August 9, 2009: the Oregonian

School quality depends on societal forces, not teachers

Throughout my 10-year teaching career I have seen districts large and small, urban and suburban, above average and utterly dysfunctional. I have also spent hundreds of hours in other teachers' classrooms, and so I feel I am qualified to say the following: High-performing schools (and districts) get far too much credit for what they do, and low-performing schools get far too much blame.

 I say this because regardless of whether test scores were below or above average at schools where I have taught, the quality of teachers has more or less been consistently good.

Although educational research is full of tortured arguments that attempt to de-emphasize the impact of a student's environment and assert the primacy of classroom instruction as the chief factor in student success, the reality that I have consistently observed points convincingly to family support as the dominant factor. In other words, generally speaking, students who succeed in school have their parents to thank, first and foremost.

There is a fundamentally incorrect belief that what happens in our public schools today shapes our society tomorrow. In fact, I have found the opposite to be closer to the truth. Like the proverbial canary in a coal mine, what happens in our schools is a reflection of many stronger forces at play in our society at large.

Parents in all strata of society, whether rich, poor or in between, are increasingly stressed in their ability to provide the emotional, physical and financial support that children need on a day-to-day basis. The positive and nurturing values that schools (and families and churches) try to instill in our youth are constantly under assault from a crowded spectrum of media, entertainment and Internet influences that "push the envelope" in order to survive.

Busier lives also mean succumbing to the convenience of processed and fast foods, which results in poorer nutrition. And poorer fitness has meant a frightening reliance on medications and their poorly understood side effects. There is no agreement in educational research to explain why so many children lack the necessary cognitive skills to succeed in schools, such as short- or long-term memory, visual-motor integration and attention span, to name a few -- might these factors play some role? I submit that successful students succeed in spite of the collective choices we have made as a society, whereas those who fail do so because of them.

When I spent a high school year abroad in Japan in 1986, I found myself to be nothing but a minor leaguer trying to play in the big leagues when it came to math and science -- a real blow to my pride since I'd always been a first-team all-star back home in the United States. On the other hand, not a single teacher in that highly competitive school left any impression on me in terms of his or her teaching skills.

I was equally underwhelmed last summer when I was among 50 teachers from around the world who were invited to Japan to visit Japanese schools and learn about their educational system. The shocking truth is, on the basis of pure teaching talent, American teachers are superior to those in Japan. Whereas Japanese teachers are by and large more knowledgeable and stronger generalists than American teachers, they do not possess key qualities that are essential for succeeding in the American classroom such as creativity, resourcefulness and compassion.

Japanese teachers primarily deliver instruction with comparatively little interaction with the students themselves. American teachers not only deliver instruction, but must also differentiate their instruction, which is to say they must successfully contend with a far more diverse array of needs, skills and backgrounds. The point is, though Japanese schools are often assumed to be superior to American schools, if we could wave a magic wand and teleport Japanese teachers into American schools, you would see no improvement whatsoever in student outcomes. For better and worse, both the American and Japanese models of education produce results according to what their respective citizenries value.

In the famous story of the little Dutch boy, a child was able to save his country from disaster when he called upon others to help plug up leaks until sufficient repairs to the structure could be made. Our American system of education is leaking in many places -- how serious you feel is the threat depends largely on your location along the dike. But it is clear to me that teachers and schools cannot fix the problem alone. For better or for worse, we will always end up exactly with the system of education that we as a society deserve. Perhaps in the future enough of us will work together to deserve better than what we have today.