Panacea for all!

It seems like calls for education reform are a dime a dozen and are proposed every other day, but reading this one made me think (Commission Recommends Core Reforms in New York).

We hear calls for more rigorous testing in teacher education and certification programs, longer school days, more prekindergarten classes (depending on which color state you live in), more technical and career course offerings. No homework because it's stressful, useless, and diminishes a desire to learn. Flip the classroom and use more technology. Use iPads because students are used to using them.

No one ever mentions the student themselves! How do we reform them?

All of the ideas mentioned above imply that the United States no longer leads the world in educational achievement (read, test scores) because we're not using the most effective teaching methods and our teachers aren't smart enough. Wow.

To use an analogy, if a patient goes to see a doctor and then does not follow the doctor's medical advice, thus becoming even more sick, does that mean the doctor is not smart enough, needs more training, and better equipment?

Let's not wear the rose-colored glasses, either. It's not like we woke up one day about a decade ago and all students sucked. There have always been bad students, students with poor attitudes, even dangerous students. And let's also remember that it used to be true for the US only to educate a small portion of the population. But when we live in a democracy and we believe everyone is entitled to the rights guaranteed  by the Constitution, we're going to face the problems of dealing with, well, everyone, not just the entitled few.

Of course there is always room for teacher improvement because our classes of students are never the same. I have never used the exact same teaching methods or materials each year in my AP Language classes because the students differ each year even though the course itself remains the same. Technology changes and becomes easier to use each school year, and we do need to be able to devote ample time to learn how we could efficiently implement them in our classes to help facilitate student learning. For example, my AP Language students created a class wiki to share their research papers and were able to read each other's work and comment on it. But I think we should also be careful to realize that not using these technologies doesn't mean students can't learn. If that were true, how did anyone throughout history learning anything before the last ten years?

It just seems comical to me that all new reform ideas side-step the actual problem: our raw materials, the students themselves. If they ultimately don't care, how is putting an iPad in front of them supposed to magically change anything? And does it really matter that I have two Master's degrees if one of my classes is full of teenage mothers and students who are in and out of jail?

I really think that no one wants to admit that dealing with teenagers at the high school level can just be tough. It's easier to change everything about the educational system except them. Our American culture is largely responsible for shaping them as people and citizens as well as their families, and if good manners and being smart aren't truly valued, then how can teachers be the only ones in our society who are given the burden of changing that? And if a teacher grades an assignment, and a student doesn't turn it in but the parent emails the teacher asking if the student can get some kind of credit anyway (which has happened to me twice this year in AP Language), we can't pretend that our culture really does value intelligence. That parent is just implicitly teaching the student that you should be given at least something for nothing.

And I can't compete with that type of lesson.