As a foreigner I truly don't understand why people blame teachers for the school failures

[La Lioness Priyanka]

I moved from an exclusive private school in India to a public school in the United States, senior year of high school. I hated it. The kids were unruly, they seemed to really scorn anyone who tried to participate in class and were very proud of not knowing anything about their Constitution. The fact that cops patrolled the school also made me MOST uncomfortable. We had nuns patrol the school and we were petrified of them.

The one thing that truly impressed me was the quality of teachers. I was there for one summer, fall and spring semester so maybe my experience was an anomaly however the problem of lack of discipline, disinterest and disparaging attitude toward education was the problem from my experience. The teaching was FAR better than any I had experienced in India and I really was in the best school in my city. The math and science teachers were truly knowledgeable and cutting edge. I was awed by the quality of education available in public schools.

So, I am fairly confused as to why teachers are bearing the brunt of this failure. There seems to be a systematic distaste for academia and education in this country, which seems to me to be a far bigger problem. This seems to be a societal problem and not just a teacher problem. I am sure that some teachers are part of the problem but it seems too narrow a focus.

[QueenOfCalifornia]

1. !

:popcorn:

[La Lioness Priyanka]

2. i don't mean this to be a popcorn situation. i want to understand where people think

the problem lies. honestly, if its a teaching problem its easier to fix than a systematic disparaging attitude toward academia

[erinlough]

12. I agree with you,

I am a teacher and have been for a long time. Basically kids are kids and haven't changed. Their attitude towards knowing has changed. They tend to discount the importance of knowing and I realize their parents do also. When you call a parent to discuss their childs lack of turning in homework, for instance, you will often hear, "well I never did good in xxxxx".

There are parents who care very much about their child's education, and are partners in education with me. There are also many more parents who blame anyone and everyone for their children's failures other than themselves or their child. I don't mean this to hurt any parent, you are probably not the person I am talking about. But the blame attitude is pervasive in our country, and not just in education.

[QueenOfCalifornia]

18. I agree but

this is a controversial subject.

[roguevalley]

36. Nice post, op. I agree.

[Fresh_Start]

3. I hope that no one is laying all the blame on teachers

students, parents, society, educational system as a whole are obviously all part of the problem.

However, people are probably looking for the easiest solution.
And they are wrongly believing that if you improve the teachers, you don't have to deal with the other more intransigent problems.

[Johonny]

4. Most people don't

The overall quality of school systems in the US is highly variable and there is interest in trying to raise the level of many under performing school systems. I think there is an understanding that there is a social aspect to the education problem. However it is very hard fro the government to raise other peoples kids for them so they are all disciplined, interested and have a positive attitude toward education. On the other hand it's not too much to ask that the government has educational standards for teachers, school systems and class rooms, one that identifies and tries to improve failing school so that every kid that does try get a quality education.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

5. so the variability in the quality of education, is more the problem?

[woo me with science]

15. Excellent post. nt

[Juche]

6. Good point

""So, I am fairly confused as to why teachers are bearing the brunt of this failure. There seems to be a systematic distaste for academia and education in this country, which seems to me to be a far bigger problem. This seems to be a societal problem and not just a teacher problem. I am sure that some teachers are part of the problem but it seems too narrow a focus.""


True.

[KG]

7. teachers aren't the problem. the parents and society have failed the teacher.

teachers can only teach children who are willing to learn.

[GreenPartyVoter]

35. Very, very true. Failed teachers, the education system, and most of all failed the kids. It is

devastating to me that our culture in general no longer values education and denigrates people who do. :(

[The2ndWheel]

8. We need to separate teachers/parents/students

Adults won't be parents anymore, unless they choose parenting as a profession, thus creating jobs. All children that are born would be from anonymous sperm and egg donations. Build a national infrastructure to raise children in professionally operated institutions, which would create jobs for the adults. That way, there would be no more blaming of teachers by parents, blaming of parents by teachers, and all children would start out in the same environment. Adults in regular society do their jobs, and would no longer need to worry about raising children to be productive members of society. Teachers and parents inside the institutions would be pulling on the rope in the same direction, so you wouldn't have to worry about children hearing something at school, and then possibly hearing something completely different at home. All children would get the same education across the board.

Of course it would be all paid for in taxes. Now how you get the entire adult population to go along with it, that's the trickier part. But the basics of it are that you separate the children from the adults in regular society, and the adults in regular society from the educational infrastructure. There would be no blame to go around. The children get all the time they need to learn, since they don't have to balance two different lives. The adults are then free to choose to live how they want, and think of all the money they would save in the process. The teachers are then able to teach what they need to be able to teach, how they need to be able to teach it, when they need to be able to teach it, etc, in order to create productive members of society once the children are adults.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

10. brave new world?

[The2ndWheel]

20. How else are we going to stop the blame?

Children need to be able to learn. Teachers need to be able to teach. Everyone else needs to be able to do what they do.

I'm half kidding when I paint that picture, but, it's odd that that particular part of the education process is still so...tied together. I guess that's the price for it being a public interest though. Still, if it's continued to be paid for in taxes, and since our current system is so big that nobody really has any direct say in where their money goes anyway, it would still be public schooling. The only difference would be that there would be no parents, other than the ones that are provided by the education system. So any personal preferences of parents wouldn't be interfering with the kind of education required for the greater society.

No need to rush kids along, they could have year-round classes, with breaks when they need them. Adults wouldn't have to worry about how their children learn, how to provide for their children, etc, and just live their own lives how they want, since they wouldn't even know the children until 18 or 22(or more) years later, and by then they're just another adult. Teachers could teach at the pace they need, with the sort of material the children need, and adapt the education process as needed, with consultation with the other experts that run the facilities.

Or we can just keep playing this same game.

[gratuitous]

9. I think it's because . . .

The people on the front lines always take the brunt of the punishment. Teachers are the most visible portion of our education system, and everyone has experience with them. Nobody sees the tax cheats who chisel on their contribution to society so that class sizes inch up and up, going from difficult to unmanageable. Nobody sees the disinterested or neglectful parents who expect their child to go into school at 8 a.m. a hungry, under-rested and unmotivated lump and come out at 2:30 p.m. polished person quoting Shakespeare. Nobody makes the connection between the glorification of the lucky few who become media superstars and the denigration of self-improvement. Nobody sees billions spent on war, starving the schools of millions to modernize facilities. Nobody sees the ingrained attitude that "all a good teacher really needs is a blackboard and an ample supply of chalk."

But everybody sees the teachers. And a visible target is the easiest one to fire at.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

13. i think you are very right. no one also sees that unless poor kids see an economic result to

education, they may not think it amounts to much

[nichomachus]

11. Cops vs. Nuns

I'd tangle with cops long before I'd tangle with nuns -- just personal experience.

[Lyric]

14. Because laying the bulk of the blame where it belongs

(on lazy parents, apathetic voters, and a stingy government) would require people to admit that THEY are the biggest part of the problem--either directly, by not parenting their children properly, or indirectly, by voting for politicians who gut education funding by lowering property taxes, etc. It's typical blame-avoidance behavior. People don't like to have a mirror held up to their own blemishes and flaws, so they shove that mirror into someone else's face at every given opportunity.

We will get nowhere until Americans grow the hell up and start taking responsibility for the problems that their own selfish behaviors have helped to create.

[endarkenment]

16. It is a strong rightwing meme

There are a lot of public school teachers, they belong to a strong union, they vote democratic. The war against teachers has been going on for at least 30 years.

[Marrah_G]

17. They are an easy target.

[OnionPatch]

19. I agree that there is a scorn for education in our culture.

I see it in kids all the time. I'm not sure how to stop it though. Most parents I know really want their kids to realize how important education is but the bad attitude toward it in our culture is rubbing off on kids. I would blame television but a lot of it is peer pressure, too. How do you remedy that? Keep your child sheltered from the rest of the world? I'm not sure what the answer is. I try to instill the value of education to my daughter but she picks up the bad attitude from other kids at school and just about anything she watches on TV. Keeping the TV off is part of the answer but peer pressure is strong.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

26. What the average American wants is not education, but job training

They know that most well-paid jobs require a college degree, so they want their child to get good grades for college entrance. However, they do NOT want their child to be intellectual, and the mass media encourage the idea that children and teens should be mindless consumers of whatever the commercial culture throws at them.

Imagine two scenarios:

Ashley or Ryan makes the all-state team in basketball. Ashley or Ryan's classmates come up to them in the hall and say, "Oh my God, that's so cool." Ashley or Ryan gets written up in the local paper. Ashley or Ryan starts getting offers of free-ride scholarships from colleges all over the country. Ashley or Ryan's parents are congratulated by strangers on the street. Ashley or Ryan's parents have bragging rights all over town, and everyone is excited and happy for them.

Ashley or Ryan scores the highest in the state on the Putnam Math Exam. Ashley or Ryan's classmates consider this further proof that Ashley or Ryan is a nerd. Ashley or Ryan possibly becomes a target of bullying. The local paper says nothing. Local colleges are interested but don't offer much money. Ashley or Ryan's parents travel through town in anonymity. Should Ashley or Ryan's parents dare to brag about their child's high score in the most difficult math exam in the nation, other parents will either grudgingly offer congratulations (and talk behind their backs about what elitist snobs Ashley or Ryan's parents are) or come back with some snide remark, such as "Well, at least my Tyler/Amy is well-adjusted."

Even in the so-called "good" schools, the ones with stable families and dependable tax bases, actually enjoying learning is the road to social outcast status.

[kwassa]

39. also, kids feel entitled to a college education, whether or not they've prepared

Colleges have to do so much remedial work to keep kids in who should have done their homework in high school. College is a business that makes money, and sometimes it gets dangerously close to selling degrees rather than providing a true education. It is hard to fail kids, and there are those that have had none of the preparation necessary to be there. I've heard many tales about students with no work ethic who expect to get good grades anyways.

[Progressive_In_NC]

41. Remember, Senators, successful business owners, and CEOS come from that first group you cited...

Not the second. The second group are hired by the first group and forced to turn all of their intellectual property over to the company while they are employed there.

It's always been about who you know, how you look and how you can make people trust and/or believe in you.

Unfortunately the first group above; the jocks, frat guys and soririty girls get all those perks and the good low work, high paying jobs.

Life has been this way for years.

[sinkingfeeling]

21. There may well be some bad teachers in the public school system, but their numbers are few. You

are correct that in current American society, education is deemed 'elitist' and frowned upon by about 1/2 the population. Parents increasingly fail to motivate their kids in an appropriate way. They may apply pressure on them to take up sports or music, but they forget to teach a love of learning.

[msongs]

22. US high schools are designed to turn out JOCKS not scholars. Btw "anomaly" is a word most US teens

don't know how to spell or define, but they can all spell motherf***er.

Msongs

[smoogatz]

23. Bingo. American anti-intellectualism is a huge problem, IMO.

I teach at the college level and I see student apathy and contempt for learning every day--in COLLEGE classrooms. I don't have problems with student discipline (I'm 6'2", 210), but some of my female colleagues do. In COLLEGE. It's appalling and bizarre--I'm starting to think that, if anything, public universities in this country are too cheap and too available to any dumbass with a high school diploma. Call me elitist, fine with me.

The history of American anti-intellectualism is long and ugly: it's a weird feature of American-style populism--we revere the rich and despise the educated. We aspire to wealth but have no respect for knowledge except as an avenue to affluence. More Americans believe in angels and UFOs than accept evolution as fact. Our public intellectuals, by and large, are rightwing blowhards who deride science, learning, and higher education for political reasons. Americans don't read literature anymore; there's very little room in the US these days for the life of the mind (that may be because we're all struggling to make ends meet financially). It's a shame, and it's going to be the death of us as a great power, IMO.

[TheCoxwain]

27. BULLSEYE !!!!

I doubt if any politician worth his salt will have guts to bring 1/10th of what you said past his/her tongue.

Not Republicans - Not Democrats - Not Anybody. Not even Obama.

But they all know it.

We Americans are too spoiled with the positive re-enforcement bullshit. I cant believe how many times today's kids have to told "GOOD JOB" ..Collectively we have become conditioned to only expect 'psychological petting' ..anything else becomes unacceptable. Obama was criticized for being too dour on the economy .. CEO's can only be full of optimism and hope even when they are aware that his or her company is in the toilet.

We are a bunch of babies and THAT IS A FACT. The truth is that we need to learn to take the good with the bad and roll with the punches that life throws our way.

And what you said in your post is too much reality for average American to handle.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

29. Discipline problems in college are a new development

When I started college in 1968, I was astonished at the difference in atmosphere. In high school, the teachers had to play cop in the classroom. At the University of Minnesota, students were attentive and respectful. Professors addressed students not by their first names but by their last names plus title. I was "Miss Leftcoast" to all my instructors. (Not really, but they used my last name.)

This was at a time when annual tuition was only $375, or 300 times the minimum wage. Commuter students could literally work their way through college without much strain. A good summer job would set them up for the school year.

But the atmosphere was equally respectful when I transferred to a private college, although somewhere between sophomore and senior year, I became "Lydia" instead of "Miss Leftcoast."

When I started teaching about ten years later, I was astonished to have discipline problems in class. Discipline problems on the college level? Unheard of when I went through. Flaky students, yes. Contrarian students who loved to argue with the professor, yes. But loudly planning the next kegger with their neighbor during class--I'd never experienced that.

I blame student evaluations. We never got to see student evaluations till after final grades were turned in, but there was a definite correlation between bad grades, bad behavior, and critical evaluations. (I recognized handwriting by the end of the term, since I gave frequent written tests.) The "A" students might have a critical comment here and there, but the "C" and "D" students would write things like, "This teacher told me that I needed to study more, and I don't think that's any of her business" or "Everyone hates her," a clear lie, since I had good evaluations from other students.

Yet the deans would look at the numerical scores the students assigned and literally give us our GPAs, and although I never had students threaten me with bad evaluations, I know of people who did receive such threats. If they were part-time instructors, it could mean the end of their job.

Taking continuing education courses as background for translation, I sometimes ran into bad teachers, but I was always very specific about the problems when I wrote student evaluations, such as "is not prepared to demonstrate the math problems he has assigned" or "She should not be speaking English this much in a high-level language class." I was also specific in my praise, such as "His practice of explaining everything from three different approaches ensures that a majority of the students will understand the material."

There's an attitude among students and their parents that they are the college's customers and that the college's first priority should be to please them.

[smoogatz]

31. It all goes back to the decline in public support for public universities.

As an example: in 1973, over 40% of UW-Madison's budget came directly from the state. Now, thirty-six years later, it's down to 18% (yet the state still retains 100% of institutional control, ultimately). It's gotten so bad that some UW-Madison faculty have floated a proposal to secede from the UW system. This trend is nationwide, in varying degrees. Public universities have had to raise tuition to what, in the '70s, would have been outrageous levels for a "public" university education. Meanwhile, research shows that a college degree adds roughly a million dollars in probable lifetime earnings over what you'd earn with just a high-school diploma. The degree becomes a commodity, and students become customers with a customer's sense of entitlement: they paid for good grades, and it's our job as professors to deliver them. Administration supports this notion: it's hellishly hard, at my school, anyway, to fail a student--even if they're caught plagiarizing, say--you subject yourself to a raft of paperwork and an endless appeals process, and it's frankly almost never worth the trouble. It's all about retention, because the students/customers are, after all paying our salaries. It's a hell of a way to run a railroad, IMO.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

32. You've summarized many of the reasons I'm glad I left academia

I miss having lots of really smart colleagues around, but I do NOT miss the administrators or the many students (and their parents) who have feelings of entitlement.

[eppur_se_muova]

44. re your last paragraph -- I keep repeating my opinion that we owe that ...

to the Reagan/Gingrich crowd, who framed education as a product which you purchase, not a transformative process in which you have to commit yourself to active -- indeed deeply involved --participation. Education does not come in a can; it is not a commodity. You have to live through it, and let it change your life. People are being allowed to believe that if they pay their tuition and show up for class most of the time, they have done all they are supposed to do, while making little more effort than that needed to watch TV, and are entitled to personalized attention to correct for their own shortcomings.

Unfortunately, increasingly, educators are buying into this by turning their class hours into PowerPoint lectures -- where the role of the instructor could easily be taken by a recording -- and Web downloads. To judge from what I've seen, this only leads to more students sleeping through class, aided by rooms darkened for those ubiquitous projectors. It's really a shame to see so many students like only the easy classes, and dislike any classes that even try to challenge them to excel.

[RedCappedBandit]

24. people = lazy. nt

[Egnever]

25. I think you nailed it.

we became a nation where dumb is cool.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

28. You have to understand that these people are very, very stupid.

They obviously didn't do well in school, and they blame the teacher for it, instead of their own poor intellects.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

33. I actually had a dean tell us that our courses should be easier and grading standards lower

"You people are the academic success stories," he told the assembled faculty. "You have to realize that your students aren't as smart as you were in college."

Translation: We've got to keep the dumb kids so as to pay for the exploding population of administrators.

[bbgrunt]

34. you are not alone in that!! If you try to

maintain any kind of academic standards, administrators will sabotage you even if students give you great ratings. It is all part of the commodification of education mentioned above.

[raccoon]

30. They're an easy target.

And it's so much easier than raising taxes. :sarcasm:

[ColbertWatcher]

37. Excellent thread. Thank you all for posting. k+r, n/t

[nevia sky]

38. Isn't it sad that our country seems to respect others based upon salary and status?

So a teacher, whose mean salary is probably around $50,000, doesn't have the status of a stock broker, who may make 10x, 20x the same salary. It sucks.

[nadinbrzezinski]

40. You hit the nail on the damn head

that anti-intellectual attitude you saw in your classes is the norm in the US

The teachers run against that. Why they are targets of a population that is proud to be ignorant

(And yes, let reach for this... :popcorn: heavy on the butter... this is not a popular view... but if you read people like Hofstadder and others who have spent time thinking about this... it is exactly this that is going on)

[La Lioness Priyanka]

42. i dont blame parents for this either. i do however blame polititicans for creating

this anti-intellectual atmosphere where things like science are degraded and the media in being complicit

[nadinbrzezinski]

43. It is the culture, not just the parents

it is widespread, and all of us are guilty of it

I had a kid once tell me... I don't like English

I make my living (or try to) writing...

So I told the kid that was nice, do what he needs to do to get good grades

His attitude, and that was his parent's too.. why? Not an egghead!