Don't Blame Educators.
Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 08:47AM 
Everywhere I turn I hear about a politician, a lawyer, a celebrity, a news anchor or a parent pointing a finger at teachers and blaming them for failing schools. First of all, if anyone should be to blame it should be parents. Parents are unknowingly the number one factor that are contributors to failing students and, thereby, schools that fail. Don’t get me wrong - I’m fully aware that there are educators out there that are not doing their job to the best of their ability - I would even go so far as to say that there are some sub-standard educators out there but they are in a minority.
There are 3 million teachers in North America. For every one teacher you hear about in the media that has had improper relations with a student or has exhibited some other kind of unacceptable behavior you have thousands upon thousands of other teachers out there that are giving their lives to these students everyday. Teachers spend an average of 50+ hours per week on teaching duties, including noncompensated school-related activities such as grading papers, bus duty, club advising, fund raisers, phone calls at home, and evening activity supervision. Don’t blame educators for the sad state many of the nation’s failing schools are in. It is the nation’s parents and their poor parenting skills that are failing our nation’s children and I will address this issue in more depth later in this entry.
Public education is being set up to fail. This is the conclusion I reached several years ago when I sat in a 12 hour workshop where a representative from Bellsouth, with zero years of experience in the classroom, proceeded to tell us veteran teachers how to be more efficient educators. We endured this foolishness in order to comply with Bellsouth’s stipulations and qualify as a candidate for a multi-million dollar grant that would equip our school with brand new computers loaded with the latest educational software, and provide palm pilots in the place of notebook planners for every student and teacher.
All this technology is great for helping students adapt to a changing world but who really stands to gain in the long term? Corporations that want to see public education collapse as they create their own private schools free of federal and state funding and control - streamline the educational process so the ones that have the right aptitude of being a productive employee will accel. What better place is there to cultivate future employees, managers, vice presidents, presidents, executives, and CEOs than a school setting where you can track them from adolescence and groom them with ideals that are in the best interests of various corporations - instill them with a mindset that would be most conducive to maximizing their profit margin in a globalized economy?
It is corporate America that influences the decisions our government makes of making America more competitive in a globalized economy under the guise of creating an agenda for technology thereby having established no child left behind so the goals for for technology can be better met through higher qualified teachers, which in theory was to make students somehow higher academic achievers. That didn’t seem to work in the specified time Bush allotted 3 million educators hence back to the drawing board for NCLB. What our government is trying to do with America’s children and the educational system isn’t anything new. Japan has been doing it for years. But all of this educational restructuring and streamlining is decades down the line. Right now what is important is the slow and steady demise of public education. The problem that’s occurring now is school systems are failing and being taken over by the state.
The dropout rate amongst high school kids is staggering. Teachers are being pink slipped by the thousands while higher and higher standards and responsibilities are being placed on them. Educational funding is being cut by the millions on the state and federal level. Less emphasis is being placed on preparing students in k-3 yet teachers at the other end of the spectrum in middle schools and high schools are being penalized for students poor academic performance and poor standardized test scores.
More responsibility is being placed on teachers for making students into well rounded, productive citizens while parents are being held less accountable for instilling their children with the same hometraining skills that’s supposed to make them well rounded, productive citizens in the first place. Many of these students come from broken homes (where they are witnesses to 10 times the kind of acts of immorality than they could ever learn in a classroom environment even with the worst of worst teachers) that counteract the academic, moral, and professional ethics that are being taught to them in the classroom.
You talk to many parents and they’ll say the reason why schools are failing is because teachers aren’t doing their job. But you go to many of these parents homes and you’ll see children coming home to empty refrigerators and cabinets, dirty clothes, and little or no supervision. The supervision that may be there may be a mother’s boyfriend that’s unfit for the role of being a parent or legal guardian (i.e. an ex con, drug dealer, child molester/abuser, etc.). In some cases many of these parents level of education isn’t any higher, and in some cases lower, than their children’s as is the same with their moral values. Therefore, classroom management and disciplinary tactics that are used in a school setting by teachers and administrators and even in court hearings often have little or no effect since there are no repercussions at home, and in some cases many students’ disorderly, defiant, disrespectful behavior is condoned and encouraged by their parents.
There is no way an educator can be held responsible for a child that by the time he’s reached 14 years old he already has a probation officer and an ankle bracelet. There is no way a teacher can be blamed for having to place a 12-year-old child in an anger management class. There is no way a teacher can be blamed for having to develop supplemental, self contained classes under the guise of “at risk students programs” in order to try to save the alarming numbers of failing students from dropping out of school. There is no way a teacher can be blamed for a child coming to school in wet, dirty clothe, hungry hopeless and in despair due to the environment where they come from. There is nothing an educator can do outside of a school setting for a student(s) that comes home to an empty house because both parents are serving time in prison. Much of the work of an educator is undone once a child goes back to his or her anti-intellectual, anti-education environment back at home. That same poisonous environment can also be the blame for many students coming to school with a closed mind and the intention to poison the learning environment for other students that do want to learn by creating negative distractions that take away from the learning environment of a classroom.
The punchline to the joke is educators are also held responsible for establishing and maintaining a cohesive relationship with parents whether they want to be cooperative or not. So we are, in effect, supposed to devise educated ways of persuading parents to raise their own damn children. We are supposed to grovel - excuse me - meet parents halfway by dumbing ourselves down to be less intimidating, that is, if you can get the parents to come to the school to uphold their side of the bargain in meeting halfway to begin with.
Reader Comments (3)
Good post!
I came across a woman Sea Capt who is working with kids in Oakland to keep them in school through a sailing program. Showing them how the skills they need to go have fun (and get a good job) sailing relate directly to what they learn in school. The dropout rate for those in the program is 1 out of 20. The other part of this program is that the parent must be involved and grades must be keep up.
YES it's true! We can only do our best for students--and what's
burning out so many educators is that our best isn't good enough. My very first year one of my favorite students joined a gang. I talked with him about the risks, etc., and yet I understood why he was doing it--he needed a family and the gang gave him that. I couldn't stop him--or even fault him.
There has to be a way to save these kids from their environments. You can only watch the destruction of so much human potential before your own begins to shut down.Child Protective Services--at least in my area--is overburdened and of little use.What else is there besides prayer and doing your best to treat kids with respect and consistency?
google