Does It Even Matter Who's To Blame?

In his first 14 months in office, U.S. President Barack Obama has sent a lot of signals that he's serious about education reform. He's said repeatedly that things have to change in America where graduation rates are concerned, and he's riled up teacher's unions by talking about firing teachers who aren't performing. Getting a lot of coverage right now is the situation in Central Falls, Rhode Island where a majority of the high school's teaching staff and administration are being let go before school starts back up in September of this year. That's probably an overly dramatic scenario, but if nothing else, it's gotten people talking about the problem! (Talk about a wake-up call!)

As an editorial in one of our local papers pointed out recently, we need to be careful about laying all of the blame for how students are doing at the feet of teachers. It's an easy and comfortable position for parents and children to take, and it's one I often hear in my travels as a Math tutor. I get to listen to very earnest complaints along the lines of:

• the teacher doesn't communicate enough about how the student is doing
• the teacher marks too hard
• the teacher "has it in for" my child
• the material doesn't seem interesting or relevant enough
  
• the student isn't getting enough of the right kind of attention from the teacher
• the teacher can't explain things in a way that my child can understand
• the teacher plays favourites and my kid's not one of them!

One of the ways in which I respond to statements like those is to say, "Well, at least little Suzy/Billy will probably get a different teacher next year..." Implicit in that outlook, of course, is the idea that if problems persist, year after year, perhaps some of the fault lies with the student. Not that you'd ever want to come right out and say that to some parents, however.

I don't have any data to say that teachers are any worse, or any better, than they were when I was a kid. I remember having a few really great teachers, a handful that were truly lousy, and a whole lot of them that were somewhere in between those two extremes. I imagine it's probably the same way today. It's a dream come true when you end up in the classroom of someone special - I write briefly about this in the Introduction to No Kid of Ours is Failing at Math (How Parents Can Help) - but that's not the normal experience across a child's academic career. Instead, most teachers are just regular folks doing the best they can to get through the current curriculum with a wildly-diverse group of 20 to 30 children. If anything, cultural changes in parenting styles - away from discipline and toward more of a "best friend" approach - may have exacerbated the situation by inadvertently making things harder on teachers. Parents seem much more inclined today to blame teachers than to question their own child's motivation, work ethic or commitment, for example. The days of facing a "tanning" because a bad report came home from school are thankfully behind us (I hope), but it's possible that the pendulum's swung a little too far the other way in the process.

Wherever the blame actually lies, students falling behind in developing their various scholastic skills is always going to be a problem that has to be shared by each of the three groups involved:

• teachers
• parents
• the students themselves

In fact, my book doesn't really concern itself with figuring out who's to blame. Instead, it focuses on how to solve the problem, specific to a child's Math skills. It provides a lot of strategies parents can use to shore up what a student is learning in Math class and make sure that it's both understood and remembered. I write about the importance of making Math a part of each child's life, in the same way that reading and writing should be. It's my firm belief that parents can make a huge difference in how their kids do in Math - perhaps as much of a difference as an outstanding teacher can - and in No Kid of Ours is Failing at Math (How Parents Can Help) I do my level best to lay out how to accomplish that.