cross posted at
Keeping Reality In Sight
I made chili yesterday (one of the few things I actually make pretty well) and I invited my sister over for dinner. Jason was downstairs and Bryan wasn't home yet. We sat down at the table and she began to talk about her decision to go back to college for a different degree. "I just can't do it anymore. I have to find a way out," she told me with tears in her eyes. After nine years of teaching, she has had enough. "I cannot imagine doing this for another twenty years."
"We're raising a society of losers," she said.
A lovely example of the impact of No Child Left Behind, apparently it is the policy of our school system that the teachers cannot fail a child. So if a student fails a test, the teacher must allow them to retake the test, with no exceptions. Our kids are learning at a very early age that there are no consequences because they'll always get a second chance. By the time they've reached my sister in middle school, they know that they don't have to study because if they fail, they get to do it again. "What is going to happen when they get into the real world", she wondered.
The responsibility of passing and learning is no longer on a student. It's no longer on the parents. It is now the responsibility of the teacher to find a way to pass a student. Many might say well it is the teacher's responsibility and in part I might agree, just not the way it's being done now.
You see, it is the responsibility of the teacher to make sure they teach the subjects in a way that the students understand. There are sometimes many different levels of students in one classroom. Teachers must make lesson plans that teach in ways that all different levels and learning styles comprehend. Not all teachers do this, and not all teachers do this well. But that is the teacher's responsibility - to teach.
But students have a responsibility too. A student's responsibility is to listen to the lesson, participate in class, do their homework, and study. In other words, the student is the one responsible for learning. And this is what seems to have been forgotten - or at least done away with.
Parents used to be the go between. They used to be the one who enforced the rules at home that required children to study and do their homework. The person who sympathized with the teacher for having such a hard job teaching and controlling so many students all day long. But parents don't care anymore. They don't seem to care how hard a teacher works or how many hours they put in at night or the weekends. They don't care how long a teacher works on lesson plans. For some reason a shift has occurred in parenting and I have no idea the reason for it. When we were kids two things happened in regards to school. One, if you acted up in school and the teacher called home, you were in big trouble. Two, if you came home with bad grades, it was your fault and you better fix it. Now, parents seem to refuse to blame their children for misbehaving in class or bad grades. Now the parents are no longer the go-between, now they are defenders. Now, when a kid misbehaves in class, then it's another students fault. Now when the kid gets bad grades, it's the teacher's fault.
It is this shift in thinking that has caused the unbalance in responsibility. It is this new way of parenting that supported NCLB and helps make it the wreck it is today. And it is this shift that is causing great teachers like my sister to leaver the profession.
We need to bring accountability back to our schools. We need to teach our children that yes, they will fail at something, and that it is ok. We have to teach them that next time, we have to work harder and study more. We need to teach our children to be accountable for their actions both inside and outside the classroom