocational. What I AM suggesting is that it should be vastly expanded to encompass many areas of human experience and endeavor that are not currently considered part of schooling; that there should be many, many individualized tracks; that EVERY student should have an IEP and a group of counselors who meet regularly with the student and his or her parents to chart a course; and that a great deal of our time should be spent giving kids as wide a range of exposure to the possibilities for his or her development as is possible.
School should not about filling a bucket with a set of skills from anyone’s bullet list. School should be about lighting a fire, a fire within, and then tending it until it reaches to the heavens.
The way to leave no child behind is NOT to attempt to put every child through the same milling machine.
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And if you don’t know what a milling machine is, may I respectfully suggest that there may be something missing from YOUR early educational experiences. Emerson wrote, “Give me a man who can write a good Horatian ode AND build a good barn.”
Labor is the opposite of shameful, and we need to stop treating it as though it were, as though it were lower caste and lower class.
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“And if you don’t know what a milling machine is. . . ”
I tell my students I used to work with screw machines. You ought to hear the responses to that!
So allow me to modify your sentence: “And if you don’t know what a screw machine is, may I respectfully suggest that there may be something missing from YOUR LIFE experiences.”
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Labor creates all wealth.
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Our children are gifts to us. And yet we treat them, many, many of them, like the one who says, when given a gift, “Sorry. That’s not what I wanted.”
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We say to them, to millions of them, “You. You are not what was wanted.”
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I was extremely privileged to work with some giants in our school corporation. Our superintendent at that time told us to find the best materials we could find and the best methodology for using those materials and he would stand behind us.
What remarkable things some of the people in the school corporation did then. What a JOY it was to work there and it was so professionally satisfying.
Our Director of Elementary Education was one of the most intelligent, hardest working, knowledgeable people in education that it has ever been my privilege to know and with whom to work.
He made the comment once something to the effect that who in their right mind would expect every child to grow physically at the same rate. Yet some people expect these same children to mature intellectually and emotionally at the same rate.
Children have enough stresses in their lives now without the added stress of these counterproductive inane political impositions on the people who have devoted their lives to the education of our children and indeed our nation. Yet again, is education to be put in the hands of scholars and educators or in the hands of politicians, inside as well as outside the public school arena?
The answer to that and what is happening all too often frightens me. “Steve” is only one person. How many of us know of children who while yet in school yet commit suicide because of the undue stresses of home and yes now especially of schools. We ignore this at our peril in my opinion.
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Diane, Thank you for putting the spot light on Rob Miller, Marine and Principal: Oklahoma’s education hero. One who is using his position to be our state’s most formidable advocate for children, their parents, and our public schools.
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Diane, You have done a good deed to give the spot light to Oklahoma’s eduction hero: Rob Miller, Marine and Principal. All of his writings are great advocacy pieces that translate into understandable terms the complexity of education reform efforts. I especially like his Letter from the Principal. He is a formidable child, family and public school advocate.
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