Winners and Losers

“We are the champions, my friend.

And we’ll keep on fighting ‘til the end.
We are the champions. We are the champions.

No time for losers

‘Cause we are the champions

Of the world….”

Those lyrics conjure up memories of big-haired seventh graders in tight jeans swaying back and forth and yelling along with Queen’s rock anthem in the cafetorium at the Wilson Middle School social back in the early 80s.

“No time for losers.” That reminds me of a saying often attributed to race car driver Dale Earnhardt, Sr.: “Second place is the first loser.” Nike popularized this as a slogan for their ad campaigns in the 1996 Olympic games. Ricky Bobby switched the phrase up a bit in the film Talladega Nights when he proclaimed, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”

I think I’m pretty safe in saying that our society’s obsession with winning and losing is not new. We seem to delight in ranking ourselves and others. It’s not enough to call someone a winner; we revel in calling someone else a loser.

In recent weeks, the state has unveiled a controversial new school rating system that assigns letter grades from A to F to public schools. The preliminary scores of some schools with satisfactory ratings on the old system plummeted to Cs, Ds, and Fs under the new one. A whole new crop of “losers” has now surfaced. Teachers, administrators, schools, and districts are horrified, yet politicians seem unfazed (and perhaps even pleased) by the unflattering light shed on many schools and districts.         

We all know what it feels like to lose. Hopefully, we’ve all also experienced the feeling of winning, too. Winning is a motivator, but perpetual winners sometimes become complacent. Losing can motivate, too, but it can also have the opposite effect, leaving the losers to lose hope and quit trying.

Education, as I see it, doesn’t have to be a competition at all. There’s no need to be fixated on creating a hierarchical structure if success for all is what we aim to achieve.

I know that at this point some of you are worried because you fear I’m going to be one of those people who suggests we give everyone a ribbon just for showing up. That’s not the answer. Being a chronic non-athlete, I received many an unearned ribbon or trophy in my childhood, and I know from experience that those victories had little impact on me one way or another. I knew I hadn’t earned those awards, and they meant nothing to me. They just created one more item I had to throw away when I eventually moved out of my parents’ house.

My argument isn’t about eliminating criteria for success and deeming everyone a winner; instead, it’s about promoting excellence and equity with standards-based measures that we hope everyone will achieve.

Isn’t the goal of public education, after all, to create an educated public? I want to believe that everyone--the kid down the block, the woman in the car next to mine at the stoplight, the person in front of me in the voting line, the teenager serving my dinner at Popeye’s, the mechanic fixing my brakes--has succeeded in an educational setting that ensures they can think, reason, read, write, calculate, follow instructions, listen critically, solve problems, analyze, evaluate, and express their ideas clearly.     

What I don’t want is to wonder which of these people were the winners and which were the losers in the game of education. Which ones succeeded beyond expectations, and which fell further and further behind until they and everyone else gave up on them?

I firmly believe that collaboration promotes learning. Most students learn from interactions with others. In the 21st century workplace, collaboration is an essential skill, a skill we have to help students develop with practice over time.  

Competition is the enemy of collaboration. Why should I work together with you if I hope to end up ranked in a higher position than you? If someone has to win by surpassing others, there’s no advantage to collaboration.

In a world where frantic parents badger their child’s elementary school teachers for just a hint about how their little darling is doing in relation to his or her classmates and where parents gain self esteem by broadcasting their kids’ achievements on social media, competition isn’t likely to vanish completely overnight. But I think it would do us all a service to reflect on the consequences--intended and unintended--of competition in our schools. And among our schools.

Teachers can start in their own classrooms. How can you change the climate to one where every success is applauded by the class as a whole? How can you motivate all to succeed by allowing everyone an equal opportunity for success? How can you allow every student to make as much progress as possible during the short time he or she is in your class?

If everyone receives a great education regardless of school, teacher, district, socioeconomic background, or location, doesn’t our entire society win?