Delight in the Gap

Delight in the Gap

Sometime this past fall an incident occurred at one of the schools I serve which illustrated a basic problem that I see with the whole “Close the Gap” mindset that has become the focus of special education at the state level as well as at some of my local schools.  Close the Gap is a mantra being chanted by the educational system that declares that the goal must be “to eliminate the achievement gap between general education and special education students.” (This is an actual quote by a representative of the state Department of Education to our agency’s opening meeting two years ago).

You may also recognize this Close the Gap thinking in the No Child Left Behind mandate from the federal government.  Simply put, NCLB has the goal of getting all children above the 40^th percentile on standardized measures of achievement in reading, math and science.  This is, of course, statistically impossible since as soon as the lowest student is at the 40^th percentile, that becomes the 1^st percentile!  But statistical reality has never been much of an impediment to government mandates!

I should say that I do believe that we can do a much better job of challenging under-performing kids to achieve at higher levels.  And I believe that improved achievement has benefits for the individual as well as for the community and society as a whole.  Students who achieve better, feel better!  What I take issue with is the prevailing standard of measure being applied to all students – or maybe even to any students.

At some point in the past, people began to believe that people could be measured and explained statistically in much that same way that it was possible to measure various naturally occurring events – this might include coin flips or the size and weight of chicken eggs.   As a result, the concept of the normal curve was applied to human characteristics such as height and weight and then to more complicated characteristics such as intelligence.  As the use of the normal curve began to be accepted as itself “normal,” assumptions underlying its use were rarely if ever challenged.  One of those assumptions is that characteristics such as intelligence and achievement have a “normal distribution” and that plotting it as such is desirable.  One of the results of this thinking is standardized testing that we all now take for granted in our schools.  And one of the consequences of standardized testing is gap thinking based on percentile scores.  The goal becomes to get everyone under the big part of the bell curve – to make everyone “normal."

Back to the incident in the school.  There is a little kindergarten girl at one of my schools who has significant disabilities physically, intellectually, communication-ally.  She has few words although she can definitely make her desires and especially frustrations known!  She walks only with the help of a walker.  She cannot navigate steps independently at all.  In fact, one of her physical therapy goals is to go up one step.  One day in the fall, she was working on getting up one step.  She could get one foot up but was struggling to get the other one up.  After several minutes of struggling, the paraprofessional suggested that she had worked hard enough for the day and that she could stop trying for now.  Julie would have none of that and informed the aide in the way only she can that she was NOT done trying to get up the step.  At that point, Julie’s teacher had joined in supporting and encouraging her.  After about 10 minutes, a group of second graders came down the set of stairs at which Julie was at the bottom continuing to struggle.  Coincidentally, they were waiting in line at the same time that Julie finally accomplished the feat of getting the second foot up to the first step.  The aide and teacher were sweating and exhausted, emotionally as much as anything.  The second graders cheered.  Julie beamed! 

But in Close the Gap thinking, this is a big “So what??”  Julie may only be in kindergarten but she is going to be a failure when it comes time to measure her reading, math and science and will be a part of why the school ends up on the failing school list.  She simply isn’t going to be “normal.”

I don’t think anyone would say that Julie’s achievement on the step is a failure or shouldn't be celebrated.  Seriously, there were tears in people’s eyes.  But the system values achievement only compared to the norm.  Julie is not going to be at the 40^th percentile in stair walking either.  Imagine if we made that her goal for the entire of her elementary school career?  Or her entire K-12 career?  We would be asking her to do something that she physically can never do.  “Walk the stairs like a normal student!”  My school psychologist friend Frank likes to tell the fantasy story of the kid with no legs that is forced to run the 100 yard dash until he meets the standard of the so called normal kids.  In his telling, Frank keeps yelling at the fantasy teacher/real system, “BUT HE HAS NO LEGS!!!!”

For sure, there is a gap between Julie and most of the other kids in her school.  If normal curve thinking is right, it must be our goal to close the gap between Julie and the other kids.  We have to focus on the gap and are continually faced in our thinking and programming with how Julie is inadequate.  But what if normal curve thinking is wrong?  What if instead of focusing on what Julie can’t do compared to other so called normal kids, we focused entirely on what Julie can do compared to herself?  What if instead of focusing on closing the gap, we began to delight in the gap as a way of seeing Julie for how special and important she is just the way she is?  What if the system could see that Julie getting up that one step was more work and more significant an achievement for her than going up the whole flight of stairs at the 40^th percentile (and above!) is for the rest of the kids?

And what if we applied this kind of thinking to every kid in the school?  There are so very many kids who feel inadequate at school because they don’t measure up.  Our system continually compares all the kids to each other with a goal, never stated but always present, that everyone should be the same with the smart kids being just a little more the same than the others (George Orwell – Animal Farm). 

As a follower of Jesus, I reject normal curve thinking because of my firm belief that everyone is created in the image of God.  Each has passions and abilities and limitations and interests that result in a unique individual who is capable of being the best person he or she can be, as long as they are allowed to compare themselves to themselves (Galatians 6:4).  When we put kids under the normal curve, we take away their uniqueness as we force them to focus on single measures which they may or may not be capable of meeting.  In Jesus’s day, disabled people were considered to have been cursed by God (see John 9 and the man born blind).  They were different than the norm and therefore there was something wrong with them.  If science is one of the chief gods of our age, it has not helped us move away from that attitude as one of the laws of this new god, the normal curve, has defined those beneath the 40^th percentile “cursed” because they are not the same as everyone else.

We can do better than this.  Julie’s achievement on the step was one of the greatest I have seen or heard about this school year.  Julie herself is a delightful young person with so much personality and drive and stubbornness.   She is precious right now and the next steps she takes, literally and figuratively, should be celebrated because she is moving toward becoming the best Julie she can be according to her abilities and skills and passions, not because she is becoming more like the “normal kids”.  Let’s find ways to delight in the gap.  We may even close the gap while we are doing it.  But for sure, it will be more affirming, edifying and just plain more fun than focusing on trying to close a statistical gap that will always exist if we continue to measure it with standardized tests that kids like Julie will always have trouble mastering.