The top ten reasons to blame teachers for children's failure!

[cjbgreen]

1. Ignores the impact that hunger and lack of access to adequate health care on children.
2. Ignores the ramifications of foreclosures on the lives of homeless children.
3. Blames Unions
4. Supports the mythology that class sizes do not matter!
5. Supports corporate takeover of education.
6. Foster elitism (TFA approach to teaching, only those people with Harvard degrees are capable of teaching).
7. No one else is responsible, not administrators, chancellors, mayors, parents, communities etc.
8. We really don't want to have to educate students with special needs.
9. We can ignore the real reasons students drop out.\


10. Why not?

[bluestateguy]

1. I wish more people would blame lacksadaisial parents

You can have the best teachers in the world but children with bad parents will not able to succeed in school.

[cjbgreen]

3. parents

I have to admit that I don't believe that blaming parents is helpful. I think it only hurts students and sometimes if one walks a mile in some of the parents (we are quick to blame) shoes, we find that they are suffering from the consequences of having parents who were caught up in similar circumstances. The cycle of poverty is terrible and some escape, but in the US the odds keep getting worse.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. I had an original reason attributed to why I couldn't teach a kindergartener.

His mother and the director were having a parent-administrator meeting. This mother came up with this reason why her child wasn't learning in my class and it was also why this child hit, punched, and kicked me.

My race infuriated him.

Please note I was the only white person in the daycare center (students, staff, teachers).

[cjbgreen]

4. Challenges

I think your point is that being a teacher is one of the most challenging positions in our society and the "beating up" comes from many places. The issues are complex, and targeting one group, teachers, is much easier to market and prevents all parties from accepting responsibility.

[FBaggins]

5. There's another, larger, reason than any of those.

It isn't fair... but there isn't any way around it.

They are the only one in the room who gets paid to (and whose job description explicitly says that they) teach children.

They are the easiest target... especially when many of the others who could be to blame (student/administrator/parent/culture/politician) are the ones who get to point the finger.

[Blue Meany]

6. There are lots of people to blame for a system that is

pretty dysfunctional, but I think teachers get blamed because they can, sometimes only by breaking the rules, make a difference and mitigate a bad situation. Parents can help, but they are not at school to mediate between a system that demands memorization and regurgitation of masses of facts and leaves no time for reflection or critical thinking. That, at least, is my experience with my daughter's school.

My middle-school daughter is gifted, scoring in the 99.9% percentile nationally on language and abstract reasoning, and she simply cannot learn in the pedagogy offered in the public school, because it goes so slow and is laden with meaningless worksheets that are dumped on her daily and from which he learns nothing. For an essay-writing assignment, for example, she had to fill out 8 worksheets during the time she was writing it to explain the revision and editing process. It was a two-week assignment that she finished the second day, writing a 20-page paper before the worksheets and "rubrics" were handed out, rendering them meaningless. In the rubric, students were told not to write more than 7 pages. Even though the teacher was supposed to be offering her "differentiated instruction," as a gifted student, she instead referred her to the special needs staff to be tested for a learning disability because she wasn't getting in the worksheets and couldn't follow directions, which she decided had to be evidence of a cognitive disorder. We had already had her tested, so we knew that wasn't true.

Now,I recognise that the teacher was working in a system that was not of her own making, and from the perspective of the principal was doing everything right or at least did nothing wrong. But she could have made a difference by being just a little bit flexible. As her parent, I was unable to help, because the principal resisted all my efforts to intervene. As a consequence of numerous and increasingly traumatic incidents like this, I have decided to pull her out of the public school and home school her so that she has a chance to actually learn instead of having her time wasted by busy work.

As I said, there are plenty of people to blame: anal-retentive administrators, the people who dreamed up NCLB, and others. But only the teachers were on the ground, within the school, to make a difference. A few of them did--some in almost heroic ways--but most of them did not.

[tonysam]

7. Every parent thinks his or her child is "gifted."

Oh, what a crock. There are programs in public schools for "gifted" kids. Put your kid in one instead of blaming the teacher.

"In the 99.9 percentile"? The only kids I ever saw who were at the highest point were in the "99th" percentile and probably a lot smarter than your kid.

But I was a teacher, so what do I know?

[FBaggins]

8. Very little obviously. But when have you let that stop you?

You have a knack for being intentionally insulting. You don't know the poster or her child but you're going to pass judgment? You taught some other kids so that makes you qualified to judge hers?

Sure... most parents think the world of their kids and aren't always right... but most teachers think they are the best at what they do and aren't always right. I know for a fact that there's one teacher hear that's always ready to blame anything and anyone by himself/herself.

We would be better off if more of our teachers ALSO thought the world of the kids they have in their classrooms and looked for (and expected) the best from them.

Luckily, not all are as bitter as you appear to be.

[noamnety]

12. This is so true!

"We would be better off if more of our teachers ALSO thought the world of the kids they have in their classrooms and looked for (and expected) the best from them."

Studies show that students do better in school when teachers are told they are gifted.

Given that, if a teacher goes into the classroom assuming students are less intelligent than what they've been told ... it's easy to deduce that the quality of education in that classroom will be lower.

[Blue Meany]

17. Exactly... That's why am pulling my daughter our of that

school. The studies I've read show that the kind of input she has been getting not only hurts her self-esteem, it results in lower academic performance, and creates a bias in other teachers. As for sending her to a private gifted school: we live in a rural area, where there are none and we couldn't afford it if there were.

I'm sure that all parents feel that their children are gifted and, in fact, I believe that they are all gifted in some way, and that the process of education should be to cultivate those gifts. I hate the gifted label. But the fact is that my daughter did test in 99.9 percentile for her age on the WISC IV, the standard intellgience test, in the sections on language. And it is also a fact that none of her teachers ever spotted her has having talent in this area, even when she scored in the 99.0 percentile on the InView, which, at her school, was not enough to get a gifted classification (she also needed teacher recommendations). Ironically, her abilities in math are average, and that is the only subject in which the teacher thinks she is doing well.

[noamnety]

10. First off, not all districts have legitimate gifted programs.

The rural area where I grew up didn't have one. We had a pull out program once a week in high school - which consisted of playing craps with the principal.

My daughter's original district (til we pulled her out) had an after school gifted and talented program. And they had one area school that gifted kids could test into; its focus was math, science and technology. My daughter tested into it, but that's not what she was interested in. She was interested in the arts. Her asshat of a counselor told her "But honey, you're so smart, why would you want to study the arts?" That was the point where we pulled her out of a traditional public school.

Aside from that, I find it unprofessional to attack a parent for stating that their kid is gifted. It's troubling when teachers assume students and parents are liars for no apparent reason. I don't know why you would tell a random person on the internet that other kids you saw were probably a lot smarter than their kid, or that you doubt their kid is as smart as they think they are.

Finally, your information about test scores doesn't seem to be accurate - or maybe you just haven't personally seen kids score that high. A number of tests, including the DAS, the KTEA-II, the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT-II), and the Woodcock Johnson Test of Achievement (WJ-III) test can each give results that place a student at the 99.9% point. Here's a reference which cites all those tests and what those cutoffs are for the 99.9th percentile: http://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/Articles.aspx?ArticleID=144&NavID=1_33

[stopschoolpaddling]

15. You are a classic example of teachers in my area.

My son came home one day and told me his teacher was an animal. "What kind of animal?" I inquired. "A pig" he answered. I told him to put the word ignorant in front of the word pig and that would give him a most accurate description.

[FBaggins]

9. Don't be too quick to assume the worst.

Blue Meany - Many parents don't realize that the difference between some "gifted" classes and some "learning disability" classes is not what they assume it to be.

It's VERY possible that you have a child who is advanced in many areas yet really does have a "learning disability" - which in her case is really just another way of saying that she learns differently. It isn't a judgment of greater or lesser intelligence or potential.

She may very well benefit from some specialized instruction... even if only to identify how she learns so that she will be better prepared. I've worked with a number of kids with well-above-average IQs who simply don't fit the mold of the common student. Once they learn HOW to learn (how THEY learn), they can continue to excel in the rest of their educational career.

[cjbgreen]

11. what about this?

Shouldn't schools, educators, strive to find ways to educate each child and isn't one of the challenges of teaching in a public school system that individuals need to be creative. Why criticize a parent who cares about their child and thinks the child is gifted. I really don't think discounting is particulary helpful. Isn't the real question how do we help all children learn?

[noamnety]

13. I don't think that's what FBaggins was saying.

I didn't take it as criticizing the parent or questioning that the student is gifted. I read their post as taking that as a given.

It was more bringing up that as educators we sometimes see students who are gifted - and simultaneously have a learning disability of one sort or another. My husband's like that. He went to college on a full scholarship as an electrical engineer, has a master's in optics. He's pretty far up on the gifted scale. And, at the same time, he is dyslexic. That's not a statement about his intelligence, it's a statement about how he flips letters.

It's possible that the teacher has seen a pattern of how information is processed that they recognized as being potentially symptomatic of something. That doesn't mean they aren't in the 99.9th percent intellectually. In home schooling if they are able to direct their own studies in ways that work for them, that symptom might not ever be visible. Like my husband playing cello - he can learn a piece by ear so you wouldn't know if the dyslexia is affected his sight reading. The outcome is that he plays fine.

It could be the teacher was just mistaken and too stuck in her ways. It could be the teacher was right, and there's an organizational or processing skill the student is lacking in. Or it could be the teacher was partially right, but that skill only matters in the narrow context of public education where we try to force all students to do things in standardized ways. I see all three of those as realistic possibilities.

[FBaggins]

14. I wasn't criticizing the parent. Sorry if it seemed that way

In fact, I criticized the guy who WAS criticizing the parent.

I'm the LAST person to assume that a teacher's too-quick judgment of a child should trump the parents. In fact, I've gotten in to more than one argument here on exactly that point.

What I'm saying is that it's VERY possible for a child to BE "gifted" and still have needs that schools commonly address through "learning disability" (or similar) programs. I know more than one kid who moved directly from "LD" to "GT" classes once they figured out how to approach each type of learning (without ever going through a "normal" class.

[proud2BlibKansan]

16. 11. It leaves the parents out of the equation

[cjbgreen]

18. Bottom line

Teachers care and my apologies to Fbaggins for misunderstanding the points being made about how challenging identifying how to teach and educate children even when parents and teachers work together. I think the point everyone is making that focusing blame on one group is not helpful and undermines genuine efforts to provide quality education.