CC-licensed image by Flickr user schoeband

My 12-year-old son has spent this week getting ready for midterms. He’s working hard even though he knows, far better than I do, exactly what their weighted contributions to his final grades will be. He can name the percentage allotted to every single quiz, test, assignment, and extra-credit opportunity in all of his classes. And he claims that all he cares about is doing well enough to make the honor roll—no more, no less.

My eight-year-old, though, is taking piano lessons, and his teacher gave him the simple theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to practice, which gave me a reason to sit, transfixed, in front of an iPod and listen to the entire score. What I heard gave me the one good answer I can offer my sons for why grades really are not the point of education.

Give yourself a treat; go listen to the Ninth. You can’t help hearing how Beethoven plays with you—the music driving ahead with a martial air, you can almost sense the fife and drum of the people marching; now expectant as dusk; now soaring, reaching to and beyond the breaking point up toward sky, toward transcendence, toward Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” sung in the final movement:

Can you sense the Creator, world?
Seek him above the starry canopy.
Above the stars He must dwell.

Be embraced, Millions!
This kiss for all the world!
Brothers!, above the starry canopy
A loving father must dwell.

Can you sense the Creator, world?
Seek him above the starry canopy.
Above the stars He must dwell.

Joy, daughter of Elysium
Thy magic reunites those
Whom stern custom has parted;
All men will become brothers
Under thy gentle wing.

You usually hear the chorus sung in German, but I have recording of just the chorus in which Paul Robeson sings in English (slightly shifted to the political left, so it’s not about a Creator but rather the people united, “All for one and one for all”). When the chorus swells, it’s Robeson’s earth-rattling voice that I hear in my mind.

Beethoven masterfully braids together themes and melodies, so that you’re taken on an ever-winding journey upward. Robeson’s voice tells me the same story: everything is about creation. We put our children through their paces in school not so that they will learn something, or master something, or meet any standards. No. We give them tools so that they can experience the joy, the passion, of creating. All we are doing is saying, “Here, if you know this, there is more you can make; there is another path you can map; there is another song you can compose.” School—from pre-K to postdoc programs—exists so that we can all build more from within ourselves and with our colleagues.

Young people need training, so that they can become builders. In my Beethoven-induced reverie, I was thrilled to see this headline in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune: “Walnut High students build worlds in new academic program”. The article is about a school in California where 75 tenth graders have volunteered to work with three teachers, three periods each morning, to create a society from the ground up. As social studies teacher Justin Panlilio told a Tribune reporter, “Right now, the students are designing a world we call Atlantis. They have to build the government, cultural and economic structures that bind a society together.” Creation—that’s where school leads, not rote and grade percentiles.

My 12-year-old doesn’t have the patience to sit through an entire symphony. The soundtrack of his life is more immediate. But even as he put down one set of study guides and picked up another, he saw me beaming as I listened to the music. Perhaps there was a halftone of pity in his expression: poor old dad just didn’t understand what school life is really like. But I also caught a second of wonder. “Maybe, yes, maybe,” his eyes seemed to say, “there is a wild ocean ahead for me, not just these endless streams to cross.”

School librarian Sara Stevenson in front of the White House.

librarian at O. Henry Middle School in Austin, TX is well-known in educational circles for her opinion pieces and letters to the editor which appear in her local Austin American-Statesman, and nationally in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. She hopes her succinct and well-sourced points will give readers an educator’s point of view as they shape their own opinions about the educational reform movement.

Fans include author Diane Ravitch, who tweets about her pieces to the Twitter masses, and even Stevenson’s own colleagues, who she says may not feel as free to voice their opinions as she does.

“My principal has said, ‘Go for it,’” Stevenson says. “But I think there’s a lot of fear with the economy struggling and people with young children [who don’t want to lose their jobs]. I think I’m in a fortunate position to really speak out.”

And speak out she does. She considers the “letter to the editor” one of her favorite platforms, calling them her “therapy,” where she gets to “say my piece,” she says. While she has written a couple of pieces on libraries and education for her local paper, Stevenson says her real push came in 2011 when the Austin Independent School District planned to cut school librarians in secondary schools. Stevenson wrote an opinion piece, tweeted about the issue, and encouraged readers to write to the superintendent of schools. Three weeks later, the positions were reinstated—and a writing warrior was born.

The thread that runs through Stevenson’s pieces is educational reform—the push in our nation for more testing, rating teachers by how their students score on standardized exams, a rise of charter schools, vouchers for private schools, and the opinion that larger class sizes don’t matter if teachers are effective. The issue is bipartisan, believes Stevenson, citing that even President Obama’s Race to the Top grants, created to spur innovation and reform, encourage more testing. And she wonders why people, including Bill Gates, have become voices in this movement, superseding those in the trenches with real-world experience in education.

“Where are we in the discussion?” she asks. “Bill Gates is great guy, but why is he leading the discussion when his children go to private school?”

A former teacher, who’s now in her tenth year as a middle school librarian, Stevenson says she’s not against testing, explaining that evaluating where students stand can be both “useful and wonderful.”

Her objection is that the pendulum has shifted too far, with an emphasis only on programs that improve test scores, with other areas—even physical education—being dropped as extraneous. And while she has no plans to lay down her pen, Stevenson believes real change can only happen when more parties speak up in support—in particular, she says, students.

“Students say they’re sick of it, that they don’t want more testing,” she says. “I’d like to see high school students writing letters. That’s what I think some of the reformers and politicians have lost sight of—what’s good for kids.”