If someone said “You are a good person,” what exactly are they saying about you? Would you feel good about it? Or, if they said, “You are a good enough person,” what are they really saying? We have lost our definition of good. It lies somewhere between being perfect and our worry that not being good enough is a statement of personal worth and not the quality of what we do.
Good is not an exacting word; it has become a catch phrase of soft meaning. If a dictionary tells us that good means “of somewhat high but not excellent quality,” we have clouded the modifier “somewhat” to the point of obscurity. Once, good meant correct. Good was what it is; something of high quality. My mother used to check me on my weekly spelling list when I was in grade school. “Spelling is not almost correct, it is correct or it is not correct,” she would tell me. “A ten letter word cannot have nine letters right and one letter wrong and be considered spelled correctly. If you are going to be a good speller, you must spell words correctly.” I would spell out my list of words over and over again until I could spell all twenty-five words correctly five times in a row. Not four times or two times but five times. Then, she would say, “Good.” I knew her meaning of good.
Somehow good has become stretched as if goodness is elastic. There is good as in correct and now there is good enough as in almost correct or correct enough. Perhaps goodness was beaten up a bit in the cultural and political turmoils of the last quarter century to the point that it is more difficult to define that high quality of good or goodness against which we should hold ourselves.
My golf partners watch match play golf on television and have come to believe that when a golf ball is within a two or so feet from the hole it is as good as in the hole. “That’s good enough,” they will say to each other and concede the belief that the “good enough” player would have made the putt. Good enough is close enough to being correct to be accepted as a concession to being correct. It is an approximation of being of high quality without being high quality. There is the rub. A good enough golfer may never put the ball in the hole, so we never really know how good good enough really is.
Maybe the phrase “good enough for government work” derived from a concession that work does not have to be correct but just correct enough. Does this mean we can accept a degree of incorrectness in performance, behavior and attitude? If so, has the concession to incorrection also filtered into our expectations regarding the behaviors and attitudes we attempt to inculcate in others?
Good does not need to be a qualitative statement about performance. Today, it can also be a socio-emotional assuage. We are surrounded by “feel goodisms.” I watch my grandsons play youth baseball. These are 8 to 10 year-olds. Some children of this age have a natural athleticism that will set them apart in the years to come. They run, throw and catch with ease. Some children are trying to find their athleticism. They are not natural athletes, but will develop the ability to run, throw and catch that will make them average yet competent ball players. Some children are truly awkward and will be on the awkward side of want-to-be-athletes all of their lives. I hear “good heat on your fastball” or “good jump on your steal of second base” and know that these are qualitative “goods.” I also hear “good try” when the ball is dropped and “good hustle” when they are thrown out at first and “looking good” when their play is not good at all but no one wants to say so. There is nothing wrong with the socio-emotional goodisms, but we too often confuse them with the qualitative good. And, children who cannot discern the difference between good and goodisms begin to create false concepts of their abilities. Many children and their parents do not know the meaning of good. Good may always be just close enough to good to accept its incorrectness.
A local school board member told me recently that the school district’s Report Card was “pretty good. The elementary kids did a good job, but I don’t know what happened in the high school.” A school Report Card is a display of various school data. It includes the academic performance of reading and math test results and ACT results and ACT participation rates. It includes non-academic data, such as graduation and grade level promotion rates and daily attendance. It also disaggregates the data by student demographics – ethnicity, poverty, special education, native language.
“Good schools” has been a slogan in Wisconsin for some time. Without surprise, our Wisconsin Report Card divides school and school performances into five categories of goodness labeled as expectations. These are: Significantly Exceeds Expectations, Exceeds Expectations, Meets Expectations, Meets Few Expectations, and Fails to Meet Expectations. As a district overall, the local schools rated an Exceeds Expectations, and individually, the schools rated Significantly Exceeds Expectations (elementary) and Exceeds Expectations (middle school and high school).
So, what are we to think? Good! Or, good enough!
Interestingly, the reading and math test results indicate that
• to qualify as an Exceeding Expectations school, 76.8% of the local elementary school children achieved proficient or advanced status in math and 52.3% achieved proficient or advanced status in reading, and
• to qualify as a Meeting Expectations school, 49.4% of the middle school children achieved proficient or advanced status in math and 42.2% achieved proficient or advanced status in reading, and finally,
• to qualify as a Meeting Expectations school, 37.3% of the high school children achieved proficient or advanced status in math and 35.3% achieved proficient or advanced status in reading.
Still good or good enough? Let’s reverse the academic goodness statistics.
In the Exceeding Expectations elementary school, 23.2 % of the children were not proficient in math and 47.7% were not proficient in reading.
In the Meeting Expectations middle school, 50.6% of the children were not proficient in math and 57.8% of the children were not proficient in reading.
In the Meeting Expectations high school, 62.7% of the children were not proficient in math and 64.7% were not proficient in reading.
Putting aside the local graduation rates and daily attendance rates and ACT participation rates which actually are very high, as in the 90 percents, we must consider the expectational intentions of goodness related to fundamental math and reading proficiencies. A school is considered as Meeting Expectations when more than half of its children are not proficient in school level math and reading tests; repeat more than half are not proficient. In the school report card business, Meeting Expectations appears to be another concession to “good enough,” because when more than half of the test results are not correct there is more than just a little concession to incorrectness.
How can this be and what can we do to change from good enough to good?
I refer to two quotations from the past, perhaps from a time when there was not a concept of “good enough.”
Norman Vincent Peale said, “We tend to get what we expect.” In the case of a school report card, when Meeting Expectations is a “good” school report card we do not have an adequate measure of goodness. We are expecting too little of our children. We are giving in to the goodisms of our culture and do not want to be guilty of telling anyone that they are not good enough. We may not have liked the 100% proficiency requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, but when school report cards actually reported a school’s gap between actual math and reading proficiency and the requirement that 100% of all children must be proficient in math and reading, we knew the goodness of our children’s academic status. This is not a call for a return to the NCLB mandates, but for a more realistic statement of fact in our school report cards. When less than 50% of the children are not proficient in math or reading, a school is not meeting minimal expectations.
If, as Peale told us, we get what we expect, then we are going to get a lot of children who are not proficient. Yet, culturally and politically, good enough is good enough. How incorrect can this be?
And, Winston Churchill said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.” What is required is a definition of good that means “of high quality” and high quality should mean a result much closer to 100% of the children being proficient in math and reading. Or, at the very least, until 100% of the children are proficient in math and reading, we have not done a good job and must continue with their learning until we have done a good job.
Good enough is not good. The golf score is not made until the ball goes in the hole and a word with one letter that is incorrect is not spelled correctly.