Putting focus on individuals hurts society

By Anindya Kundu

If you're watching the NBA playoffs, by now you've seen the Derrick Rose "Just a Kid" commercial. The metaphor in the ad is about a rose that grew from concrete. The narration comes from a rap song by Tupac Shakur. He triumphantly states that instead of focusing on the damaged petals of this rose, we should celebrate its will to reach the sun.

Tupac, who was murdered in 1996, was right that the extraordinary rose deserves recognition, but we should ask ourselves, why is this the story we buy into as a nation? Is individual aptitude the only component to achieving greatness?

If schools are gardens, our narrow emphasis on American individualism may be keeping us from growing as many roses as possible. Instead of standing alone, we might be amid plenty of other rosebuds that just need a little more fertilizer to bloom.

As the number of social problems in this country grows - the need for an increasingly expensive college degree to gain entry to the middle-class; the dwindling strength of Social Security, with fewer active workers supporting the pensions of recent retirees; the proliferation of mass incarceration and the amount of tax dollars spent annually on prison inmates - it becomes necessary to acknowledge that support systems are needed for success.

Policies that look to equalize opportunities, such as offering universal free breakfast for all students regardless of income, have been proven to increase attendance and academic achievement. Teachers are then able to simply focus on teaching, without having to worry about the factors outside the classroom that affect their students' ability to learn.

In New York, we are observing the rollout of Mayor Bill de Blasio's universal pre-K program, for which an astounding 69,000 families applied in this first round of admissions in April. Many overtaxed parents hope their child-care needs will soon be taken care of.

The problem with roses-in-concrete stories is that they can keep us from realizing the need for these social responsibilities in areas such as education. This is troublesome because the American concrete is so formidable. Like weeds, disadvantages are concentrated.

Today, one in five American children grows up in poverty; in New York, the number is one in four. Out of New York's 1.1 million public school students, 80,000 children were homeless in 2013, and 11,000 kids were in foster care last year. These roses need our collective cultivation.

In education research, increased attention to qualities like grit as critical for student achievement has often been interpreted as praising individualism at the expense of social context.

The University of Pennsylvania Duckworth Lab focuses on grit and self-control as predictors of achievement. Its research shows the importance of "surrogate grit," the idea that a mentor can be gritty on behalf of a student and help push him or her toward excellence. This further highlights the fact that the arts of teaching and learning are social processes, and thus they should be thought of as such.

Our relentless focus on standardized tests might cripple this art, and the ability to creatively address the unique problems of students. In Atlanta's recent cheating scandal, we witnessed the admonishment of teachers who scrambled after believing they were left to their own devices and backed into a corner to produce results. Some of the jail sentences handed out to teachers charged in the scandal were greater than those given to some people convicted of second-degree murder. This model seems predicated on valuing individual success and stigmatizing failure.

Ironically, while public education remains our nation's most egalitarian promise - with access mandated for illegal immigrants and the homeless - there is an inherent disconnect between this vision and its reality. Since schools work for some, we might not question why they do not work for others. Thus a war wages on in our classrooms between two of our core American cultural values: an idealization of democracy vs. an idolization of the individual.

There is something to be said about the sociological prowess of advertisers to tap into our value system to make us buy things. In the case of the Derrick Rose commercial, the message seems to be that with enough persistence and Powerade, success is possible for every kid.

But when some roses grow from concrete and others from flower beds, our options are either to learn to grow together or to slowly wilt apart.