A teacher wrote an article complaining about how teachers are vilified, when the real problem is deficient parenting. Curious what you think about it. Here's one clip:
Truth is, the problem with the American student is the American adult. Deadbeat dads, pushover moms, vulgar celebrities, self-interested politicians, depraved ministers, tax-sheltering CEOs, steroid-injecting athletes, benefit-collecting retirees who vote down school taxes, and yes, incompetent teachers—all take their turns conspiring to neglect the needs of the young in favor of the wants of the old. The line of malefactors stretches out before our children; they take turns dealing them drugs, unhealthy foods, skewed values messages, consumerist pap, emotional and physical and sexual traumas, racist messages of aspersion for their cultures, and countless other strains of vicious disregard. Nevertheless, many pundits and politicians are happy to train their rhetorical fire uniquely on the teachers, and the damnable hive-feast on the souls of our young continues unabated. We’re told not to worry because good teachers will simply overcome this American psychic cannibalism and drag our hurting children across the finish line ahead of the Finnish lions.
Yeah, right.
Apt. 11d 
I’d try anything to get my kid into the room with the other teacher. Everybody has moments like that, but most people are self-aware enough not to write down the thoughts at put them where other people can see them.
On the other hand, if you picture him like Abe Simpson shaking his fist, it’s more fun to read.
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I can’t help but agree with the sentiment here – at least a little. Last night, we heard a song on the radio that used the word copacetic – one of my favorites. So I had a conversation with my sons about the word, and now we’re all using it regularly. Not to pat myself on the back (okay a little), but that’s how it’s been in our house for ages. And research backs this up – kids of educated parents are exposed to FAR more books and words in their life. So, how is a teacher supposed to overcome these differences? I mean – that’s asking a lot. Look – I don’t know the solution to our problems with education and I do understand that we need to do better at getting rid of bad teachers, but at the same time, I can’t help but wish that we would be more respectful of teachers and the difficulties they face in general.
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It’s true that parents, or the more expansive “family factors”, are by far the biggest determinant of child outcomes and success. What I don’t like about this teacher’s depiction of parents is that it blames individuals without any thought as to the structural factors that might keep generations of families’ uninterested in educational success.
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There’s probably a way to talk about the role of family in educational outcomes that doesn’t require mentioning steroids, cannibalism, drugs, and “the damnable hive-feast on the souls of our young”.
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@scantee, no kidding! We go from “blame the teachers for not being able to overcome massive structural problems” to “blame the parents for not being able to overcome massive structural problems”. What a step forward! (Not.)
This reminds me of a bad meeting at the office. Typically at my office when things really blow up it’s because someone’s web site went down. So everyone sits around screaming about who was at fault – the help desk guy who reported the issue? The data center guy who monitors the hardware? The network guy? The developer who wrote the code? The answer, almost always, is if it really got this bad then it’s everyone’s fault a little bit, and no one’s fault totally. Which makes it harder to fix. (And, note, that’s what made it hard to do right in the first place.)
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Well, this is old news in China, where parents have been blamed for their children’s failures since at least 1949. Back then it was Feudalist mindset ruining their children; now it’s Tiger-mothering. (True story, I own a parenting advice book titled “Parents determine 100% of their children’s lives.” Another thing I love about China is that titles don’t beat around the bush.)
Though on the issue, I also agree with the teacher. I feel like we expect schools, and teachers in particular, to solve widespread social inequality. There’s only so much one person can do, or one institution, and we’re not willing to invest in what it would take on a society level to turn around this sort of inequality, but instead hope schools just work miracles. Except for maybe ER doctors, it’s hard to think of another career where we expect people to work miracles on a daily basis, and teachers aren’t nearly as well remunerated.
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oh, to clarify, I don’t agree with the teacher that it’s all parents’ fault. I think it’s a bunch of structural problems, but it’s definitely not teachers’ problems. We have no evidence teachers are getting worse; merely, as society gets less equal, educational outcomes are more predetermined. How we can draw from that that its the fault of teachers though seems to be a bit willfully blind.
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Listen, clearly there is some blame to be laid with teachers, and some blame to be laid with parents.
To get back to the office analogy, if I were managing a team that had descended into this type of blame-storm I would do up a RACI chart. I wonder what type of RACI chart we’d end up with in this situation? I tend to think part of our problem is we think delivery of education is a process that involves only parents and teachers. When in reality it takes a stable, safe, and healthy environment to even get to the point where education can be delivered.
Let’s just say this out loud: not every child is going to end up with an equal outcome. We seem to be frozen as a country, unable to accept this, IMO because it kills our national Horatio Alger narrative.
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I think I shared yesterday that I was an ed assistant in a school for a couple of years. I saw lots of bad parents and bad parenting and of course it impacts on their kids a lot.
That said, I think teaching is part of the problem. I know the large narrative around teachers is that they good, dedicated people who put in a zillion extra hours. I don’t doubt that (although I don’t know too many people who _don’t_ work at night, at this point) but I also don’t think that most teachers are particularly _effective_.
Because they are not required to be. And they actively protest any efforts in that direction.
And I think as women have moved into other fields and social standing for teachers has fallen, we’ve lost a lot of the stars that were kind of making up for the general mediocrity.
A teacher in his or her first year has the _exact same job_ as a teacher in his or her last year. I have total sympathy for all the crap, administrative, political and otherwise, that teachers deal with. The hero narrative – that good teachers walk in like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds – doesn’t help them at all.
But I think teachers actively discourage the changes that would help them. They need more mentoring and that means more critique as well as support. They need someone challenging them on how they do things right in their classrooms.
It’s _tough_. Yes. Welcome to the world.
I know as an editor I was nowhere near as good in my first 5 years, although enthusiastic and hard working and fresher in some ways, because I had not made a bunch of mistakes yet. BUT I was in a system with senior people over me to help guide both me and mitigate my errors. Sometimes bluntly. And it was embarrassing, and sucked, but I improved. I still am in the process.
I don’t think teachers get that. Get it, i.e. understand it, and get it, as in receive it. So you end up with teachers who just blame the parents.
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I’m not sure how we can know that teachers, as a whole, are more mediocre than other careers as a whole, as we have no meaningful ground of comparison. I don’t doubt there are dysfunctional schools and bad teachers, but there are dysfunctional publishing houses and bad editors, or dysfunctional hospitals and bad doctors. I think that all industries should constantly work on improvement and weed out the worst, but teaching seems to be held to a standard where everyone must be a superstar in something that’s almost impossible to measure, ideologically motivated, and contradictory. Moreover, we have this narrative of decline with no evidence that teachers are actually worse than they were. Kids in wealthy suburban districts *aren’t* doing worse then they were. In fact, our crisis in education isn’t that all education is getting worse, it’s that it’s getting less equal, with some kids doing the same or better, and a lot kids doing worse, but the kids doing worse correspond to the group of Americans who, in aggregate, are doing worse.
When studies show that white women without college degrees are living shorter lives, we don’t blame their individual doctors for messing up. We assume there are structural reasons for that. The publishing industry is in crisis. We don’t assume it’s because editors are getting worse, literary agents are doing a poorer job, or that writers are simply less talented. We look at structural and technological changes. Yet when poor white women aren’t graduating, we assume it’s because Ms. Smith wasn’t motivating them enough in geometry. This is really messed up.
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Those are good points B.I., but I still disagree with a lot. I think your point about is there a problem really is a good one, vs. society as a whole.
But I still do think the way most public schools, at least here in Ontario, are set up basically prevents teachers from identifying weaknesses and improving unless those are weaknesses in paperwork. I don’t think the bar is set too high; I think it is set too low. And I do think teaching has degraded since I went through school.
Editors may or may not be perceived as getting worse (I’d argue they are, sometimes quite justifiably and sometimes not) but they are losing their jobs, benefits and pensions.
I worked in a school where one grade one teacher regularly identified 3-4 kids in her class who needed remedial support with reading.
The other grade one teacher, in a population where classroom assignment was pretty random, regularly identified 11-14 kids who needed remedial support in reading.
The second teacher actually had more qualifications and was making $10k more than the first.
If we assume that the main job of grade one is getting the kids to read, it was pretty clear that one teacher was more successful. But it had no career impact. Both teachers are still at the school with about the same separation in pay.
While this dysfunction exists everywhere, sure, to some extent, when I read a screed on how parents suck I am reminded that teachers have no incentive not to blame parents.
Whereas editors that blame their readers for not liking their stuff will not be editors very long. If readers prefer blogs, they do for a reason and that’s what editors are figuring out from an audience perspective. (The business end is a whole other tangle.)
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… kids of educated parents are exposed to FAR more books and words in their life. So, how is a teacher supposed to overcome these differences?
Teachers CAN do some things differently to help overcome these differences, but many current public schools are doing exactly the wrong things.
The Atlantic article linked here a few days ago is an excellent example of how schools can overcome differences. In that case,
returning to fundamentals like explicit grammar instruction and formulaic writing has succeeded in turning around the dismal performance of high poverty students
. Contrast that with most literacy instruction today, typified by “personal narratives, poetry, and memoirs and engaged in ‘peer editing,’ without much attention to formal composition”.
Yes, we have parenting issues that affect learning, but the schools/teachers should realize they are also contributing to the problem.
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“Because they are not required to be. And they actively protest any efforts in that direction. ”
Indeed, because “effective” has no common definition in this discussion. My children did not need to be taught how to read. For them, reading was really like talking; they learned without any explicit instruction. Judging the effectiveness of my kids’ teachers on how well they taught children to read would be irrelevant (and, worse, against the interests of my kids, ’cause it would mean they were judged on their ability to teach the 10% or so of the class that was not learning to read, and not my children).
Teachers are fighting attempts to measure their effectiveness in quantitative for venal reasons, too (I want to deny that). But, I’m fighting the measures ’cause I think there’s a very poor record of efficiency/effectiveness measures resulting in holistic improvements on difficult to measure outcomes.
There are interesting experiments on quantitative outcome measures going on in medicine now. I’d like to see those experiments play out there (with less vulnerable populations — adults + doctors who are a less vulnerable labor source) before I’ll think they’re useful for teachers.
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Teachers are fighting attempts to measure their effectiveness in quantitative for venal reasons, too (I want to deny that). But, I’m fighting the measures ’cause I think there’s a very poor record of efficiency/effectiveness measures resulting in holistic improvements on difficult to measure outcomes.
There is a sort of circular argument regarding teachers pay, that goes:
A: “Teachers don’t matter! Let’s cut teachers’ pay!”
B: “But teachers are really important for teaching kids! Paying more money would attract better teachers!”
A: “But look at these crappy test scores in this school! These student’s teachers suck! Let’s cut their pay!”
B: “Teachers can only do so much in a classroom where there are all of these other outside influences that have a bigger impact!”
A: “Teachers don’t matter! Let’s cut teachers’ pay!”
Teachers need to either agree on a method of testing their effectiveness, and agree to be paid based on that effectiveness, or else forever be criticized for being overpaid — whether they are or not.
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If it isn’t teachers’ fault when students don’t learn, it isn’t to teachers’ credit if students do learn. And I don’t think the latter is true. My 5th grade daughter has learned Latin, a bunch of songs on the recorder, some art history, some music theory and some kiddie physics in school, and we parents definitely were not responsible for any of that stuff. (It’s especially clear with the music. My husband is tone deaf and I carefully forgot my recorder at home when I was a 6th grader, so our combined music knowledge is virtually non-existent.)
It occurs to me that there is a big difference in the teacher population now as opposed to 50 or 60 years ago, namely that back in the day, you would see a lot more bright female teachers…who HATED kids.
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Your response is unfair. Teachers aren’t being offered a reasonable metric for testing their effectiveness. The ‘education reform’ movement is pushing a set of metrics that have not been shown to actually work. They are too noisy and are therefore unfair and probably make the situation worse. And there is a lot of money backing this movement. I can’t criticize teacher’s union when there preferred alternative of changing little or nothing is superior to what is on the table for measuring effectiveness.
Anyways, controlling for the percentage of students living below the poverty line in a school district, US public schools score just as well and frequently substantially better than Sweden’s or any other country in Europe. The real issue in the US is that 20% of kids are raised in poverty.
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