What's in a name?

Christopher, your humble servant here agrees. Nothing replaces asking the "customer" or student directly what he or she thinks. This writer was part of a systems improvement team at a middle school in Madison, Wisconsin. We interviewed a broad sample of students face to face. We asked them, "What one thing could the school do to make your school day better?" Here is the honest-to-God answer: "I never hear my name." We found that this school had 100 of its 600 students coming from welfare hotels where the county parked their families until it could find housing for them. As a result, the teachers simply ignored these 100 students for they would be there on average only 30 days. This included not calling their names in home rome for attendance, asking them to participate in class, and ignoring them outside class for they were nameless to everybody. How much does it cost to say, use somebody's name? Yet, hearing my name counted more than school budgets, new school buildings, teacher unions, etc., which is the usual stuff of educational improvement talk. We pointed this out to the school, and to its great credit, it took steps to make sure these "rootless" children heard their names so they felt connected to something solid and not totally adrift. I have never forgotten this research project. I share it with you and the members of our course because as you argue there is no way statistical analysis would have ever found this. The analysts would have asked the "wrong" questions. I gave a workshop on this project at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma.