Struggle Not Failure

In my 35-years as a public educator, I never saw a young learner that “learned a lesson” from failure. Far from it. Instead, what I witnessed were young learners that doubted themselves as smart and strong, blamed their teacher, and at worse, gave up and dropped out from the learning game – after being labeled a failure.

Russell Shaw, head of school at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C. thinks differently. Recently, Shaw wrote in an article for The Atlantic (2/4/26):

“Early in my career, a mother came to my office to discuss her daughter’s calculus grade. When parents make this kind of request, I try to manage expectations by saying that as a school administrator, I have never changed a grade. Still, hopeful parents persist. In this case, the student had received a B, which her mother saw as a blemish on her otherwise spotless transcript. ‘I’m worried about how this will look to colleges,’ she told me. ‘Is there any extra credit she can do?’”

“I explained that it’s okay to earn a B in a challenging course, and that her daughter might benefit from the experience of not being perfect. The mother looked at me as if I had suggested her child take up base jumping. ‘She’s never gotten a B before,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how she’ll handle it.’”

“That kind of exchange perfectly captures a paradox of contemporary parents: In trying to protect their children from any hint of failure, many parents risk making them more fragile. For years, parents and psychologists have been debating how much parental support is too much. But the stakes feel different now. In a world rife with anxiety, intensive parenting has become even more intensive, and some parents are deploying every more sophisticated strategies to manage their children’s lives – initiating protracted grade appeals, trying to protect their child’s self-esteem by finding a part for everyone in a play, carefully curating extracurriculars to optimize their kids’ future. This happens even as teens take their first steps away from home and into independent adulthood. (Some parent, for instance, now hire ‘rush consultants’ to help guide their kid through the process of getting into a sorority.)”

“Too many parents, probably unwittingly are conditioning their kids to be afraid of losing. But experiencing failure and learning to recover from it are prerequisites for long-term success and, crucially, for mental health.”

The problem with Shaw’s line about “experiencing failure and learning to recover from it” is that too many learners – especially those who are black, brown, and poor – experience too much failure and, in turn, never recover from it.

Instead, our goal for young learners should be to experience struggle, while all the time receiving the right type of support from their adult learning leader, with success being the outcome.

Instead of expecting young learners to fit into a state-approved, district-led curriculum, let’s allow them to develop their own personalized learning plans, emphasizing their passions along with reading, writing, and problem-solving practice.

Instead of using a letter grade to an assignment that, let’s face it, is built on extremely flimsy reliability and validity, let’s train our young learners to evaluate their own learning and be accepting when their adult learning leader says “not yet” when discussing their work.

Instead of labeling student work as failure, which is so easy to do, let’s spend time with our young learners teaching them resilience through struggle, and not, in the end, settling on work that could be better.

No, I’ve met many Russell Shaw’s in my career, and frankly most young learners don’t respect them. They don’t respect them because the Russell Shaw’s of the world don’t appreciate the impact of failure. Most aren’t willing to spend the time with the young learner necessary to struggle but then succeed. Instead, they make quick decisions on young learners, at the detriment of the learners they are supposed to be serving.

Finally, Shaw’s brag about “never changing a grade” is laughable. My school registrar hated the sight of me walking into her office with a handful of grade changes, demonstrating that my kids had overcome struggle and met success. But, deep in her heart, my school registrar also believed in rewarding struggle and was happy to support a learning environment that didn’t embrace student failure.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB