Education--Who's Really Responsible?

Our scores aren’t matching up. Japanese kids do science better than ours; New Zealand kids read better—and on and on and on. It’s somebody’s fault—somebody must be MADE to do it better. Who else should that be but the people who are paid to do it?
Wonderful story—kid comes home with a dreadful mark in Algebra. Father looks at the report card and says, “I’m really disappointed with your teacher.” Kid nods, “So am I.” Yeah. Do you suppose that’s one of the same kids that I handed an assignment to today and he said, “I ain’t gonna do this” and threw the paper on the floor? Sounds like it.
There’s no way to make him. You can send him to the Counseling Office where he’ll get a lugubrious talk on responsibility and respect for his teacher. You can kick him out of school, and that same dad in the story will stay too busy to notice. The kid’ll watch TV for a week.
There is simply no way to make those young men or women PICK UP that paper and do the assignment if they decide not to. Many teachers I talk to wish mightily (and privately) that they would bring the paddle back in school. That certainly would motivate some students.
I’m not against it. I can pull the faces to mind right now of a dozen or so high schoolers that I KNOW would react positively to that sort of stimulus and, as I sit here, I can imagine nothing else that would get them to pick up the paper and work.
But the rumble out of Washington and from more and more states is: we’re going to peg teachers’ pay to how well their students perform on the standardized tests. In other words, if those kids will not pick up his paper and work, we’ll dock the teacher’s pay.
On the face of it, that’s stupid—and it shows a kind of mindless desperation, suggesting the sort of floundering that one expects from a panicked, drowning person. (At least the life guard is sllowed to use physical force to subdue a potentially dangerous flounderer.)
Our whole system is panicked. We are graduating schools full of kids who can neither read nor write nor do sums. Each year whole faculties are trained in some new system to better teach math or reading. Nobody tells them how to get the kids to pick up the papers.
I remember reading several books on teaching experiences in inner city schools during the 1960s. The bottom line in each one of them was that there was no motivation from home. I found that to be true when I taught in 1963. The parents didn’t care—they got angry if you flunked a kid for cheating on his test, yes, indeedy. But they saw little enough use for education themselves. Why hassle their kids about it?
Illiterate immigrant families on New York’s lower East Side produced untold numbers of doctors, lawyers, writers, accountants, teachers and scholars during the last century. Why? Parents believed that the classroom was the only way out of the sweat shops—and if the teacher even hinted that the kid was a problem? Boom! I know I never wanted my Grand Rapids parents to hear about problems at school. They didn’t do a lot of teaching, but they motivated me! So did a lot of my friends’ moms and dads.
Parents have got to get involved again—and not automatically side with their child when there’s a problem. The paddle may have to come back for kids who have no parents who care enough to motivate them.
The teacher cannot do it alone. He or she has been left with nothing in his or her educational arsenal with which to deal with the kid who doesn’t care—and the parents who don’t care. Cutting teacher pay will not motivate parents or students.
This is the emphasis that must come out of Washington. Teachers CANNOT do it alone. There must be books in the home, parents willing to take the time to read to young children, to turn the TV off and have quiet times for study. (Pull the cable out, deny internet access during certain hours.)
(But the parent wants to watch too—and play computer games. He often doesn’t care enough for his kids to deny himself. Kids who do care often come to school exhausted because they didn’t start studying until after midnight.)
Education doesn’t take place at home—but it MUST begin there. The motivation must start there. No child must be allowed to enjoy the security that comes from knowing he can drop his paper on the floor, refuse to work, and there will be no consequences.
Cutting salaries because we parents have allowed that to happen is simply vicious.