Rigor--what does it mean?

In his recent posting, “Bias against rigor in urban schools,” Jay Matthews posits that one of the roadblocks in education reform—particularly in the District of Columbia—is educators’ reluctance to “to push low-income kids too hard…[M]any well-meaning and hard-working people in the D.C. school system are biased against rigor.” There are several parts of these bold statements that I would like to unpack.

First, Matthews’ formulation of the problem puts the responsibility of educating low-income students solely on the shoulders of teachers and other educators, ignoring the fact that community and family factors also play a huge role. Teachers can “push” kids as hard as they want, but if the students don’t have proper supports inside and outside school—at least a modicum of medical care and somewhere quiet to do homework, to name a few obvious ones—chances are the students won’t show too much improvement. This is not to say that educators should have low expectations for students who face difficulties or who come from low-income backgrounds—this would be nothing short of unconscionable. However, it is also unconscionable to look at schools and what goes on in them as completely divorced from the interwoven factors that influence the populations and communities they serve.

Let us move beyond our critique of the school/teachers-in-vacuum concept and accept, for a moment, the premise that rigor is being undercut by educators’ reluctance. What do we end up with in Matthews’ formulation? We get “a secondary school model, which requires students to take at least eight AP courses and pass at least six of the 3-hour, independently written and graded exams.” While AP courses exams certainly have their place in education—they often provide much-needed college prep coursework—they do not necessarily promote deep understanding of subjects or a life-long love of learning. Is rigor, then, just a battery of AP classes and more standardized tests?

Not to get overly snarky or split hairs, but if we go back to the roots of this word rigor then we will see perhaps this is not so far from the truth. Merriam Webster offers this as the first definition for the word rigor: “harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment.” It is a given that this word has come to mean something a quite different in the context of academics, and Matthews is using in this way to mean an appropriately challenging academic program. But that Matthews’ idea of rigor is so narrow, so inflexible as to include only one vision of what high academic standards might look like, this is troubling.

Near the end of his article, Matthew’s asks: “Couldn’t we have something for those students whose only educational problem is that the standard curriculum is too slow and dumb for them?” Now that is a great question, and one I think all of us interested and invested in the success of public education need to be asking. But part of really asking this question is facing the fact that rigor in the narrow, rigid sense is not going to be enough.

High expectations for our students will only become reality in the classroom when we give teachers the tools and the time to collaborate and innovate, to create hands-on, real-world lessons that make theory and abstract thought come alive for all students. For students to succeed in this kind of highly creative and academically demanding environment, they will need all manner of supports. If education does not include these elements and a disciplined focus on how different subjects intertwine—from math to English, Science to the arts—then it probably won’t matter how many AP courses are offered or how many tests students have the opportunity to pass.