By Amber Dembowski
Have you ever stood at the edge of the ocean, mesmerized by its vastness? Recently, I found myself drawing an unexpected parallel between the sea and our education system. Both appear deceptively simple from a distance, yet harbor incredible complexity beneath their surface.
Picture this: A vast, breathing entity that sometimes appears glass-smooth and reflective, other times churning with volatility. Beneath that shifting membrane lies a universe of profound mystery. Layers upon layers of history, revealing glimpses of an inner world that is simultaneously transparent and utterly opaque. What appears calm on the surface conceals turbulence, complexities, and intricate networks we can barely comprehend.
This description fits both the ocean and our schools – systems that carry centuries of accumulated memory, stories of countless endeavors, successes, and failures.
The parallel becomes even more striking when we examine how we approach these complex systems. With the ocean, we marvel at its mysteries, respect its unpredictability, and acknowledge that there's so much we don't yet understand. But with our schools? We often do the opposite, attempting to create systems that aren't as dynamic and varied as the communities they serve.
Imagine looking into the ocean and seeing your own reflection. You know this is an illusion. If you were to reach into the water, there wouldn’t be another you on the other side. We also have illusions of our school system. Yet, we don’t seem to be as aware that they, in fact, are illusions. We believe that students come to school at the sprite age of 5 ready to learn and excited to be there. We believe that the teacher gives a direction and the students respond by following that direction. We believe that the learning process is linear and that the teachers and students go through their day seamlessly following the schedule and the curriculum provided. School readiness and the learning process that everyone imagines it to be, is an illusion for many of us. Just like your reflection.
Let me share a tale of two schools that highlights this idea. Both experienced the same scenario: a kindergarten teacher briefly leaving her students on the carpet while retrieving materials from her desk in the back of the room.
In School A, this resulted in some minor chatting and fidgeting – a ripple in an otherwise calm sea. The teacher returned to the carpet and gave the students a signal to quiet down. Most students did. She thanked them for their patience and showed enthusiasm for the upcoming task.
But in School B, this same moment sparked a cascade of events – a hurricane, if you will. What began as a brief teacher absence quickly evolved into chaos:
The first 30 seconds: Two students jumped up from the carpet and began chasing each other around the room, laughing. While one student tried to maintain order by yelling at them to sit down, the rest of the class cheered on the runners. In the midst of this commotion, one overwhelmed student quietly slipped out of the room.
The situation escalates: One of the running students tripped and fell. His playful mood instantly turned to anger, and he blamed the other student for his fall. In a burst of rage, he grabbed a chair and hurled it at his classmate. The chair missed its intended target, instead bouncing off a table and striking a girl sitting on the carpet.
The aftermath unfolds: The teacher, now aware of the situation, attempted to regain control by asking the running students to sit down. But before order could be restored, the student who threw the chair fled the classroom, heading for the playground where he hid in a tunnel. The other students scooted away from the impacted area, visibly frightened.
The ripple effect: What began as a simple disruption now required significant school resources:
Two office staff initially responded to the classroom
Two more staff members joined the search for the student who fled outside
The nurse tended to the injured student and called home
The injured student's parent demanded the aggressive student's permanent removal
Two additional staff members were called to locate the overwhelmed student who had initially left, eventually finding him hiding behind a coat in the hallway
Throughout this crisis, the four staff members continued their pursuit of the student on the playground while the teacher, attempting to resume her lesson, dealt with the emotional weight of having two missing students and a classroom of shaken children.
What started as a three-minute wait-time escalated into a school-wide incident, depleting personnel resources from the rest of the building, traumatizing students, and completely derailing the learning environment. While the overwhelmed student was found relatively quickly, the impact of this event would resonate far beyond this single morning.
School A vs. School B: Same situation, drastically different outcomes. Now imagine these outcomes across the day and across classrooms – multiplied.
After 27 years in Title I schools across five buildings and two districts, I've lived these disparities. We often respond to such situations by measuring what's easy to quantify: lost instructional time, antecedents, behavior incidents, nurse visits. But what about the immeasurable? The cumulative stress on teachers and students, the depleted resources for the rest of the school building, the emotional toll on everyone involved?
Here's what keeps me up at night: both schools receive the same improvement strategies, the same measuring sticks, the same expectations. We're treating them as identical vessels when they're navigating vastly different waters. It's like comparing a leisure cruise to a journey through a storm – the basic principles of navigation might be the same, but the amount of energy required from those supporting the learning environments are worlds apart.
I have never been one to focus on this disparity from a negative perspective. In fact, the one time I did try to advocate by focusing on the inequalities, it was met with resistance, and afterwards I felt even more alone and unsupported. Those who I reached out to weren’t intentionally making me feel that way. They just didn’t have the answers either, and it was easier to lean into the current systems and to look at what the isolated data was telling them:
We were fine.
Things were fine.
We were doing incredible work.
This I didn’t argue. But the toll it was taking on all of us to live up to this standard was what was missing. I didn’t let it get me down for long. Instead, it fueled me. I continued to move ahead taking a sense of pride in how hard we all work each day to provide better outcomes for our students.
Recently, the reality of the differences in school communities hit me harder than ever before. Sitting in my car, I found myself overwhelmed with tears, struggling to articulate to my husband the profound sadness I felt about these disparities. It's not that School B has worse teachers or leaders – quite the opposite. They're often putting in herculean effort just to achieve the same results as School A, yet this additional energy, stress, and resource expenditure goes largely unrecognized.
We're caught in what Socrates called a "noble lie" – the comforting fiction that all schools can fit the same perfect mold. Like trying to find a perfect circle in nature, we're chasing an ideal that doesn't exist in reality. This pursuit of perfection, or even "average," isn't just failing – it's actively widening the gaps between our schools.
Looking back now, I know that I was also compromising a piece of myself to live within this noble lie. I wanted to justify the system because I believed in what our teachers were doing, and I believed in our students. I would rarely speak in detail, outside of the school, about the unsafe and stressful situations our students or teachers were navigating each day because I didn’t want to disrupt the system.
Don't misunderstand me – I'm not arguing against public education. Quite the contrary. I’m a huge advocate for public education. I'm arguing for a more nuanced, honest conversation about the complexities within our system. Just as we wouldn't expect every coastline to weather a storm the same way, we need to lean into the idea that the complexities at each school will need varied support and resources.
It's time to wake up to the reality that what appears calm on the surface often conceals turbulence, complexities, and intricate networks we barely comprehend. The solutions might not be immediately visible, obscured by the very systems that shaped our thinking. But the first step is acknowledging that our current approach – treating all schools as identical and the data as all-telling – isn't just ineffective; it's perpetuating the very inequities we're trying to solve.
The problem doesn’t lie within the recommendations we’re given to improve our practice or the accountability standards we’re held to—those have their place. The real issue is that we continue to operate within a system built on isolated data points, comforting narratives, and the illusion of uniformity. We rely on surface-level metrics to justify decisions, rather than acknowledging the deep, structural differences shaping each school community.
But if we truly want to create sustainable, effective change, we must be willing to dismantle these noble lies, confront the uncomfortable truths, and reconstruct an education system that reflects the realities we see every day. That means not just reimagining an ideal, but also building the management systems and fiscal structures necessary to support it. Because just as a seawall must be designed for the waves it faces, our schools need solutions tailored to their specific challenges—solutions that go beyond ideology and aspiration, and instead provide the real, tangible support that educators and students deserve.
Are we willing to take that step? To dive deeper, to challenge what we’ve been told is “just the way things are,” and to build something that actually holds? Because the answers won’t come easily—but if we’re brave enough to look beyond the reflection, they’re waiting to be uncovered.
تعليقات