Does Stressing Performance Goals Lead to Too Much, Well, Stress? Schools Must Set Rigorous Expectations for All Students, but Schools Also Must Be Thoughtful about How They Define and Pursue Those Expectations

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If schools lack high standards, students will not achieve at high levels. That assumption seems true on its face, has been confirmed by empirical research (Nieto, 1992; Ferguson, 2002; Clark & Cookson, 2012), and has provided a firm foundation for more than two decades of educational policymaking. Even today, after the demise of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, reformers continue to push schools to raise their academic expectations and for districts and states to hold them accountable for all students' performance. Further, the moral imperative to focus on more ambitious and equitable outcomes remains as urgent as ever--for example, among black students who took the ACT last year, just 11% scored at a level indicating that they are "strongly college ready" (ACT, 2016). Setting bold performance objectives has clear benefits, but putting too much emphasis on reaching ambitious goals can encourage all sorts of undesirable behaviors. Some teachers and administrators have used the excuse of reaching specific targets to explain why they helped students cheat on state tests, doctored test sheets, and inflated graduation records (Katsikas, 2015; Blinder, 2015). Similarly, when businesses set audacious sales goals, they have found that workers overcharge customers and recommend needless repairs, and when real estate developers make unrealistic promises about the completion data for a new building, engineers tend to cut corners, putting safety at risk (Ordonez et al., 2009). Sometimes these unwelcome side effects can be truly massive in scale, as the country learned from the mortgage meltdown of 2008: When lenders aim for record numbers of commissions, they tend to hand out bad loans. Simply put, stressing goals often leads to stressed-out people. When we become too aggressive in our focus on performance objectives, people can become less able to meet them. We believe wholeheartedly that schools must set rigorous expectations for all students. But schools must be thoughtful about how they define and pursue those expectations. Forests and trees Part of the problem is that educators tend to confuse the measure of the goal with the goal itself. For instance, let's say that our objective is "preparing more students for the demands of college, work, and life in the 21st century." That sounds like a worthy goal. But every worthy goal is complex and begs additional questions: What exactly are 21st-century demands? How prepared is prepared enough? Does "more students" also mean more equity? When people come together to flesh out such goals in greater depth, they develop a greater sense of ownership in them. Individually, they feel empowered and autonomous, and, at the same time, they feel they have become part of something important and bigger than just themselves. As a wealth of research evidence suggests, such feelings of autonomy and purpose are key components of motivating, productive work (Pink, 2009). But while we may feel good about our work, how do we know that we're making progress? For this, we need measures, or indicators, of our performance. For example, we might aim to move a certain percentage of students to the proficient level on state tests or to raise the graduation rate by a certain percentage. Setting targets is not enough; we have to set targets that are challenging enough to push us to stretch and innovate, or meeting them wouldn't really count as progress. So far, so good: We've set an inspiring and challenging goal, and we've defined clear and tangible measures of success. What happens, though, when stakes are added to the mix? The incentives might be negative (if we fail to hit our targets, we'll be labeled a failing school, perhaps face a state takeover), or they might be positive (hitting our targets will bring accolades and additional funding). Either way, we shift our attention from the pursuit of a big, noble goal--preparing students for life in the 21st century--to hitting small, narrowly defined targets that trigger sanctions or rewards. …