Remembering Influential Teachers

It's Memorial Day, a time when we pause to remember those who have died in the service of our country, as well as those family and friends who are no longer with us. It seems a fitting time, too, to recall those teachers who have played important roles in our lives, perhaps influencing us to become the people we are today or pursue the careers we have chosen.

Most of us can think back to at least one such teacher and, if we're lucky, several. For many people, the most influential teachers were those we had in our youth—in high school, middle school, or even the elementary years. This may be because when we're young, more things are new to us and, consequently, we're more impressionable. Although influential teachers can appear at any time, even well into adulthood, those from our childhoods often have a disproportionately greater effect on our lives, underscoring the importance of teacher excellence in K–12 education.

In my case, I was fortunate to attend a top-notch middle and high school where I had many great teachers. One was a slightly eccentric high school English teacher who was passionate about literature and tried hard to make his students understand how great books written by long-deceased authors could relate to disaffected teenagers of the late 1960s. Mr. Raftery sometimes drew parallels from experiences in his own life or in the lives of those he knew. One particularly memorable story came after the class had read Zorba the Greek. Exhorting us to "live for today," Mr. Raftery told us about someone he knew who had postponed "living life" while pursuing a Ph.D. at our neighboring university. The day after this person received his degree, he died. The moral was clear: If we spent too much time planning and working for the future, we risked dying without ever having lived.

Another influential teacher taught journalism at my high school. Successfully bridging the gap between teacher and friend, Mr. Brasler was one of the school's funniest and most popular teachers, inspiring many students to pursue journalism careers. For those whose home lives were less than ideal, Mr. Brasler's classes and extracurricular activities—the school newspaper and yearbook—were both refuges and bastions of normalcy. Always involved but never too much so, Mr. Brasler often knew or intuited more about students than they did themselves and had great compassion for the difficult circumstances they were sometimes forced to endure.

So on this Memorial Day, here's to you, Mr. Brasler and Mr. Raftery—and to all teachers everywhere who try hard to make a lasting difference in their students' lives.

Legacy Enrollment in Public School Districts

We've all heard of legacy admissions, which give preferential treatment to children of alumni, in private school and college admissions. But what if public school districts adopted similar enrollment policies for their K–12 students?

According to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, two Southland school districts—Beverly Hills Unified and Santa Monica–Malibu Unified—have recently begun offering preferential enrollment to kids whose parents attended their schools (and, in the case of Beverly Hills, whose grandparents have lived in the district for at least 10 years). The idea is to strengthen ties both with alumni, who may be more likely to donate money or help out in other ways, and with grandparents still residing in the district—and voting on school-related measures—who no longer have a "direct stake" in area schools.

Critics question, among other things, the fairness and utility of legacy enrollment in public schools, while supporters argue that districts already offer spots to nonresident children whose parents work in the district or whose attendance will help boost state funding or achieve other district goals. So far, the percentage of students admitted under this new policy is minuscule: In Beverly Hills, just 11 out of 5,100 students.

In these dire economic times, when school districts are struggling with drastically cut budgets, instituting a policy offering preferential enrollment to those few students whose alumni parents may be more likely to offer support that will benefit the many seems worth trying. Doing so is particularly justifiable given that much larger numbers of nonresident children with no district school affiliation are already allowed to enroll. If a legacy enrollment policy proves problematic, with too many parents taking advantage of the situation, district officials can always revise or eliminate it. Remaining flexible and open to change is key if schools are to survive the current financial crisis.

Gaining a Competitive Edge: Neuroenhancing Drugs

Recently the New Yorker ran a piece on the "underground world" of neuroenhancing drugs—"drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted." As competition, both in educational institutions and the workplace, grows ever more intense, increasing numbers of students (and graduates) are using such drugs as Adderall, Ritalin, and Provigil to give themselves a leg up.

If we accept, as the article seems to, that "cosmetic neurology is here to stay"—and that banning the use of neuroenhancers doesn't make sense since they are already in such widespread use—then what are the implications for today's students?

Significant numbers of them, from preschool through high school, already devote most of their free time and sacrifice much of their childhood to test-preparation courses and so-called educational enrichment programs in hopes of gaining a competitive academic edge. Even parents who balk at subjecting their kids to this sort of regimen can't help wondering if they're doing them a disservice and thwarting their chances for educational success.

The use of neuroenhancing drugs ups the ante still further. If Johnny's academic peers not only have the benefit of countless additional hours of training, tutoring, and testing but also the ability, thanks to neuroenhancers, to push ahead further, faster, and more efficiently, what chance does Johnny really have?

It's time to put a stop to this rapidly escalating race and take a closer look at its effects. Many kids today are already overburdened, overstressed overachievers. Is that really what we want for them, and is this really the kind of society we want to create—and live in?

What's Missing from College Rejection Letters

Recently the Wall Street Journal published an article on college rejection letters, citing some of the most praiseworthy (and infamous) among this year's crop. Even the kindest—and perhaps wisest—of these, from Harvard ("Past experience suggests that the particular college a student attends is far less important than what the student does to develop his or her strengths and talents over the next four years"), doesn't acknowledge the inherent subjectivity, randomness, and fallibility in college admissions.

The fact is, for every student admitted to any given college, many more are equally qualified and deserving but simply weren't lucky enough to get in. Although college admissions officials are typically highly dedicated professionals who work long and hard to make their task as objective as possible, the fine-level distinctions they ultimately make among highly qualified applicants simply aren't defensible from a scientific standpoint.

As I discussed in my previous post commenting on Barry Schwartz's Huffington Post piece titled "Why Selective Colleges—and Outstanding Students—Should Become Less Selective," his solution—that colleges should randomly admit students from their groups of "good enough" applicants—is not only sensible but more humane. Every year thousands of high school seniors are rejected from schools they had the grades, test scores, recommendations, essays, and extracurriculars to be admitted to.

These rejections are frequently traumatic and can have long-lasting effects, in part because colleges don't acknowledge the luck factor, which is far greater than most applicants or their parents suspect. Even rejection letters that pay lip service to unprecedented numbers of highly qualified applicants don't admit to the elements of chance, although doing so would be more honest and forestall much personal suffering on the parts of rejected students.

Some years ago in Admissions Confidential, a controversial book by a former admissions officer at Duke, Rachel Toor recounted her experiences in the field, revealing just how imperfect and random college admissions decisions can be. It's time for rejection letters to acknowledge this fact. Instead of claiming that only the "best" and "most qualified" applicants could be admitted (e.g., "The deans were obliged to select from among candidates who clearly could do sound work at Bates"), rejection letters should concede that the processes used to choose among highly qualified students are fallible and subjective, and that in the vast majority of cases, the determining factor was simply luck.