OK, I'm still scratching my head over this one:
The Lincoln [RI] district has decided to eliminate this year’s spelling bee -- a competition involving pupils in grades 4 through 8, with each school district winner advancing to the state competition and a chance to proceed to the national spelling bee in Washington, D.C....Assistant Superintendent of Schools Linda Newman said the decision to scuttle the event was reached shortly after the January 2004 bee in a unanimous decision by herself and the district’s elementary school principals.
The administrators decided to eliminate the spelling bee, because they feel it runs afoul of the mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. "No Child Left Behind says all kids must reach high standards," Newman said. "It’s our responsibility to find as many ways as possible to accomplish this."
The administrators agreed, Newman said, that a spelling bee doesn’t meet the criteria of all children reaching high standards -- because there can only be one winner, leaving all other students behind.
"It’s about one kid winning, several making it to the top and leaving all others behind. That’s contrary to No Child Left Behind," Newman said. A spelling bee, she continued, is about "some kids being winners, some kids being losers." As a result, the spelling bee "sends a message that this isn’t an all-kids movement," Newman said.
Furthermore, professional organizations now frown on competition at the elementary school level and are urging participation in activities that avoid winners, Newman said. That’s why there are no sports teams at the elementary level, she said as an example. The emphasis today, she said, is on building self-esteem in all students.
"You have to build positive self-esteem for all kids, so they believe they’re all winners," she said. "You want to build positive self-esteem so that all kids can get to where they want to go." A spelling bee only benefits a few, not all, students, the elementary principals and Newman agreed, so it was canceled.
Oooookay.
You know, my first thought here was that perhaps Newman and the school principals actually oppose NCLB and are being craftily sarcastic in their opposition to it, by coming up with a ridiculous position and insisting that it follows the letter of the law. Certainly, anyone who knows little of NCLB won't think much of it if they believe it prohibits any and all competition.
But on second thought, I doubt the thought processes here are that complex. It's probably just another simple-minded case of an educrat assuming that competion is evil and winning on any scholastic front is a zero-sum game. So much for the self-esteem of those who had hoped to win the spelling bee this year - or even those who would have been quite happy to make the top 10.
Hey Newman, are you making sure that all of your students learn to spell perfectly? If so, then we'll be quite happy to call them all "winners." If not, then those kids are most definitely going to realize their shortcomings when they graduate from your overprotective environment and learn that it's up to them to keep from being left behind.
Oh, and these school principals might want to take a look at this month's Scientific American, which contains the article "Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth." Key grafs:
At the outset, we had every reason to hope that boosting self-esteem would be a potent tool for helping students. Logic suggests that having a good dollop of self-esteem would enhance striving and persistence in school, while making a student less likely to succumb to paralyzing feelings of incompetence or self-doubt. Early work showed positive correlations between self-esteem and academic performance, lending credence to this notion. Modern efforts have, however, cast doubt on the idea that higher self-esteem actually induces students to do better.
Such inferences about causality are possible when the subjects are examined at two different times, as was the case in 1986 when Sheila M. Pottebaum, Timothy Z. Keith and Stewart W. Ehly, all then at the University of Iowa, tested more than 23,000 high school students, first in the 10th and again in the 12th grade. They found that self-esteem in 10th grade is only weakly predictive of academic achievement in 12th grade. Academic achievement in 10th grade correlates with self-esteem in 12th grade only trivially better. Such results, which are now available from multiple studies, certainly do not indicate that raising self-esteem offers students much benefit. Some findings even suggest that artificially boosting self-esteem may lower subsequent performance.
Emphasis mine, with "artificially" being the key word there. If Newman's kids aren't taught to relish the art of spelling - and relish academic competition in general - it's quite possible that any boost in "self-esteem" they recieve from not having to watching others win at spelling bees will be pretty artificial.
Posted by kswygert at January 28, 2005 09:37 AM