By Kristin

My journalism students are writing their first opinion pieces.  One student chose to write about the poor teachers in our building.  She complained that her senior project class was chaos, a waste of time. 

"The teacher can't handle us," she said. 

"You are seniors," I said. "Are you unable to behave for fifty minutes and work on your projects?" 

"Well," she answered, "we're rowdy and when she tells us to get to work no one listens to her."

I am not even going to go into the skills of this particular teacher.  I think in the context of this situation it's a moot point.  Am I really to sympathize that twenty-five seniors - eighteen year olds, most of them – can't use a fifty-minute research period to complete a graduation requirement?  I find it hard to fault the teacher.  The teacher of this class is there to guide, edit, and encourage.  She should not have to manage the behavior of a group of young adults who fully expect to graduate.

Or am I out of line? 

Again and again I hear students lay the blame for their lack of literacy, math skills, and high school credit on the teacher.  They have taken cues from a society that holds teachers responsible for students who fail, even if those children don't come to school, don't do their homework, and don't want to do any academic work during classtime.  Increased testing and teacher accountability don't seem to have improved the education of our children, but they have caused millions of dollars of scarce resources to go into more testing and teacher accountability. 

If, as some have claimed, public education is a sinking ship, we have students and families on that ship who are being told by society and the media that they don't have to bail water, even a little, or put on a life vest.  They should just sit there, helpless and dependent, and everything will be done for them and to them even if they choose to throw away their opportunity for an education. 

The charter schools that the media holds up as examples of effective education?  What they have in common is a student population that has chosen to engage in its own education.  Students of charter schools self-select in, or have families who have selected the school, a process that carries with it an inherent investment.  In my big urban district most failing students are in schools they neither chose nor appreciate.  They have made no investment, and so don't bother caring for it.

If we're going to see better results in public schools we can't focus only on teacher change.  We have to start expecting students and their families to engage, or we have to allow alternatives to the current model of "prepare students for university and nothing else."

Either we need to provide alternative education that allows students a vocational track – something both Mark and Brian have posted convincingly about on this blog –  or we need to start holding our own culture accountable – a culture that has put the entire burden of a child's education on the teacher and none of it on the child or her family. 

And my senior who has thrown her hands in the air on the third day of the school year and pronounced her class a waste of time?  Well, I'm going to make the cynical prediction that for her, it will be.