Remember
transactional analysis? "I'm OK--You're OK" (or not, as the case may be)?

When
this newsy little tidbit popped up in Blogworld last week, I figured it would
be just a matter of hours until the usual blog suspects trotted out a
full-scale assault on any researcher (in this case, Geoffrey Cohen of
CU-Boulder) daring to suggest that kids perform better when given simple tools by
their teachers to re-affirm their competence:

If
a student starts off the year feeling more stress due to negative stereotypes,
and then performs poorly during the first few weeks of school, this can
establish a downward cycle of increasing stress and poor performance that is
hard to break. The self-affirmation exercise, by reminding students about what
is really important to them, could help reduce that stress, the researchers
suggest.

Like
TA, Values Clarification and polyester Saturday shirts, self-esteem as a
workable premise for improving student learning is seriously out of fashion
these days. Mostly, we see articles like "Are We Good-Jobbing Our Kids to
Pieces?"--followed by 186 comments from people who are convinced that
while they're OK, other people's children have been given way too much empty
praise causing their egos to blow up like fraudulent balloons. Use the word
"self-esteem" in any educational context, and you're likely to be hit
with a barrage of low-information platitudes about grade inflation, college
admissions based on the wrong stuff, and our miserable international test-score
standings.

The
concept of self-esteem is pretty squishy, involving considerable latitude of opinion
around ego health and evaluating achievement, when you deconstruct it.
Policymakers who believe that American kids are wallowing in unsubstantiated self-esteem
still believe it's a good idea to pay them for grades and test scores. Coaches
who declare that it's good for kids to lose occasionally still schedule extra practices
on Sunday mornings to prevent that from happening. We idolize Susan Boyle, the
modest, mousy Scottish lady who apparently kept her singing talents hidden for
50 years--but we don't want our children to be silenced by their own personal
Simon Cowell when they subject their early work products to scrutiny. That's
why refrigerator magnets were invented.

Every
first-rate classroom teacher understands the paradox here: you have to have a
base of self-esteem to withstand and benefit from honest and productive
criticism of your own work.  And
sometimes, kids come to school with very little sense of their own worth. The
research on self-esteem and social learning is pretty consistent: you need to
feel OK in order to learn effectively.

There
is also plenty of research showing that people running successful drug rings
and beating up their spouses have high self-esteem.  Teachers don't want to be nurturing the next
generation of narcissists. Self-esteem
in isolation can become a psychological defense for anti-community behaviors.
One of the most chilling and sordid examples of this was the HS athletes in
Glen Ridge, New Jersey, who raped a mildly retarded 8-year old girl with a
baseball bat, detailed in Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz. Plenty of self-esteem
there--plus a healthy dose of disgusting entitlement.

Most
of the people railing against the excess of self-esteem in American schools
aren't thinking about our national adulation of sports heroes or entertainers.
They're pushing to keep "standards" in place--to hold teachers and
students accountable, to increase rigor, to raise the bar--plus a couple dozen
other academic clichés.  If students feel
too good about themselves and their work, the reasoning goes, they will not see
a need to try harder to compete against our economic competitors. The problem
with this get-tough rhetoric is that students won't produce more if they feel
bad about themselves, either. It's a balancing act between sincere encouragement
and honest critique. And it happens in the classroom, not in Policy World.