The currently fashionable “fix those bad teachers” model of education reform IMO misses the real problem. In general poor academic skills performance has been attached for decades to zip codes characterized by low “social capital” households in terms of their levels of relative wealth and education. These households generally (not always) have overwhelmingly non-intellectual environments, and parents with minimal academic ability.
Bad teachers may be part of the problem, but the household and parental influence is far more of an issue. Per some social experiments along this line it’s quite true that if you enclose the kids of these households in a hugely supportive bubble that addresses almost all the social capital issues their performance will improve, but at that point you are more or less artificially simulating (at huge expense) a middle class or upper middle class household environment.
I believe the “bad teachers” model of education reform will peter out when they finish the latest reforms and discover that kids for poor households are still not magically testing the same as middle class kids.
This is all so absurd. Why can’t anyone just tell the truth? Poor, ignorant parents and their associated social contexts and “low social capital” household environments are not going to produce kids as interested in learning or able to perform as middle class households over the long haul. Pretending this is not the main problem and pointing the finger at teachers for failing to make magic with these under-performing kids is nonsensical.
I don’t know that it’s MORE oen or the other, but stupid parents are a major factor, yes. Hereabouts it’s a recurrent problem that Memphis City Schools see an influx of students registering weeks after the school year begins because the parents can’t be arsed to learn the actual date school begins, and don’t think anything happens the first week or two anyway. Not only does this result in those kids starting with a disadvantage, but also it causes problems for the rest of their class; and of course parents who don’t bother finding out when school begins are not taking – or helping their kids to take – education seriously.
There’s a lot that is out of parents’ control. But there’s also a lot of stuff that parents can and should teach their kids. For one thing, a lot of parents simply don’t teach social skills to their kids. Yeah, the teachers should REINFORCE those skills, but a child who doesn’t know to say please and thank you when it’s appropriate will start off his/her school years at a severe disadvantage. And parents can and should teach their kids things like colors and numbers and letters before the kids start kindergarten. And it would help if the kid knew how to print his/her own name.
And parents need to ask their kids if there’s anything that the teacher sent home (especially small kids). Parents have to get their children into the habit of doing homework, and parents need to check that homework when the kids are in grade school, at least, and possibly later.
There was a story in the newspaper about how a lot of kids couldn’t go to school during the first week of class because they hadn’t had their vaccinations. The parents knew for quite some time that their children needed to be up to date on their shots, but somehow they couldn’t manage to schedule this.
I know that there are some spectacularly bad teachers out there. I’ve had them myself, and my daughter has had them. There are going to be some toxic people in ANY field, and yes, we as a society should try to prevent these people from going into teaching, and removing them when they manage to become teachers. But I put most of the blame for poor academic results on the parents.
Shitty teachers often wind up in schools with uninvolved parents; it doesn’t mean they still aren’t aren’t shitty.
We all know perfectly well that there are better and worse performers at every job, from baseball player to waitress to ditch-digger. Empirical study has shown repeatedly that teacher quality makes a difference in learning outcomes – yes, even when you control for socioeconomics. And we all know from personal experience that some teachers suck, because we’ve all had one. So it’s common sense, verified by science and personal experience.
And yet people will insist with religious fervor that there are no bad teachers. “Nope, no such thing. All the same. Now give us more money.”
I totally agree. In our district test scores correlate more closely with number of subsidized breakfasts and lunches than any other factor. My son-in-law went to the town’s best high school (which often gets state recognition) and my kids went to the second best one, still good. The teachers were really no different - the parents were.
all our teacher friends tell us that the parents who care enough to show up to back to school night are the ones who don’t really need to, since their kids are doing fine.
Having parents who know the material is a plus, but I think it is far more important to have parents who consider doing homework the most important thing the kid does at night, beside sleeping and eating, and who ask about school, and who recognize academic achievement.
Maybe if they gave out letters for being a top student the way they do for sports parents will sit up and actually care.
Who is insisting on this again? No one in this thread.
A kid with a bad teacher and caring parents will do better than a kid with a good teacher and uncaring parents. A kid usually has more than one teacher, so the impact of one is minimized, and the teacher has 20 - 30 students, so cannot possibly give the attention a parent can. Plus, a bad teacher is for a year, a bad parent is forever.
There’s no question that bad teachers are part of the issue, but my contention is that in the larger scheme of things, the impact of the relatively small number of truly bad teachers on overall scholastic performance over time, is minuscule compared to the impact of the home environment, and yet people think that eliminating the underperforming bad teachers is going to cause a major improvement in the academic performance of these underperforming children. I contend this is a fantasy.
We hear over and over at teacher conferences that “the parents we see are the kids who are doing fine - the parents we don’t see are the ones who should be here.”
However, since you can’t fix parents, we are going to try and keep fixing the schools to compensate. Because sometimes these kids ARE reached by good teachers and plentiful resources. Unfortunately, individuals are - well, individual. There is no magic formula for making a kid care when his parents don’t.
In fairness to the bad parents - as one of my old bosses was fond of saying, poor people lead complicated lives. Vaccinations, for example, cost money - not a lot, but some. And getting your kid to the doctor often means you need to take time off work - not easy if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, and it gets harder if the doctor isn’t near you and you’re relying on public transit in a community that doesn’t have a good transit system.
Of course, there are programs to help pay for vaccinations, and even to help parents get their kids to doctors. And there are programs to get free books in peoples’ homes, and for tutoring, and so on. Name a town, and I’ll bet you can I find those programs in or near that community, with about five minutes of Googling. But then, I have a computer, and Internet access, and I’m a native English speaker with an advanced degree who was raised to trust authority figures and aid programs (student loans, for example). For that matter, I’m fully accustomed to filling out paperwork to get all sorts of things - student loans, jobs, bank accounts, physical exams, and so on and so on. But for someone who may only have limited literacy his or herself, filling out these sorts of forms on behalf of a kid can be frightening in itself.
It’s easy to see a way out of being an uneducated member of the lower socioeconomic classes - so long as you have all the advantages a middle-class upbringing provides. Absent those, it’s a lot more of a mess.
On the other hand, some parents really are just indifferent assholes.
Note that the OP was not simply a complaint that “bad teachers” were blamed for poor education. It was a specific challenge to the current methodology or philosophy behind “education reform.”
I would tend to agree with that assertion, regardless whether there are bad teachers.
When the Needy Children Left Behind program was initiated, (with the backing of both the Republicans and Democrats in Congress–this is not a partisan issue), one of the significant measures in the program was that schools that failed to improve were going to have their funding cut. This was alleged to be a carrot-and-stick effort to ensure that “lazy” schools with “bad” teachers did not simply accept the money while making no effort to improve. The (easily foreseen, if ignored) unintended consequence, however, was that school districts with high disruption (due to a lot of social factors the schools cannot control) were never able to seriously improve the scores beyond some finite level, leading to cuts to schools that desperately needed more help, not less.
In the Cleveland schools, for example, at least a third of the kids in elementary school households move, (meaning that they need to change schools), every year. So we have classrooms in which teachers lose students they are coaching while experiencing the “beginning of year” administration duties for new students (along with the socializing of new students) constantly throughout the year. In that situation, none of the kids are going to be learning at their best potential. I suspect that the same situation, or something like it, occurs in every major city.
What NCLB should have done was spur more imaginative ways of addressing those social issues and engaging parents rather than just setting out tests for teachers to take and judging all schools by a set of standardized tests.
I would have to agree with you, astro. I think parents make more difference than teachers. OTOH, schools we can work on. Parents, not so much.
And Mr. Excellent makes some very good points. Not only can seemingly simple things be extremely difficult for poor and uneducated people, but they may not even be aware that those things need doing, much less how to do them.
We either have to try to improve schools to give those kids from disadvantaged backgrounds more support, or we just write them all off and have a permanent underclass.
Who’s not telling the truth? As a parent, we hear all the time about how important parental involvement is. Problem is, it’s non-enforceable, and - much like the boss who bitches about tardiness at a meeting to everyone who was on time - the people you’re talking to are the ones who don’t need the message again.
We can’t do anything about parental involvement, really. We can try to require a certain number of community service hours or dollars fundraised or whatever, but what do you do about those parents that can’t or don’t? Penalize their kids’ grades? That hardly seems fair (and really, their kids are already suffering the consequences of poor parental involvement in their grades and learning). Refuse the student access to the school? There’s that pesky mandatory education thing, plus, again, punishing the student for their parent’s action (or inaction.) Permit parenting by permit only? Good luck with that, Mein Führer!
Bad teachers, on the other hand, we *can *control. We can fire them. (Well, theoretically…)
Will it make our schools perfect? Absolutely not. There are too many things wrong with them, and bad teachers is only one. But one mustn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A bad teacher with good parents may not be an abject failure, but it’s still not as good as a good teacher with good parents, or even a good teacher with bad parents.
IMHO, the problem with all of this is objectively identifying bad teachers. Tying teacher performance to student performance on standardized tests is using those tests for something other than their design. A test can only accurately test what you’ve designed it to test. A bad teacher can have students who do work on their own, find tutors and form study groups and do very well on the tests. A good teacher can have a group of overwhelmed kids dealing with rough stuff who do very poorly on the exams. Unlike a boss at a corporate office who can use observation and her professional experience to determine a bad employee and fire them, we’ve disemboweled administrators’ ability to deal directly with firing staff. (Don’t get me wrong, I understand why tenure exists, but it does have this negative consequence!) We really have to have another rubric to go by. But that’s not being done, we’re just misusing standardized achievement test data, and that’s a big mistake, I think.
From my experiences working in public schools, I definitely think the parents are far more of a problem than the teachers. Even with less adequate teachers, the kids who had invoved parents did fine, and those with uninvolved parents did poorly even with good teachers.
When there are no expectations, consequences, interest or discipline at home, there is poor performance. No matter what you do at school, you can’t change the home they go back too.
The prevalence of separated parents, single parents and (here’s a thing that gets little attention, but I believe is becoming more and more of an issue) very young parents plays into it too.
What’s worse is that schools are offloading more and more responsibility on parents, i.e. waaay more homework than before, so if the parents aren’t so hot, the kids will suffer accordingly.
I’m going to have to agree with Astro on this. The focus on “bad teachers” is, on the one hand laudable - if there is opportunity for improvement we should work in that direction. However, we should also studiously avoid making this the panacea for all of the ills in education. It is but one aspect, let’s keep that in perspective.
By comparison - if the crime rate in an area is higher, do we talk about identifying individual “bad cops” as the reason for it? No.
If the general health of a population is lower, do we talk about identifying individual “bad doctors” as the reason?
If we all agreed that bad parents were more of a problem, then there are better ways to improve educational outcomes than demonizing teachers and teacher’s unions. I don’t think it needs to be an either/or situation, but I don’t see parents getting nearly the same bad press as teachers.
To address your specific point about there being nothing we can do about bad parents, I disagree. There are already times when we penalize parents for their childrens’ truancy or criminal behavior, why not expand that a bit. You can offer parenting classes and different ways for them to become involved. Or, you can emphasize educational models that mitigate the effects of bad parenting, like boarding school. Either way, few of those options are usually being discussed.
My wife is an elementary teacher and even she agrees that the answer is not higher pay for teachers. What she would like to see is more resources for kids who are falling behind in early grades – kindergarten, first, second. She teaches first grade and already there are big differences between kids that are learning the material and those that are just not getting it. Someone needs to take the laggers aside and give them extra one-on-one help so they can catch up, but the school district just can’t afford it. By the time they are in third grade, they are hopelessly behind and can never catch up.