Who's responsible?

John Stein

Every so often, I see an article, an editorial, or a letter to the editor about the sad state of education in the US, and on occasion, in other countries. Many opine that the fault lies not with the schools but with the parents. How can teachers teach if parents do not get their children ready to learn or make them behave? Many do not offer any solutions; they seem satisfied to have identified the cause of the problem. Others suggest that if we impose consequences on the parents when their children misbehave, perhaps for acting out seriously in class or skipping school, we can make parents make their kids do better. But the end result of both approaches seems to be to relieve schools and teachers of the responsibility for educating children.

Less often, I encounter those who find parents blameless. Rather, they opine, children who are not doing well suffer from some physical or biological defect or deficiency, perhaps neurological, such as a chemical imbalance in the brain. Biological problems require diagnoses and medication. They view parents, teachers, and even the children as virtually powerless in such circumstances, at least until the correct diagnoses are found and properly medicated. If things aren’t going well, then obviously the medication is not working.

When things are really bad, children with serious challenges are likely to be referred for institutionalized treatment. There are those programs who will give challenging children a “chance” and admit them, then when unable to manage the challenges posed by difficult children, discharge them as “untreatable in this environment.” It seems they take responsibility for giving children a chance rather than for treating them.

This is certainly not the case with all parents, teachers, children, or treatment programs, but I think I have been seeing more and more of it in recent years. With fewer people taking responsibility for teaching children to behave and expecting children to be responsible for their behavior, children are left clueless about what is going wrong.

These things make me think back to an open house when I was beginning the second grade in the early 1950's. Parents attended with their children and met with our teachers. I remember my teacher telling my mother that I was going to start getting homework in arithmetic. It was news to me. We had not gotten homework yet, except for ten spelling words once a week, but I had heard about homework. I was not looking forward to it. Suddenly, here it was.

Then my teacher told my mother, “I don’t want you to help him with his homework. Homework is his responsibility.” Wow. Only six years old and all of a sudden, I had responsibility. I kind of liked that idea. But I still didn’t like the idea of homework.

Then my teacher told my mother, “It’s my responsibility to teach him. I need to know if he’s getting it. If he doesn’t understand his homework and you help him, then I won’t know that he doesn’t understand what I am teaching. Your responsibility is only to see that he has a time and a place to do his homework.”

So there was my teacher taking responsibility for teaching me. The least I could do was to meet my responsibility by doing my best to learn.

I also remember teachers taking responsibility for discipline in their classrooms, teaching us what behavior was expected and why it was important. That usually entailed helping us to understand how our behavior could be unhelpful for us or for others. Then, once we understood, they expected us to behave. They didn’t tell us what the consequences would be if we didn’t behave; there were no behavior plans. There was no need for such things because teachers expected children to behave. In fact, somehow, we children expected ourselves and each other to behave.

We rarely got punished, but when we did, we didn’t get sent home early on suspension. Rather, punishment usually involved more time in school, staying in at recess to finish our homework or staying after school to meet with the teacher while the other kids went home to play. Teachers rarely if ever called parents or sent home notes. There were no behavior reports “they hadn’t been invented yet. And there were no diagnoses or medications for children who had more trouble behaving than others. They, too, were expected to behave, and somehow, eventually did.

Our schools and teachers were also very good at meeting children's needs. They provided breaks. We weren’t expected to sit at our desks all day. In elementary school, we had a scheduled lavatory break each morning and afternoon, along with morning and afternoon recess, usually outside. We played dodge ball, tag, and other competitive games. When the weather was inclement, we would push our desks to one side of the room to have relays or play some other competitive indoor game for recess. I remember that some of the kids who weren’t very good at school work were very good at the games we played at recess or the races we had. Others were good at arts and crafts or music. There were lots of opportunities for children to be successful at something.

The elementary schools with which I am familiar today no longer have recesses. Or music. Or art. It’s all about increasing academic instructional time and scores on standardized tests.

Every classroom has a behavior plan. Specialists develop individual behavior plans for children who have been identified as having one or more specific behavior problems. It almost seems that they expect children to misbehave and must have a plan for when they do. When the plans don’t work, there’s the search for a diagnosis and medication to correct the problem.

Meanwhile, playing competitive games is frowned upon “it’s damaging to the self-esteem of children who do not do well in competitive games. We don’t want any losers.

It does seem that many of our children are not doing as well as we would like. The question, in my mind, is not who is at fault, but who is going to step up and take responsibility for making things better? Determining who is at fault is beneficial only to the extent that it contributes to a solution. In my opinion, our schools and teachers are in the best position to contribute to a solution. First, our children spend more time under the supervision of teachers during the school day than they do under the supervision of their parents. Second, and more importantly, teachers supervise not only individual children but also their peers. Parents are rarely in a position to influence their children's peers; teachers are.

When I read about schools that are having success with children no matter what their backgrounds, they have taken full responsibility for educating their children. They somehow manage to create an environment where learning is expected, where even the children value learning. They make no excuses. When schools are successful in creating an environment where learning is the norm, children learn.

Nevertheless, I am not convinced that the answer lies in more instructional time and longer school days and a longer school year. Rather, I think the answer lies in meeting children's needs, including their need for play and their need to experience success. The more opportunities our teachers and schools can provide children to succeed, not only in academics, but in arts and music and dance and athletics and crafts, the more confidence children gain in themselves to face challenges, including academic challenges.

Children cannot take responsibility for themselves and their behavior until responsible adults help them to learn to do so. Adults who blame others are not in the best position to teach children to be responsible. Adults who assume responsibility are.

Just my thoughts.