Defining Excellence

It is carefully placed in every publication, hangs in every classroom, fills the bottom of our emails, and any Vianney employee, student, or alumni can recite it:

"St. John Vianney High School is dedicated to forming young men for spiritual, academic, and personal excellence in the Catholic, Marianist tradition."

Of course, these are merely words unless we have a shared understanding of what they mean for our school. I reflect on these words often.  As principal I think it's important that I at least have my own understanding of what the words mean to me. I always find myself coming back time and time again to the word “excellence.” I often ask myself some tough questions:

• What exactly what about this concept is important for us at Vianney?
• What organization doesn’t want to be excellent?
• What school doesn’t want its students, employees, and alumni to be excellent?
• How, exactly, does my understanding of excellence differentiate our school?

So here are some of my quick thoughts/ramblings on what excellence means for Vianney...

To me, Vianney recognizes excellence as meaningful growth resulting from dedicated pursuit of individual and shared goals.

This view is not meant to discount what might be traditional measures of excellence such as our Average ACT score, number of National Merit finalists, or state championships in soccer. Instead, we want to dig deeper, to recognize how excellence is defined by individuals or groups depending on a host of factors.

Lory Hough has written a terrific article in Harvard Education Magazine where she highlights the dangers of using “averages” to define excellence in student achievement. The design of school, says Harvard professor Todd Rose, is built around a mythical “average student,” with the result being that systems, textbooks and curriculum don’t fit about 80% of the students sitting in the classrooms — we end up treating students in one-dimensional terms.

At Vianney we are dedicated to helping discover and unlock known and unknown potential in all our students. We help them understand standards of individual excellence and to develop the self-awareness and skills to achieve realistic goals. We also work to develop the group and social skills necessary to achieve in interdisciplinary, artistic, and athletic endeavors. 

In this way, we can say that we are all constantly striving for excellence at Vianney. The target is moving, and we are excited to be on the journey.