We’ve Romanticized Student Struggle. And It’s Costing Kids Years.

4 days ago
4 min read

We all love a good educator movie redemption arc: The student who struggles for years. The long road. The moment when everything finally turns around and we celebrate the breakthrough. I mean who doesn’t want to be Jaimie Escalante or Joe Clark or Vivian Perry (I’m dating myself with that last one). Who doesn’t want to make a difference and change a kid’s life?

We LOVE those stories. But we rarely stop to ask what they’ve taught us to expect.

Instead, we’ve romanticized student struggle because it lets adults be the hero. The redemption arc has come to define what it means to “make a difference.”

But as good as it feels, the redemption arc is doing something else much more sinister. The redemption arc normalizes systems that require kids to suffer before they succeed.

You see, the stories we tell don’t just shape how we feel about our work. They shape how we design our schools.

To really understand what’s at stake here, it helps to think about this in three layers:

the narrative we’ve inherited,
the distinction we’ve ignored,
and the implications if we’re willing to take this seriously.

First, the narrative

Many of us don’t even consciously realize that we are living inside of the redemption arc.

And yet, if we listen to the stories we love to tell about our students, it’s there -- the struggling kid, our benevolent intervention, the dramatic and satisfying turn around.

It’s emotionally satisfying. It makes the work feel noble. And it positions us as the patient, resilient, and indispensable hero.

We all LIVE for these stories. But, the problem is that these stories shape our design decisions.

If you expect struggle to be the norm, you build systems that tolerate it. If you expect turnaround to take years, there’s no urgency to fix the conditions producing it. If success is defined as “eventually,” then “not yet” feels acceptable.

We don’t do it intentionally. But we also rarely examine how the redemption arc impacts how we see our work and our role.

And because it’s unexamined, it becomes invisible.

Second, the distinction we’ve missed

Here’s where the conversation is going to get a little more uncomfortable.

This isn’t an argument that struggle never happens. Students face real and profound academic, social, emotional, and systemic challenges that are more complex than ever. They will struggle.

But prolonged struggle is different.

Prolonged struggle is often evidence of a system doing exactly what it was built to do.

That’s the distinction we rarely make.

There’s a difference between productive effort and unnecessary struggle.

There’s a difference between challenge and delay. There’s a difference between resilience and rationing access to success.

Getting students on track in a semester versus three years isn’t just a timeline issue. It’s a design issue.

If a student needs three years to “finally turn it around,” one of two things is true: Either the student was incapable of succeeding sooner, or the system wasn’t built to help them succeed sooner.

Unfortunately, we default to the first explanation far too quickly because the second one implicates adults, structures, systems, and priorities.

That’s very uncomfortable.

So instead, we mythologize perseverance.

Third, the implications if we’re right

If we take this premise seriously, then we have to ask ourselves different questions.

What if success earlier and more often was the expectation, not the exception?
What if the goal wasn’t to help kids recover from failure, but to prevent unnecessary failure in the first place?
What if the real measure of a school wasn’t how inspiring the comeback stories are, but how few comebacks are required?
What if instead of trying to get everyone to care more or work harder, we interrogated our systems and designed them differently?

This doesn’t deny outside factors that significantly impact student success. It just refuses to use them as an excuse for bad system design.

This is what Buildership is the antidote to.

The idea that struggle is a rite of passage. The idea that success takes a long, long time. The idea that our job is to help students endure a system rather than redesign it.

Buildership replaces the hero story with a design story.

We go from Who saved this student? to: Why did the system make saving necessary in the first place?

And once you start asking that question, everything changes: from how you see your work, to how you look at what you’ve been calling “normal.”

This isn’t about doing more.

It’s about seeing differently.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Robyn R. Jackson is the founder of Mindtseps and Buildership University and the host of the popular School Leadership Reimagined weekly podcast, where she offers free training on how to use feedback, support, accountability, and culture to build a bigger vision, develop a better process, and achieve a brighter future for your schools. This piece was originally posted February 4, 2026 and is cross-posted here with permission. You can reach out to Robyn via email here.