My school takes on that challenge. We daily emphasize the importance of personal responsibility, social responsibility, and hard work. When we recognize a “C” student as the “student of the month” for her efforts (and progress), we are speaking to our values. When I lecture them on the need to “respect yourselves, respect your ability, respect your peers”, I’m not directly teaching them science — but I’m teaching them the mindset they need to be successful in school and beyond.

That is why it works. Schools *can* teach culture. They *can* teach responsibility, ethics, and hard work. And they *need* to teach these values to achieve real culture change.

We can do it because we are a Catholic school (independent of the Diocese, but nonetheless with a religious charter). Public schools balk at teaching morality because they don’t feel it is part of their mandate. And if they tried, parents would scream.

The problem is a general malaise that has overtaken society since the 1960′s. It is difficult to quantify, but it involves things like attempts to change society from a system of ensuring equal opportunity to ensuring equal outcomes, and other social nonsense based on feelings instead of facts. Our society (in the US) is no longer propagating the things that brought us to greatness: hard work and individual responsibility. Until the people can see that empty ideas don’t work when they are translated from some vague “it ought to be true” to what is actually true in the real world, the education system has no chance whatsoever – and our children have no chance. The ideas discussed are valuable in and of themselves, but are in fact treating the symptoms of the illness rather than the illness itself. How to reverse such a trend is harder, of course.

That’s because in any respectable school district, they DO get fired. It isn’t a simple process, but through a series of performance evaluations, warnings, and action plans, you can resolve any problem within a couple years. Usually the teacher will quit rather than see it through to the end.

For a teacher with less than three years tenure, no process or justification is required. (At least not here.) You simply don’t renew their contract. That happens quite frequently as well.

It isn’t hard getting rid of bad teachers. It *is* hard finding good ones, sometimes.

First of all, it’s simply not possible to “anonymize” data. Anybody who says they can do so is trying to sell you something you don’t need at a price you can’t afford.

Second, the reason teachers get fired is not because they’re bad. They get fired because there isn’t enough money to pay their salaries, benefits and expenses. Truly bad teachers are very rare.

If you really want to make a difference in the life of inner-city kids, you need to be teacher AND mentor AND counselor to them. If the relationship ends with the textbook, you’ll never get them turned around. But that takes time, and can’t be managed with the same staffing levels you see in the suburbs, where you might see one teacher for every 15-20 students.

And yes, some of the wealthier districts get unexceptional results. I’ve never intended to equate money with quality. But only a fool (or an HP CEO) believes that you can build excellence WITHOUT adequate funding.

Yet as FredFlintstone states, we are seeing an increasing divide between the “haves” and the “have nots”. The wealthy congregate in their cloistered suburbs, which have sufficient resources to do the job well. The poorer towns face a far more difficult challenge, yet operate with tighter funding.

You can’t provide equal educational opportunity unless the funding is proportional to the challenges faced. I hesitate to argue that the money should be taken away from the wealthier towns (since their schools aren’t exactly living in the lap of luxury either), but the urban districts would definitely benefit from greater staffing in support of a broader mandate.

OBTW, my school shared this video with the kids last month. Some powerful messages, as Fred suggests.
http://www.missrepresentation.org/

1. The role of poverty and student/school performance. If you remove school test data based on school lunch takeup, the US PISA scores are among the highest or the highest. Nothing you covered in your piece addresses poverty and its impact on students, parents, schools, and their communities. It also would appear that non-poverty schools are doing fine and should be left alone.

2. The role of public education in US society. With home schooling and charter schools added to private schools, without much debate we’ve moved from an educational system where everyone is equal to an education system where what you can buy or manage to do makes you more equal or less equal.

We’ve traded a school system that forces kids to interact for years with other kids from different economic and cultural backgrounds to separate school systems based on economics and cultures. That’s not healthy for a democracy. And it was explicitly worried about by the people who created the US, if their opinions matter. Inequality in education only reinforces elites and reduces (or eliminates) the future choices of all our kids.

3. School is more than rote and classroom education. Think about what you learned in school. My most telling experiences came not from a book or research. It came from interacting with a teacher and my fellow students.

For example, senior year high school I had an ethics teacher who made us read Playboy in one class then forced us to answer a series of questions that made it clear how artificial the photos really were (e.g. what did the model do before and after this shoot? Does this person have parents, brothers and sisters, cousins? Do you think she’s interested in you personally when she doesn’t know you? Who wrote her biography here?). Naturally we were all thrilled but then dismayed and amused as we went through the process. It taught us how fake the media really is, how much of the media is about eyeballs and stimulating reader emotions to drive sales.

You cannot measure these teacher/student interactions yet they are the most powerful and long lasting. And often they’re what distinguish great teachers from good teachers. The role of data in education is profoundly limited.

These three points are critical to the education debate, even more than what you chose to focus on (which is more micro than meta). Maybe next time you can address them. It’s interesting, given this piece reports out a conference, that it also appears none of these three issues were discussed.