Could the problem be something OTHER than teachers, perhaps?

After responding to Liz’s post earlier today, I continued thinking about the real “problems” with American education. A lot of people seem to want to place blame squarely on the shoulders of educators themselves, which is one of the reasons nothing seems to be improving.

Executive decisions about policy are determined in a very corporate manner, by people sitting in rooms far away from an actual school, looking at a spreadsheet that has reduced individual learners to a series of “representative” numbers. As Tyack and Cuban discussed, input from actual teachers tends to fall on deaf ears, and many of the policies that seep down into schools seem to tie educators hands more than help prepare students for any sort of existence in the “real world” (If all of life’s tasks were resolved by bubbling in answers on a scantron sheet, this might be different). America lags behind many other countries in terms of educational opportunities, and yet many people will tell you that this is still the greatest nation for receiving an education. These people are either very optimistic, or horribly uninformed. Either way, they’ve probably never examined schools in the “corridor of shame.”

Problems in schools don’t stop and start with policy-makers, though. When schools fail to produce thoughtful, competent children, parents are always ready to point their fingers in the direction of the teachers. However, real educational reform starts at home. All too often, parents are uninterested in what their children do at home and take absolutely no responsibility to teach their children. Parents generally leave the education of their children to teachers and television sets, and they are fast to blame youth problems on both. Where is the accountability? (Have we learned NOTHING from Crosby, Stills, and Nash?!)

As we have learned, teachers tend to be pretty low on the reform food chain, generally forced to enact policies that they know are flawed or won’t work on any practical level in the classroom. And yet, when children are failing to achieve scholastic goals, it is always the teacher who is blamed. What about the careless parents, who have shirked the responsibility of educating their own children? Or the policy makers, the people sitting in an office looking at state-wide scores? It seems like teachers get a bad rap and are perennial scapegoats in this mess.

In the world of frivolous law suits we live in, it has never been easier to shirk responsibility and blame the party that is honestly trying to do all it can to make the situation better when the true blame rests solely on the one doing the pointing. Are teachers responsible for their students? Absolutely, but only for as long as they’re in the classroom. There are about 22 hours on any given day where children will not be in the care of a specific teacher. My point in all of this is that as long as it is enough for parents, administrators, and legislators to simply place blame on teachers, thereby liberating themselves from any wrongdoing, then the real educational reform this country needs will never happen, because the REAL problems will continue to be overlooked.