Educators keep complaining and then keep choosing to fail

From Teachers Can’t Hold Students Accountable. It’s Making the Job Miserable. by Jessica Grose.  Our education system is not as bad as made out to be but it has dreadful points of failure (mostly in large cities) and it is subject to fads with absolutely no empirical basis.  It is often also highly averse to responsibility and accountability (administration, teaches, students, and parents).  Not always and not everywhere, but often, especially in big city systems where the entire education system is more of a make-work program for administrators than it is an institution of knowledge acquisition and transmittal.  

We know what makes for a good education system.  A community culture which admires and values learning in combination with an ethos of hard work is a good start.  The elements which are well documented to maximize outcomes for all students include:

Direct Instruction 

Phonics

Classroom discipline (behaviors)

School discipline

School system goals and standards

These policies work but they are hard work for all stakeholders; administration, teaches, students, and parents.  Consequently, many large education systems shy away from adhering to the policies which are known to achieve high levels of knowledge acquisition, skills development, and effective preparation for higher education.

Instead, school systems focus on chimera grades, passing children from grade to grade, and graduation rates.  Typically to the gross detriment to all, students and parents alike.  Such school systems end up focusing on issues beyond the purview of the schools:  Equity, Equality of outcomes, Whole word reading; Learning styles; Getting rid of standards of performance, etc.

These symptoms are less prevalent in private schools, religious schools, charter schools, and small education districts and systems where accountability and transparency are less avoidable.  Less prevalent, but not completely absent.  

Journalists live in big cities, mostly in the most dysfunctional of the big cities (think San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.).  They see a magnitude of educational dysfunction and failure not representative of the nation and therefore there articles, such as this one are more extravagant than the reality.  

What Grose is indirectly highlighting is that failure is a choice.  In this instance, she is writing about schools which do not practice education policies which are known to work and instead abandon both teaching and order in the classroom and school.  Of course kids do not learn in that environment and the lamentations are loud.  Even though the failure was chosen by the school system and by the voters.  

For all the failure highlighted by Grose, there are tremendous routine successes of schools who never abandoned the tried and tested - direct learning, phonics, and discipline in the classroom, school and system.  And a direct engagement with parents to create the effective support environment where children learn best.

It is not the inherent failure of the next generation.  It is not a systemic racism issue.  It is not a poverty issue.  It is not inadequate spending.  The cause is a choice to fail because it is easier to fail than to do what is necessary to succeed.  Easier to abandon children than teach them.