It has been a year since I last published an essay. In 2024, our oldest son gifted my husband and me each a subscription to StoryWorth. I spent the year writing my memoirs instead of untangling snarls. The snarls, however, continue to pile up, and I am back to untangling them. While this essay initially appears to involve a local snarl, I believe the untangling reveals a global issue. As always, thank you for reading, and thank you for considering ideas.
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Recently, local elections were held in Illinois. In my community, eight candidates ran for four seats on the school board. This kindergarten-through-8th-grade school district posed a series of questions to the candidates, all of whom submitted their answers, which were then posted on the school district’s website.
One of the questions read: What would you consider to be a successful school district?
The responses were as follows:
- Inspires innovation and academic growth through an inclusive community
- Does everything in its power to create a learning environment that nurtures learning for all students
- The students feel safe and included, thus preventing bullying and violence
- Maintains a collaborative relationship with staff, students, and other stakeholders
- Students and staff feel safe, respected, and valued
- Leaders and educators share goals, collaborate, and work together to create a strong and proud family-like atmosphere
- Collaborative in nature and willing to listen to the headwinds and tailwinds of all stakeholders
- Every student has the opportunity to thrive academically, socially, and emotionally
Only the first and last responses mentioned academics at all, and in both cases diluted it with other criteria. The other six responses could have referred to a soccer team, a church youth group, a summer camp, a pediatrician’s office, or the Chamber of Commerce. No one answered: A successful school district is one whose students can read, write, and do math problems proficiently.
Perhaps you will argue—surely, surely! —that is understood. Alas, facts indicate otherwise. In this school district, in 2024, per the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), 42% of the students could read at grade level and 26% of the students could do math at grade level. Per the ISBE, doing work at grade level or above is the definition of proficient. Therefore, more than half of the students in my district are NOT proficient in English language arts, and almost three-quarters are NOT proficient in math.1
Perhaps you will suggest that my school district must face some serious social challenges—low-income families, high poverty rates, uneducated parents, recent immigrants. The latest census data reveals the opposite. The median income in this community is almost 30% above the state average; the poverty rate is half the state average; crime is low; 95% of the residents are U.S. citizens; 42% of the adult population holds a minimum of a bachelor’s degree.
Maybe you wonder if, in spite of the community’s demographic strengths, we simply don’t fund the schools. My kindergarten-through-8th-grade school district spends $15,000 per pupil; my high school district spends another $21,250 per pupil. Therefore, my community spends more than $36,000 on each pupil as they move from kindergarten through high school, which is double the state average, and triple the amount our neighboring states spend. And yet half our students cannot read proficiently and three-quarters of them cannot solve math problems at grade level.
What are we DOING?
Clearly, we are NOT teaching our children to read, write, and do math, but why not? I believe the clue lies in the responses of the school board candidates to the question: What would you consider to be a successful school district?
In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay entitled, Politics and the English Language. His premise was that sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. To think clearly is difficult and requires effort. You can save yourself a lot of trouble by regurgitating platitudes. Orwell writes that platitudes, euphemisms, stale metaphors, and vague phrases will “construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
Conceal your meaning—even from yourself.
The school board candidates reveal from their answers that either they don’t understand the gravity of the situation, or they don’t care whether our community’s children can read, or they don’t know what to do about it. Because how can it be possible that a community with so many advantages cannot teach its children to read, when for decades—centuries, even—children, often with far fewer advantages, were taught to read, write, and do math proficiently? This is a truly difficult question to face. And so, the candidates conceal their meaning from themselves. It is too awful to contemplate.
Two decades after Orwell wrote his essay on the English language, Václav Havel, the great Czech playwright, dissident, and eventual first President of the Czech Republic, wrote an essay entitled, On Evasive Thinking.2 He opens by describing a recent unfortunate event in Prague, in which a chunk of stone fell off a building façade, killing a person walking underneath it. A few weeks later, the same thing happened again—different chunk of stone, different victim. Instead of demanding that the manager of the building be held accountable and fix the problem, commentary on these events dissolved into vague contextualization, and drifted into other, irrelevant topics (particularly irrelevant for the grieving family members of the squashed victims). Havel points out that when we ritualize language, we engage in evasive thinking as we separate our thoughts from concrete reality and thus “cripple our capacity to intervene in that reality effectively.”
Cripple our capacity to intervene in that reality effectively.
Until the members of this school district get clear in their thinking—until they can articulate that a school district exists to teach children to read, write, and do math proficiently—they will be crippled in their attempts to govern a successful school district. They will speak vaguely of inclusion, and bullying, and collaboration, and safety—aye, they will even “listen to headwinds and tailwinds”—as they discuss “stakeholders” instead of children.
Even if you don’t live in my community, or you have no vested interest in public schools, I propose that the same problem can be found across the whole of society. My school district just happens to illustrate the problem. Once you start to look for it, you will notice that your congressman, your zoning commission, your neighborhood association board, your union steward, your city council rep, your United Way chapter, your alumni association will not get to the heart of the matter. They will respond to concerns with cloudy vagueness, slovenly language, and sheer incompetence,3 thus concealing the problem, even from themselves, and thereby crippling anyone’s ability to intervene effectively.
There are one dozen schools in my community’s kindergarten-through-8th-grade school district. Remember, the average proficiency score for reading and writing across those dozen school buildings is 42%, and the average math proficiency is 26%. Yet the State of Illinois rates eleven of those dozen schools as “commendable.” In Illinois, a school is commendable if it performs better than the state average, which is 39% for English language and 28% for math. Think about that. All it takes for commendation is to be slightly better than lousy. It is not surprising that the public messaging from the district Superintendent highlights the commendable rating and leaves the definition of the rating and the actual results unsaid.
Conceal the problem, even from yourself, and cripple your ability to intervene and solve it.
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1 I am indebted to Wirepoints for creating an easy-to-access report card for all Illinois school districts. If you live in Illinois, and want to check on how your school district is doing, go to https://wirepoints.org/kidscantread/ and enter your district number or school name in the search function. That said, I cross-checked all of the data with the ISBE website, which is, unsurprisingly, more difficult to navigate.
2Václav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990 (New York, NY: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1992) 10
3 George Orwell in Politics and the English Language, which is available on-line through the Orwell Foundation. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/
