No, we're gonna use MY dictionary, thank you.

We all want excellence from our gorgeous new school but who gets to define what that is, and how will we know when we get there?

Don't fall into the trap of thinking this school has already met the bar we parents wish to set for it. It hasn't. I like to think of it as a school that has the potential for excellence, but we're not there yet.

You know what the biggest obstacle for us is, on our way to excellence? Ourselves. Our own complacency.

That's because we have already persuaded ourselves that excellence has been achieved, or is a foregone conclusion. Just listen to some of the internal rationalizing that's going on:

"Well, we're just feeding off of Morningside's already-established excellence, and besides, we have this beautiful building and it has--gasp!--actual geothermal wells! And it's LEED-eligible! (sound of hyperventilating).


You know what? A green school is not going to get your kid into Georgia Tech.


"We have an awesome principal, and the teachers are great."

(True. But --this is the crucial thing to remember: excellent by APS standards is not how we should define excellence).

And this is where we're going to hurt some feelings.

Saying SPARK is excellent by APS standards is exactly like saying a McDonald's hamburger is excellent by fast-food standards, or the winner of a county beauty pageant in eastern Iowa (I actually dated one such girl in college; her title (and I swear I am not making this up) was "Pork Queen") is pretty-- by rural agricultural Midwestern standards.

It's damning with faint praise. It's factually correct, perhaps, but meaningless, because the standard cited is not the standard we, as parents, would choose to use.

We should set the standard for SPARK based on the standards we have set for ourselves as (let's not feel guilty about it) relatively high-achieving, relatively affluent Americans.

I go to the parent events and I see almost all of you are college-educated, hard-working responsible people. I have yet to meet one of you whose success in life, to this point, was due to any other factors other than hard work, persistence and setting a high bar for yourselves. That's why your level of inertia when it comes to agitating for excellence bothers me so much (see more about that in the post called "Inertia, And Why You People Piss Me Off."

We do not have to apologize for having a different definition of excellence from Bev Hall's definition, or even Yolonda Brown's definition. Yolonda Brown may think she's successful if she hits a certain test score mark, schoolwide. I would not think that was an indicator of excellence. I would expect that from her as a minimum; a floor-level achievement, not a ceiling.

We cannot let anybody but ourselves decide what excellence is, and we sure as hell can't let anybody tell us that SPARK is excellent "compared to APS and Georgia public elementary schools." Please, let's agree on one thing upfront: you can be pretty awful and still compare favorably to most APS and Georgia public schools.