Close Topic Options

Blaming Teachers Is Easy, But Is It Fair?

Blaming Teachers Is Easy, But Is It Fair?
Education Related News

When schools are failing and students aren't learning, who is responsible? The answer these days seems to be teachers. When it comes to education reform, most of the current focus is on making teachers accountable for their students' performance. But is it fair to assign so much of the burden for the success or failure of schools to teachers? NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports.
Source: NPR Topics: Education

Fair Is Easy Teachers Blaming

The article was pretty interesting from the standpoint of what the Superintendent of the school was proposing to improve the scores of the students:

Lengthen the school day 25 minutes
On the surface, this sounds good. More school equals more learning, but if you think about what the 25 minutes means it is ridiculous. In highschool, you get about 5 to 6 classes per day. I would assume that you would want more learning across the board, so that is about 4-5 mins additional per subject. Ummm...the teachers are just going to stretch the class by 4-5 mins and it wont equate to more material being covered. Now they could just add the 25 mins to math class, but that would mess up the whole rotation of classes, so that isnt going to happen, but would have helped math scores.

Free tutoring before and after classes
Again, sounds good, but likely isnt going to help anything. After school is owned by extra-ciricular activities (sports, clubs, etc...), so those students wont have time to take advantage of tutoring. Try and get highschool kids up earlier for school...too funny! I wont even mention that parents work and it will be difficult for them to change schedules to pick up kids at different times. Now the school could add more buses to accommodate the different leaving times for students, but that means money and the schools basically don't have it. Plus, I seriously doubt that the students that are doing poorly are clammering for tutoring to help.

Teacher evaluations, training and planning sessions
Now these might make better teachers and I have no issues with it. However, if more stringent teacher evaluations improve the quality of educations, it wasnt the teachers that failed the children it was the school administrations that allowed bad teachers to continue their poor practice. Even with this, I am not sure it directly equates to better math scores.

Teachers having lunch with students once a week?
The only reason students would want to have lunch with a teacher is if they were crushing on them! This is a guarantee way to create a few more Mary Jo Laterneauxs! This idea receives a F.

With the comparison of compulsary testing, blame has to be assessed. It is a natural biproduct.

As far as math is concerned, it just isnt cool to be good at math in highschool. I have seen this with my younger siblings when they went through highschool and it has progressively gotten worse. I am not saving that there are social pressures to be bad at math, but there are definitely pressures to not seem too good at math. So for some of the blame, I would blame peer pressure. I really cannot stress peer pressure enough in undermining education. It is more important to make sure that you are dressed well for tomorrows class than to having done your homework.

When I remember going to highschool, there were some teachers that were really good at their trade and I enjoyed going to class. However, it was usually the way the dealt with kids as opposed to how they taught that separated them. It also didn't necessarily result in better scores for the subject.

Honestly, the kitchen table was where I learned more than anywhere else. Every night from 7-10 pm, I did homework (that teachers actually assigned). Questions I couldnt asnswer, I took back to teachers for help. This is where the studying for test happened...not in the classroom. I have to tip my hat to my parents for making sure that I didn't sit in front of a TV after dinner. My parents didn't have to know the answers...they just had to provide the environment and the guideance. You can blame the teachers, but they are not the answer...educating kids is the responsibility of 3 partners (teachers, parents and the kids themselves).