Mismatch: Historical Perspectives on Schools and Students Who Don't Fit Them

There have always been students who do not meet the educational expectations of their time—students outside the mainstream mold who do not fit dominant notions of success. The differences between schools and these students can be thought of as a “mismatch” between the structure of schools and the social, cultural, or economic backgrounds of students identified as problems. In this essay we examine the history of these students who have not been able to do what educators wanted them to do. We look at how educators have labeled poor school performers in different periods and how these labels reflected both attitudes and institutional conditions. We then summarize four major historical explanations for why children fail in school—individual deficits or incompetence, families, inefficiency in schools, and cultural difference. Finally, we explore what implications this history has for students in the current standards-based reform movement, including implications for social promotion and the age-graded school. To avoid a mismatch in the standards movement, we argue that educators should focus on adapting the school better to the child, addressing social inequalities that extend beyond the classroom, and undertaking comprehensive changes that take no features of current schools for granted.

Compared to their predecessors, reformers in the standards movement have been making a rather radical argument: that all students can learn and that all students should be held to a high standard of performance.Though many educators have held these beliefs, never before has a school reform movement incorporated these tenets so fully into its reform strategy.There have always been children in schools labeled as slow, delinquent, or incapable of learning.They have been held back, put in special classes, tracked, and expelled.Despite the beliefs of the standards movement, though, there will always be a number of children who do not or cannot accomplish what their schools expect them to accomplish. In this way, the standards movement has and will have something in common with every American reform movement of the past century and a half: students who perform poorly and who fail.These students, we argue, are part of a mismatch between schools and groups of students who do not meet the “standards” of their day. We need to pay attention to the fate of the students in the present mismatch; understanding what has happened to these kinds of students in past school reforms can help us understand what might happen to the number of students who will end up failing in the current standards movement.

Over time, educators have identified a number of groups of “problem” students: pupils who did not learn efficiently what educators sought to teach; who misbehaved or were truant and delinquent; or who fell behind, were not promoted, and dropped out. As we see it, these differences between schools and students is based on a mismatch between the structure of schools and the social, cultural, or economic backgrounds of students identified as problems.It is not a problem of individual or cultural deficit, as many educators have argued, but this mismatch has had serious consequences for both individuals and groups of students.

To understand how educators have framed these problems of failure and poor school performance, we first look at how educators have labeled poor school performers in different periods and how these labels reflected both attitudes and institutional conditions.The labels that educators and reformers have given to low performing students contain important information about educators’ and reformers’ values about success, social diversity, and individual achievement.They give us some insight into the discrepancies between school-sanctioned values and the backgrounds of the waves of new groups of students attending school throughout the past two centuries and the changes in the types of mismatch over time.Labels also reveal just how embedded categorization and constructions of difference are in the structure of schooling.

We then summarize four major explanations for why children fail in school—who is to blame and why.Despite the persistent presence of students who fail, reform minded educators in different movements and at different times have framed the problem of this mismatch in sharply different ways.Individual students, families, inefficiency in schools, and cultural difference are the main categories for these explanations.In turn, these diagnoses led to quite different solutions, including intelligence testing and differentiation, the creation of a school counterculture that would overcome the defective socialization children received at home, and the addition of multicultural curricula.We suggest that many of the earlier assumptions and explanations embedded in these explanations and solutions have persisted into modern reform periods, even though rhetoric has changed.

Finally we argue that that educators need to focus on better adapting the school to the child as the most feasible way to remedy the mismatch in public education and to prevent much of the labeling and stratification in the standards movement that has worked to the detriment of students in previous eras.The problem lies in the fact that educators have focused more on the student side of the school student mismatch than on refashioning the school to fit the children.One reason is that for a majority of students—the middle-class mainstream—the standard form of schooling worked reasonably well, and the political power lay with them rather than with the outsiders.Policy makers’ focus on promotion and retention in the standards movement is to some extent misguided.There is less thought given to who is failing, why they are failing, and what schools can do about this failure than there is to political strategy and accountability for accountability’s sake.The students who are suffering are the same students who have felt the brunt of the school student mismatch in the past: poor and minority children.

Teaching children effectively will require a thorough rethinking of both the familiar structures of schooling, such as the graded school, and the gap between the culture of the school and the cultures of the communities they serve.The history of the education of students in this mismatch underscores three points relevant to the standards movement.One is that most efforts have concentrated on fitting the pupil to the school or on supplying alibis for the mismatch rather than looking to institutional factors to explain failure.The second is that broader social inequalities must be addressed in conjunction with failure and discrepancies in schools to give students their best shot at success.The third is that reforms have mostly been piecemeal and disconnected rather than comprehensive and coordinated.Standards-based reform has been assembled into a coherent design, but without alignment with other kinds of change that children need for success.In addition, proposals for reform have spilled forth from all sides of the political and pedagogical spectrum. We are convinced that unless contemporary practitioners, policy makers, and researchers question how problems are framed, including misconceptions and omissions, they may implement solutions, like the elimination of social promotion, that may hurt children rather than help them.