"Harvard has failed us," goes the speech by Scott Levin-Gesundheit, my former PAF, at Harvard gradation. "And by that, I mean it's given us B-pluses."
I have, throughout my school career, heard from countless friends and schoolmates that "I'm so gonna fail," "I totally failed that exam," etc. And somehow, it all came out okay. No one actually failed out of high school, or of Harvard, or even failed a single class. "Failure" in the American school system is a subjective -- doing more poorly than you had hoped or expected -- rather than an objective experience. Not so in Österreich.
Here, the threat of failure hangs over the entire educational system. The expected distribution on any test will include a certain number of failures, and one of the teachers told me she has made her exams much harder this year, because last year's students passed them all on the first try. (This does not mean that they all got 100% -- there was a normal distribution of 1-4s, just not any 5s.* And that was a problem, in her eyes.)
Students in Austria have more official rights than do American students, who are basically subject to the whims of their teachers and schools, and there's a law here stating that if more than 50% of the class fails an exam, the students have the right to repeat it. Most exams, at least here at the Karajangasse, are repeated. And this isn't because the students don't study -- I tutored a group of eighth formers for more than 10 hours before their last exam, and they also spent time studying at home. And they still failed. ("It was an 8, not a 13, this time"-- on the 1-5 scale, said their teacher. "So you did make progress with them.")
In the United States, I had always felt that my teachers had omniscient power, that they were the ones who decided my grades. And there was a tacit understanding between students and teachers that if you did any work at all, you wouldn't fail the class. If you were lazy, you might get a C, and as long as you did what was expected of you, an A or a B was yours for the taking.
Things are completely different here in Austria. For one thing, I get the distinct feeling, especially in the seventh and eighth form classes, that the students and teachers are working together against a common enemy: the Matura. Eighth form teachers are obligated to give their classes old Maturas as exams -- after all, if the students don't practice, how on Earth are they supposed to pass the actual exam in June? Last week, I had to awkward stand in front of a class while the teacher announced the results of the most recent exam to her eighth formers. "We worked so hard," she said, "and I had really hoped the results would be better this time. But they got worse." As if how her students did on the exam was totally out of her control -- which, in many ways, it is.
On the one hand, it's positive that there's some external accountability. I know that were I in a similar school in the United States, with similarly disadvantaged students, many fewer students would fail -- but they would get meaningless high school diplomas that wouldn't correspond to any actual increase in skills. Pushing kids through the system, because that's easier than holding ourselves accountable to teaching them, as is the case in the United States, clearly isn't the answer.
But neither is this laissez-faire attitude toward failure that at times takes root here in Austria. "These kids are a nightmare," one of the teachers at a friend's school said to her about some fifth formers. "But with any luck they won't be around next year." Because they'll drop out. Of course, dropping out of Gymnasium in Austria isn't the same as dropping out of high school in the United States: there are other, more vocationally-oriented school types to which you can turn, as well as apprenticeships where you learn a skill directly from your future employer, with everything organized by the school system.
But, because teachers know that they aren't damning their kids by failing them, they're much more willing to do so. It's the same attitude that I've identified at Austrian universities -- here's the Angebot, you can either do what you need to do to get a degree, in however long it takes you, or you can crash and burn, but we're not going to help you either way. I had always thought that was a result of Austrian universities being public, Massenunis rather than highly-selective, coddling institutions like the one I attended. But now I wonder whether it's not also part of a larger framework of Austrian society, a complete willingness and even a desire to separate and track different people to different societal positions. There's a meritocracy in the sense that the system doesn't particularly care which people end up doing what, but that some people are going to be steered into skilled technician jobs is without a doubt. Which makes me, as an everybody-can-do-anything, everybody-should-go-to-college American, somewhat uncomfortable.
It also makes some Austrian teachers uncomfortable. With the semester break coming up in the first week of February, final grades for the term are becoming clearer. (There are two marking periods in Austria, not four.) One of my teachers was telling me how she felt so bad giving two particular students in her school 5s for this term because she could see how hard they were trying. "But," she told them and me after an giving them an additional oral exam to try to make up some points, "the Matura is in two years and fourteen weeks. And I've had better conversations with third-formers than I just had with those two. I just don't see them coming there with me."
This is the backpacking model of school success. The Matura forms the structural conditions. It creates set goals that must be reached in a certain amount of time, just as certain safe camping sites must be reached before dark every night while hiking the Appalachian Trail, for instance. The teacher sets the pace, trying to support slower students where needed, but ultimately, these set goals do need to be reached at designated points, and so her choices are limited. Those students who simply cannot keep up, day after day, get left behind.
Interestingly, while there is an enormous pressure on students at the bottom of the distribution, there's almost none at the top. There's no college application process like we have in the United States, where the better your grades are, the more prestigious of a school you can get into. (Or, alternatively, the less you will have to pay for school, if you take a merit scholarship from a school where you're at the top of the applicant pool.) There's no ranking of Austrian universities, and there's no GPA cut-off for admission to university. Everyone with a Matura is allowed to study. More and more subjects, like psychologie, medicine, publicity & communications, and computer science, are requiring students to sit for competitive entrance exams, but high school grades do not play a role in this process.
Practically, this means there's almost no sense of competition for the best grades in Austrian schools. I was once leading a discussion on moral dilemmas in everyday life with one of my classes where the students were asked what they would do if they found a copy of an upcoming test. Not only would my students look at the exam (which American students would most likely do as well), they all said that they would also make copies of the exam for everyone else in their class! Ensuring that the entire class passed, not that they themselves got an A, seems to be the ideal scenario here.
This lack of grade-grubbiness is another reason why teachers feel the pressure to keep failure an option. "We wouldn't study," my students tell me, "if we knew we would pass all of our classes without studying." Which does make me wonder about why, exactly, American students study. To do better than the next person? What type of value system is that?
Schools, I'm discovering more and more, really are a distillation of and an indoctrination into the societies that produce them. I've often railed against the ways that American schools -- with their emphasis on individual achievement, on setting "equal" requirements and seeing who comes out on top -- introduce students to the key ideologies of American capitalism. Austrian schools, on the other hand, are based on an entirely different system of beliefs. And although I can't summarize it as succinctly as the American system, I do recognize key elements of Austrian society -- the importance of belonging to the collective, the tracking into various social groupings, the focus on making sure everyone reaches some acceptable minimum rather than allowing some people to achieve great things and others to crash and burn -- in the way the school system is structured.
* The Austrian grading system runs from 1 to 5, with a 1 (Einser) being the best and a 5 (Fünfer) representing failure.
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