What about the kids?

In talking about NCLB, many people latch on to the notion of “holding teachers accountable” like my sister’s old pit bull used to latch on to the sofa cushion. The result is the same — a beat-up sofa cushion and a lot of beat-up teachers.

Missing from the dogfight over accountability, says Dennis Fermoyle at From the Trenches of Public Ed, is the students themselves:

I don’t think these experts get it. They want higher test scores from American kids, and when they don’t get them, they continually blame those who are teaching the kids. If the kids aren’t performing, it must be the schools’ and the teachers’ fault. They seem to never consider that maybe it’s the kids.

Fermoyle introduces us to four students of varying motivation to show that it doesn’t matter how good a teacher you are, kids have to care about their education to make learning work.

“If the elites of America are dissatisfied with the performance of American students,” he writes, “they need to understand that our ’student problem’ is much worse than our ’school problem.’”

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