Georgia’s current school metric underscores how our education system is stacked against certain students. You can guess which students.
In my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, our Cincinnati Bengals beat the odds.
The Bengals, one of the worst teams in the NFL the year previously, came into this past season with the third-worst odds to win the Super Bowl.
And the reason why was obvious.
The team was inferior than just about every other team, at least on paper.
The offensive line was a sieve. The QB was coming off a major knee injury. The best wide receiver was a rookie with a bad case of the drops. The defense was in the bottom half of all teams.
Yet, despite being inferior in so many metrics, the Bengals beat the odds.
They made the Super Bowl.
They had myriad areas of liability, but they overcame those liabilities.
Bearing this in mind, check out this “award” in Georgia schools.
In the state of Georgia, there’s currently an award districts vie for called “Beating the Odds.”
The state uses a variety of “characteristics” to help calculate how bad the odds are of a school succeeding.
The school traits, according to the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement:
- The percentage of minority, specifically Black and Brown, students in the school;
- The percentage of non-English speakers in the school;
- The percentage of female students in the school;
- The percentage of low-income students in the school;
- The percentage of students with disabilities in the school.
Like having a terrible offensive line or an inexperienced wide receiver corps in football, the state of Georgia defines liability by the darkness of students’ skin, the gender of students, and the language they speak.
Think about that analogy for a minute.
Georgia knows they have a system where Black students, women and immigrants are disadvantaged.
Yet, instead of fixing the system, they simply encourage schools to “try harder,” like a lame horse limping to the finish line at the end of a Disney movie.
“This isn’t ideal. But with enough grit, you can overcome your disadvantages.”
In the book We Want To Do More Than Survive, author Bettina L. Love describes this absurdity by saying, “So, the state acknowledges that there are barriers that hinder students’ educational growth, but instead of eliminating English-only testing or funding education fully, it tests dark children specifically against the odds they and their families did not create, knowing they cannot win.”
It’s one thing to “do your best with what you have” when you’re playing a finite game. But unlike the NFL, education is an “infinite game.” Or, at least, it should be.
Popularized by business writer Simon Sinek, an infinite game is a system where “the players come and go, the rules are changeable, and there is no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers in an infinite game, there is only ahead and behind.”
Because education is an “infinite game,” the institution can change. Rules aren’t static.
Yet that’s not how we treat it.
Instead, we demand compliance to a set of rules that might work for some students, but not others.
Or they might help students grow in one area, but not others.
And I don’t mean to pick on Georgia. They are just kind enough to vocalize the absurdity of labeling minority, female and poor students as disadvantages in our current educational system. But every state adheres to this philosophy. Most, if not all, schools do.
If being Black, or Hispanic, or female inherently disadvantages you — as Georgia admits — then something needs to change.
The way we test.
The way we teach.
The way we discipline.
These are changes we can make.
If we want to, of course.