Hypothetical

The typical law school exam presents the student with a fact pattern (i.e., a story about two or more parties who have a dispute over something or other) and asks him to apply legal reasoning and substantive law to determine the respective rights and obligations of the parties, and perhaps determine who would be more likely to prevail in court and why. A former colleague shared the following story with me yesterday, so let's use that as the fact pattern, and then see if we can apply legal reasoning to the facts to determine the appropriate outcome:

Mrs. X is the mother of an 18-year-old high school senior, Y, who failed one of his classes due to his not completing and handing in required work. Upon learning of this, Mrs. X goes to the school, armed with a copy of the "Parents' Bill of Rights," which indicates that she has the right to be informed if her child is failing. She tells an Assistant Principal that she was not informed, and therefore Y's teacher cannot give Y a failing grade. She says that if she had been informed that Y was failing, she "would have made him do the work." The teacher disputes her contention and claims that she was informed. Y failed the previous marking period also, which his interim report card indicated.

OK, let's examine Mrs. X's claim one piece at a time, using basic legal reasoning and general principles of civil law. Does Mrs. X have a legitimate claim, and if so, is the remedy for which she is asking an appropriate one? The parental claim that "The teacher didn't tell me my child was failing, therefore she cannot fail" seems to be a fairly common one nowadays, and one must wonder if it really makes sense. Let's examine the situation in the context of a typical tort case, i.e.: Duty, Breach, Causation, Damages.

Duty

Without knowing precisely what the "Parents' Bill of Rights" says with regard to notification, it's difficult to say for sure just what the notification requirements and procedures in that school are. Let's assume for the sake of argument that it's just a generic statement like the one indicated above, and the school has standard procedures for NYC high schools for report cards, Open School, etc. The first question, then, is whether the teacher had an affirmative duty to personally reach out to the parent any time Y's average dipped below 65, or any time Y neglected to submit an assignment, and inform her of same.

Neither the Chancellor's Regulations nor the UFT Contract, nor any substantive body of law or regulatory scheme of which I am aware, explicitly creates an affirmative duty on the part of teachers to personally inform parents of a student's failing status whenever it may occur, nor of each and every individual failing grade or non-completed assignment, beyond report cards. Every school has a system for informing parents of student progress, including mid-term or marking-period report cards, progress reports or other mailings, scheduled parent-teacher conference events such as Open School, etc. Most city high schools have two intermediate marking periods (and thus two interim report cards) within each semester, therefore all parents are informed twice over the course of a five-month semester of their child's status in each class, in addition to the final report card in January or June.

Historically, personal phone calls or other correspondence to parents from teachers outside of these school-wide procedures have generally been regarded as a courtesy, an example of a teacher "going the extra mile" to help her students succeed. Parents, of course, have always been free to reach out to their children's teachers individually if they are particularly concerned, and teachers traditionally reciprocate in those individual cases. But does every teacher have an affirmative duty to reach out to every parent of every child whose average falls below 65, or who does not submit an assignment, any and every time either of these things occurs? Is it reasonable to place such a duty on the teacher?

The typical teacher has roughly 150 students across five classes; I've had as many as 170. While I keep my grades on an Excel spreadsheet and thus they are updated automatically every time an assignment is graded (or entered as a zero if it is not submitted), many teachers do not compute student grade averages until the end of the marking period. Even I sometimes don't know if a child will fail until he takes a midterm or final exam, or completes an assignment due just before the end of a marking period or semester. Either way, is it reasonable for a teacher to have to compute and monitor 150 students' grade averages every day, to personally call every parent whose child's average falls below 65 any and every time that occurs, to personally call every parent of every child who does not submit an assignment, as well as every parent whose child receives a low or failing grade on that assignment, every time an assignment comes due? Is it reasonable for the teacher who has spent hours calculating final grades to then have to personally call every parent whose child has failed a marking period or semester before filling out her report cards, which will in any case be mailed out presently?

To put it another way, is it reasonable to set a policy that a child cannot fail a class unless the parent was personally informed by the teacher in advance that she might fail?

Note that the word "every" keeps coming up here because we cannot call this an affirmative duty otherwise. What a teacher does for one student and parent as a matter of policy he must do for all. Of course a teacher can do this for individual students if he is asked by the parent, guidance counselor, administration, etc., and agrees to take on the responsibility, and he can do so on his own if he judges a student to be severely deficient, disruptive, uniquely troubled, etc., but if we are talking about an affirmative duty then it must apply to all teachers and all students in all situations.

Remember, the question is not whether teachers should or should not call parents, or whether it would be a positive and admirable thing to do. Of course they should, and of course it would be a good thing. The question is whether or not an affirmative duty exists; i.e., is the teacher required to do this in all cases, and will the parent and/or student be entitled to a remedy if he does not?

As we have seen, it is very difficult to find an affirmative duty for teachers to always inform parents whenever any individual child underperforms in school. It would just not be reasonable to expect teachers to do this for every student in every case, nor would it be an efficient use of a teacher's time and resources. We have report cards, we have Open School, we have all sorts of academic intervention services in the schools including guidance counselors. It is not always clear to a teacher that a child may fail until the teacher sits down to compute all of her students' grade averages at the end of a marking period. There is no reason why periodic report cards cannot satisfy the notification requirement. And whether a child passes or fails should be determined by his own ability and performance, not the teacher's non-pedagogical procedural compliance.

The issue also raises the question of the student's duty to be aware of his requirements and do his work, and the parent's duty to be aware of the child's work habits and progress. Recall the discussion in a previous post concerning entitlements and obligations. Every relationship between individuals, whether in a public or private context, involves reciprocal rights and duties; never are all the rights and entitlements vested in one party with all the duties and obligations placed upon the other. No system could function under such conditions. Recall also that minors are not immune from tort or contract liability based on their age. If any breach of duty has occurred here, the student has breached his affirmative duty (remember, he is in the best position to avoid the risk) to know and meet the requirements of that particular class, the intention of which is in any event for his own benefit.

The parent's claim that she "would have made him do the work" if she had known of his failing status is interesting in a couple of different ways. In the context of duty, it implies that the parent does not have a duty to see to it that her child does his work as a general matter, and in the case of this particular parent, would only do so if she is informed that he is failing. The claim obviously begs the question, why would the parent not do that anyway? Although it is not strictly at issue in this case, what is the parent's duty with respect to her child's academic performance in the first instance? (The claim also raises interesting causation issues, which are discussed infra.)

It therefore seems that, under the common law tort analysis, the teacher has no affirmative duty to personally inform the parent of the student's academic status beyond report cards and similar standard school-wide procedures. However, even if there is a duty on the part of teachers to keep parents informed in the fashion suggested, was that duty breached in this case?

Breach

Obviously, if there is no duty, there can be no breach. It is usually more arduous to establish a duty than to establish a breach of that duty, but assuming there was a duty in this case, the question then is whether the teacher fulfilled her obligation.

Unfortunately, more facts would be needed to make a definitive determination of a breach of affirmative duty. We know that the student failed the interim marking period and that this was indicated on his previous report card. The teacher claims to have informed the parent of the child's failing status, but by what means and precisely when are unknown, as is the nature of that information. The question may hinge on whether the report card itself satisfies the notification requirement; if it does, that ends the inquiry and there is no breach of duty.

However, the question may also hinge on whether it is reasonable to believe that the parent did not know that the child was failing, or in danger of failing, the course. The parent has already implied that she did not monitor the child's academic performance and was not concerned about "making him do the work," but that can mean several things. It could mean that she honestly believed the child was doing fine and did not need monitoring, but the interim report card would make that unlikely. It could also mean the child simply lied to her about his status and she believed him. Or it could mean that the parent, as mentioned above, does not see it as her responsibility to do that at all, unless she is personally informed by the teacher that the child is in danger of failing. Although the student's overall academic record is unknown, the interim report card should have been enough for the parent to know that the child was in trouble in that class.

Now, let us assume that the parent knew, but that the teacher still neglected to call and thus breached her affirmative duty to inform the parent that the child was about to fail. If we limit the inquiry to the teacher, we therefore must ask whether the teacher's breach of duty, and nothing else, caused the child to fail the class.

Causation

The classic test of causation in both tort and criminal cases is the "but-for" test. But for the defendant's actions (or negligence), the injury/loss would not have occurred. Then there is the additional element of proximate cause (the so-called, and self-explanatory, "Hitler's mother" problem). This is obviously the most difficult element for the parent to establish. If the student's grade is the measure and result of his performance (and let's assume, arguendo, that it is), the teacher's calling or not calling the parent has no direct impact on that; i.e., even if the teacher had a duty to call the parent and failed, the child still underperformed and still did not submit the missing work. The teacher calling the parent, by itself, would not have changed that. In other words, it is certainly possible (perhaps likely) that the child would have failed even if the teacher had called the parent, thus the "but-for" test fails rather quickly. The proximate cause of the student's failure is simple, and obvious: He did not do his work.

Hence the parent in this case attempts to establish causation by claiming that she "would have made him do the work" if she had known he might fail. (Which again begs the question, how does a parent not already know that her child might fail if he does not do his work?) This cannot possibly satisfy the "but-for" causation test, because it is not only indirect, but vague and hypothetical. There is obviously no way to know, with any degree of certainty, precisely what the parent would have done or said or what effect it would have had on the child, let alone that it would have averted the failure. Not only would we have to assume, with 100% certainty, that the parent would actually have done what she said she would, but that it would have had the effect she claims it would have had. That's a lot to assume; far too much to establish causation.

Even if the parent could establish causation, would it be appropriate to change the student's grade and pass him for the year, as a direct remedy for the teacher's failure to call the parent?

Damages

Here we return to the fundamental contention cited above: "No one told me he was failing, therefore he cannot fail." One does not need legal reasoning to see that this is a logical fallacy. Unfortunately, it has become a ubiquitous and convenient last-resort position for parents everywhere, an easy claim to make because it neither requires proof nor can be affirmatively proven.

The question here harks back to many of the points I have made in earlier posts, including the general reluctance to place the burden of learning on the learner or attribute blameworthy conduct to students, the idea of retroactively un-doing past events to absolve and benefit the student, the concept of failure as punitive action taken by the teacher rather than a denotation of student performance, etc. Yet as difficult as it is to find a logical justification for retroactively raising a student's grade based solely on the parent's ignorance thereof or lack of prior notification, this is most often what happens.

The bottom line is this: The fact that the teacher did not personally inform the parent in advance that the child was in danger of failing, even if the teacher had an affirmative duty to do that and breached that duty, does not alter the course of time and make it so the child actually wrote the essay or passed the exam the failure of which caused him to fail the course. It does not magically endow him with the skills and knowledge which he was heretofore unable or unwilling to demonstrate. Given the absence of direct or proximate causation, as discussed above, it would hardly be appropriate to simply change the child's grade to reflect what the parent thinks it "would have" been under some vague, attenuated hypothetical; i.e., to base the grade on something that did not actually happen. That simply makes no sense.

Sometimes in a case like this, the parent will claim that the teacher "did not give my child a chance" to either make up the work or do something else to earn a passing average, and demand that the child be allowed to submit the missing work, or do "extra credit" or somesuch, even if the term has already ended. Not for nothing, but the semester is five months long. There are roughly ninety school days over that time period. The student, over that time, has plenty of opportunities to choose whether to do his work or not, and decide how much time and effort to devote to that class and its requirements. It is absurd to suggest that any teacher, over a five-month period, does not give every child every chance to succeed and pass the course, or that teachers should be obligated to keep giving a student additional "chances" until the child and parent are satisfied with outcome. One cannot make up for five months of inaction and poor performance by writing one essay or taking one test. Students will not learn to make the most of the opportunities they are given if they know they will always be given one more.

(Personally, I do not believe in "extra credit;" you do the work you are assigned, period. If you are willing and able to do "extra credit," then you were able to do the assigned work but chose not to. You must now accept the consequences of that choice. When a failing student begs me for "extra credit" at the end of the term because it's "really important" that she pass my class for whatever reason, my response is simple: You should have considered that earlier, when you chose not to do your work. Yes, it's harsh, but it is a lesson young people must learn.)

All of this indicates a general reluctance on just about everyone's part to view academic performance, and particularly failure, as a result of the student's choices. Again, failure is generally regarded as punitive action even though it should not be. Not to belabor the point, as I've discussed this at length in previous posts, but if we are really here to teach, to educate young people on how the real world works, we do a very poor job of it by teaching them that their choices don't have consequences, that they do not and should not have to pay for their mistakes, negligence, and frankly, plain stupidity.

In the end, whether Mrs. X has a case or not, she is setting the most horrible example imaginable for her son. The lesson he will learn is thus: When things do not go your way, the proper thing to do is complain, claim ignorance, and demand to have what you did un-done, to have your mistakes corrected for you, because it must be someone else's fault, and you are entitled to the outcome you desire.

Fish Story

There's an old saying I recently read somewhere, and darned if I can remember where:

"Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."

The more I think about the entitlement grading model (i.e., the student begins the school year with a perfect 100 average without having done any work or demonstrated proficiency), the more I think that it is the root of almost all of the problems we have in the schools when it comes to actual student learning. It is a product of the ubiquitous self-esteem movement, which is more of an underlying philosophy than an actual pedagogical policy which is explicitly manifested in the classroom, like the entitlement grading model. That 100 average with which the student begins the year is the "fish" we give him that in many ways prevents him from learning how to fish. By making him happy today, we fail to properly prepare and equip him for tomorrow.

Just to recap, the entitlement grading model:

- Promotes the false axiom that "everyone's a winner" until proven otherwise;
- Promotes the idea that all students are automatically entitled to high grades and lavish praise, without having to do anything at all to earn them;
- Gives students a strong disincentive to do their work, or even to understand what to do; i.e., makes it preferable to not do the work at all than to do it and receive less than the maximum grade;
- Creates a disconnect in the student's mind between his work habits and his grade average;
- Gives students illogical ideas, e.g., that they should pass their classes with high averages because of their intellectual deficiencies, long-term absences, subjective dislike of or disinterest in subject matter, or other conditions inhibiting performance;
- Destroys the meaning of failure, and the meaning of achievement;
- Prevents students from learning by fostering a "defensive" approach to school; i.e., the student approaches his classes, schoolwork and assignments from the standpoint of minimizing loss instead of maximizing gain.

It is very difficult to find a logical rationale for the entitlement grading model. The only thing I can think of is the idea that if students knew that they had a zero average on the first day of school, that they had to earn 65 points or more starting from zero, they might find that to be too much of an uphill climb, and -- here we go again -- be "discouraged" and "turn off to learning." Starting with a 100 average would "make them feel better," be "encouraging," and having to "maintain" a 100 average will seem "easier" than having to earn it from the ground up. (None of this, of course, is logical.) In addition, one does not need to use pure mathematical logic to arrive at a student's final grade; I've often wondered precisely how such teachers compute the number of points to be "deducted" from 100 at the end of a marking period or semester, based on the grades the child received on submitted work, and how non-submitted work factors in. Is there any way to do it without it becoming completely arbitrary?

Using the economic model which I prefer, the child's final grade is the result of a simple mathematical formula. I enter into an Excel spreadsheet the numbers corresponding to the letter grades students receive for their notebooks and essays, create a formula to compute the weighted average, and the computer does the math (the average of each field of cells, each representing one set of assignments collectively worth a pre-determined percentage of the final grade, added together). When an assignment is not submitted, I enter "0" (zero) in that cell. In order for the formula to compute a number greater than 65, the students must generate positive numbers for me to enter into the computer by submitting work which meets or exceeds minimum grade-level standards. If the work is not submitted, I must then enter a zero. A zero in any cell will substantially reduce the average value of that field of cells (the fewer total number of entries there are, the more a zero affects the average), and it becomes less likely if not impossible for the numbers to add up to 65 or more.

Students who do not do their work at all, therefore, have no chance of passing, especially early in the term when there are not that many assignments to average in. Yet year after year I find it almost impossible to get students to understand this, and I now think I understand why. A friend of mine who teaches middle school told me recently that he and his colleagues are instructed and required to start every student off with a 100 average at the beginning of the school year. I can only imagine that the typical student who does not do his work, even if he does know that he will lose points for not submitting an assignment (and again, I really think there are students who believe they can't lose points for not submitting work), he doesn't think he will lose very many, certainly not enough to fail the class. The student thus does not believe he is risking very much by not submitting the assignment; or, alternatively, he may think that it's worth the risk. He may believe that it is less of a risk to submit nothing than it would be to submit something which might turn out to be insufficient or substandard.

The difference, then, is that under an economic model of grading the students must first demonstrate proficiency and learning before they acquire the points which will ultimately determine their final grade. Using the entitlement model, the points are already there; it is up to the student to avoid losing them, but to do that she really does not need to demonstrate either proficiency or learning. At the very least, the number at which the teacher arrives in the end will likely not be an accurate measure of the child's abilities and performance. Put simply, the child can "pass," meaning avoid the loss of more than 35 points, without actually learning anything (i.e., demonstrating that he has learned anything), which would not be possible under the economic model. Actual learning, then, becomes merely a hoped-for by-product of an arbitrary numbering system.

At the end of the day, the point seems to be to create a grading system whose primary purpose is to arrive at a number between 65 and 100 for practically every student; whether each student actually learns anything or not, or is able to demonstrate learning in any of many various ways, is a separate and tertiary concern. Remember, the first priority is self-esteem, not learning. The things which actually make learning occur, such as pointing out deficiencies in students' work, bringing attention to things which they do not know, or tying grades to objective measurements of actual ability and performance, tend to hurt children's feelings and make them uncomfortable, so we have to avoid those. We abandon the techniques that actually make learning happen and replace them with a steady and exclusive stream of praise, reward and "encouragement," thinking, hoping, that some actual learning will occur along the way.

Unfortunately, it often doesn't. The plain fact is that people of all ages need to "feel bad" in order to learn. Learning comes from experience, particularly negative experience; when we fail or are hurt, we learn how to examine what happened and prevent it from happening again. Actual learning comes from an awareness of what we do not know and what we cannot do, an acknowledgment that we can and must know more and perform better than we do now, and a commitment to engage with the mental and physical processes that will get us from where we are to where we need to be. A person learns nothing by starting at the finish line and then being congratulated for winning the race.

Why do we feel the need to play these psychological games with kids, and more to the point, ignore logic and reason along the way? As I've written earlier, when we do things like this we become enablers; we actually encourage precisely the kind of self-indulgent behavior and narcissistic personality traits we wish to avoid. The idea is to promote "achievement," but in the long run it has the opposite effect. We prefer, bizarrely, to give kids a false sense of achievement, because a system which has the potential to give them a true sense of achievement down the road would "hurt their feelings" in the here and now.

The saying about the fish which I cited above reminds me specifically of the so-called "writing process" which I was forced to employ in the Long Island school where I taught briefly several years ago. As I mentioned in a previous post, this "process" was only one step removed from having the students take dictation. Allow me to illustrate.

Session Two, Part A of the ELA Regents Exam is called "Reading and Writing for Literary Response." The task provides students with two short literary passages sharing a common motif or topic, which is enunciated in the instructions (e.g., "...write a unified essay about the nature of friendship, as revealed in the passages.") The students need to read the passages and develop a controlling idea about the topic (i.e., e.g., what do these two passages tell us about the nature of friendship?), then write a detailed response to each passage discussing how each author conveys that idea using specific literary devices. The task is neither easy nor simple.

My approach to instruction on these tasks has always been to provide students with a thorough understanding of how the essays need to be constructed and what they need to include, but only in the abstract (see the Plan of Action on my website for details); it is up to the student to actually read and understand the passages, find a controlling idea, develop a thesis, identify the key literary devices and write the actual response. The reason for this is that the ELA Regents is a test of "first-encounter;" whatever passages appear on the actual exam which the student takes, she will be reading them for the first time. There is no way to know or predict what the passages or the topic will be on the next Regents exam. Therefore, students need to learn, and gain actual experience with, reading, responding to and writing about literary texts in general, on their own, in such a way as to be able to apply those skills to any text they may read in the future.

However, in that particular school, I was expected and required to do essentially all of the students' thinking for them. For each Session Two-Part A task I gave them, my supervisor expected me to: explain what each passage was about and what it meant, tell students what their controlling idea and thesis should be, point out the important literary techniques and tell them which ones to write about, pick out direct quotations from each text and show them how to cite them, and tell them what ideas to include in their introduction and conclusion. In other words, it was my job to actually read and respond to the passages, think through the task, plan, develop and write the essay, and then give the students whatever I had come up with so they could score well on their essays. If they did not score well, then my explanation must have been inadequate; any deficiency in the essay was attributable to my not specifically telling them to include whatever was missing. If they did not write and submit the essay at all, it was because they "didn't get it" or "didn't know what to do" because I had, again, not given adequate explanation and instruction on what to write.

My supervisor, of course, rejected the idea that the students should be reading these passages themselves and coming up with their own ideas for these essays; she was entirely unmoved by (or possibly unaware of) the "first-encounter" nature of the Regents exam which I discussed above. Her position was that the students could not do these things on their own, could not be expected to do them on their own, and could not be faulted (i.e., could not be given low scores) for being unable to do them on their own. The idea was that if I gave them the solution to this particular problem (i.e., gave them a controlling idea and literary response details for this topic and these passages), they'd be able to solve whatever problem would appear on the actual Regents, with a different topic and different passages.

I strongly disagreed; my doing the students' reading, thinking, planning and composition for them, allowing them to skip those processes altogether, might earn them higher scores on these essays but would teach them absolutely nothing, let alone provide an accurate or reliable predictor of Regents performance. One cannot study for the ELA Regents; one can only practice. They needed to work their way through the task, reading material and thought process in order to learn how to do it on their own, without someone there to "explain" everything, as they would do on the actual Regents. But, naturally, the lower scores they were likely to receive as a result would -- once more, with feeling -- make them "feel bad" and "turn off to learning." So, since according to that supervisor it's "not his fault" if a student "doesn't get it," once again I had to give the students the proverbial fish, and just hope that when they actually found themselves out on the boat alone, they could operate the bait and tackle well enough to catch one.

In a self-esteem-based academic environment, not only can learning not possibly be the primary goal, it really cannot occur at all, because the things that actually make learning happen are antithetical to the preservation of fragile self-esteem. For some reason, we have chosen to give kids a false sense of accomplishment and enable the kind of self-indulgence and narcissism we wish to avoid, because a system that produces real winners would also have to produce, I'm sorry to say, real losers. Better to simply call everyone a winner than actually teach children how to win.

Redefining Failure

A couple of years ago I read an article in the Daily News about school officials in Britain who wanted to remove the word "failure" from the educational lexicon and replace it with the ridiculous euphemism "deferred success." In other words, if a child does not perform up to the minimum standard on an assessment, such as by answering too few questions correctly on an exam, we will not say that he "failed" that exam. The reason behind this, as stated in the article, was -- all together now -- we don't want the child to "feel bad" and "turn off to learning."

The only thing that really surprised me at the time was that it was happening in Britain, not here, though I'm sure it's crept its way across the pond. Many people have heard about this by now (Dana Carvey mentioned it last month on Real Time with Bill Maher), and thankfully it hasn't taken hold, at least not from what I've seen (the sentiment obviously has, but the euphemism hasn't). I only bring it up because I've been thinking a lot about what I wrote yesterday ["Twenty Questions" (June 5, 2007)], and I think there's a connection. The problem with the word "failure" is not that it makes kids "feel bad;" it's that no one seems to understand what it really means, least of all students, and yet no one wants to deal with it. Those who would solve the problem by simply eliminating the word "failure" and replacing it with a benign euphemism, regardless of their motivation, completely miss the point. They are correct that the word has power, but they are mistaken as to what that power is and where it comes from, let alone how to remedy it.

First, let's define "failure." What does it mean to "fail," in the general sense? My definition of failure is simple: the non-achievement of an achievable goal; a non-performance where performance is necessary or required and may be reasonably expected. Regardless of context, that is essentially what it means to fail. Now, toss yesterday's discussion into the mix: the economic model of grading (i.e., students start from zero and earn points by doing their work) on one side, and the entitlement model (i.e., students start from 100 and have points deducted along the way) on the other.

Under the economic model, a student can only fail as a result of inaction or deficiency. The student must complete and submit her assigned work in order to pass (i.e., earn 65 points or more), and also must perform at a certain level to demonstrate proficiency, learning, progress, and (eventually, hopefully) mastery, and thus be rewarded with a significant number of grade points. She must do her work to pass, and must do exceptional work to earn the highest grades. Therefore, the only way a student can "fail" under the economic grading model is if his work is substandard or deficient, i.e., below what he should reasonably be able to do at his grade level, or if he does not do the work at all, whether by choice or by negligence. This meets the basic definition of failure, supra. The student has an incentive to do the work and an incentive to demonstrate learning and thus increase his grade by producing higher-quality work product.

However, when we look at the entitlement model, and couple it with the ideas about blameworthiness which I also discussed yesterday, we realize almost instantly that the definition of failure, and the student's understanding thereof, must change under this scenario. Bearing in mind the necessary but mistaken belief that the student's grade should remain the same if she does not do her work, and that if she does the grade can only go down; i.e., where the student's final grade is a matter of how many points have been deducted rather than earned, the student now can only fail through action, and more to the point, profoundly negative and blameworthy action. If a student fails, it means she lost a significant number of points, that the teacher took them away, which could only have been the result of some terrible thing she did.

Regardless of whether the student (or parent) actually believes that he did something blameworthy to cause these points to be deducted, the perception nonetheless remains that a failing grade is some sort of proactive punishment; a "fine," if you will, a deprivation (unjust, of course) of something the student already possessed and to which he was rightfully entitled. A "failure" thus becomes tantamount to an accusation of grievous misconduct; "fail" becomes a transitive verb, an action taken by the teacher instead of a denotation of the student's performance. Hence students inevitably ask "Why did you fail me?" instead of "Why did I fail?"

Whereas under the economic grading model a failure means the student did not or could not obtain something, under the entitlement model it means the student has had something taken away. Whether we call it failure or "deferred success," this perception will not change.

It's no wonder, then, that the word "failure" is so upsetting to children and their parents. It has been made to carry a connotation which it should not, under any reasonable definition of the word, thanks to a misguided and counter-intuitive educational policy designed, like everything else, to make the children "feel good." Changing it to "deferred success" would merely sweep the problem under the carpet. The entitlement model of grading combined with the subjective performance standards I discussed earlier actually give students a powerful disincentive to do their work, learn, progress, and master their academic subjects. Why do your work if it can only make your grade average go down? Why try to improve when whatever your "best" is now will get you an "A" and allow you to keep that perfect 100 average you started with?

With all this talk about eliminating or redefining the word "failure," what about the meaning of "success" or "achievement?" Starting with nothing and earning 95 out of a possible 100 points is an achievement. Starting with 100 and only losing five along the way is not. In the real world, particularly in a merit-driven capitalist system like we have here in the U.S., success means making something out of nothing; taking what you have and gaining something more through skill, hard work, resourcefulness and perseverance. This is the lesson we need to be teaching our youth. Success is not starting with everything and ending up with only slightly less; it is not an accomplishment to merely avoid having what you already own be taken away, especially if you didn't earn it to begin with. Entitlements do not motivate people to better themselves.

Ultimately, I don't think the word "failure" needs to be replaced or even redefined; I think it needs to be better understood. So, too, do the words "success" and "achievement." These words should mean what they are supposed to mean, and nothing more.

Twenty Questions

Just recently I gave my students a take-home quiz containing 20 multiple choice questions. I am test-marketing this quiz for next year's students to take home in September at the beginning of the school year, to see if they can apply logic, reason and common sense to everyday school situations, such as what to do if you're absent on the day of an exam, what it means to be late to class, what to expect if you miss an assignment, etc. The idea for my current students is that they should, especially after having been in my class for a whole year, be able to get all 20 questions right and boost their grade average with what essentially amounts to a free "A."

Stunningly, incomprehensibly, most of the students who handed this quiz in got close to half the questions wrong. In one sense I should not have been surprised; after all, the questions were designed to illustrate all the possible wrong things I've seen students do (from which I drew the "wrong" choices for each question), in contrast with the one simple, logical, reasonable correct thing, but I have found in most cases that students tend to know what the right thing to do is even though they almost never do it. At the very least, they should have been able to determine what I would have thought the right answer was.

Two questions in particular stood out, in that the majority of the students answered wrong (correct answer in bold; typical student response in italics):

You are not late to class if
a. you have an excuse.
b. you have a note from guidance, dean, nurse, SPARK, principal, etc.
c. you are coming from gym.
d. you are coming from your arts studio.
e. your previous class ran long or let out late.
f. you come into the room less than a minute after the late bell.
g. you were in the room before the late bell and then left.
h. your belongings are at your seat when the late bell rings, even if you are out of the room.
i. you are standing just outside the doorway at the late bell.
j. all of the above.
k. none of the above.

On the first day of school in September, before the course begins, before any assignments are given and before any work is done or graded, your grade average is
a. 100
b. 65
c. 55
d. Zero (0)
e. whatever your grade in English was last year.
f. whatever you think you deserve.

Let's look at the first question first. The students were instructed to use logic, reason and common sense in answering, and to read each question and all the choices carefully. The question was, simply, under which of these circumstances are you not late to class? The question was not whether such lateness would be actionable or blameworthy. Given the strict liability for lateness policy I discussed in an earlier post, the students should have known that no matter what the reason is, if you arrive after class starts then you're late. The condition of being late involves arrival after a designated time, nothing more. Having a note or other mitigating factor does not alter the fundamental laws of temporal physics; a note does not turn back the clock. If you are late, you are late. Period.

(Note: The previous question was "You are late to class if...", so the fact of the student's arrival after the beginning of the period should have been a given, although in retrospect I might have wanted to include it in the question stem. However, many of the students who answered that question correctly, "...you arrive any time after the late bell, regardless of why," still answered this question wrong.)

The answer, then, indicates a couple of examples of flawed thinking. For one, it indicates that either the student did not read the question carefully or did not apply logic, reason and common sense, interpreting the word "late" to mean "at fault for being late." More notably, it indicates the mistaken belief that the perceived absence of blameworthiness somehow negates or cancels out the conduct. As anyone even vaguely familiar with tort law (or basic physics) knows, even if the conduct is not blameworthy, the event still happened, it cannot be undone, regardless of the actor's intent or whether he was knowingly "at fault." The question of fault is what is moot, not the conduct or condition. Late means late.

The wrong answer to the second question is even more troubling and even less surprising. The idea that every student walks into class with a perfect 100 average on the first day of school is one of the most ubiquitous yet completely counter-intuitive and, frankly, dumb ideas I've encountered in secondary schools. It's yet another example of what I discussed previously about every student and every parent thinking the child automatically deserves the highest possible grade and the most lavish, obsequious praise for whatever he does; that he's under no obligation to earn his grade points or do anything at all to deserve them.

Where does a child think her grade comes from? Where does she think the teacher gets the points from? Does it really make sense for a student to start the year with a 100 average and work his way down from there? If a grade is a commodity, using the economic model I discussed previously, what kind of sense does it make to start with the maximum? Why, for example, would anyone put $100 into a stock if there could be essentially no return on the investment, meaning the value could only go down? Why would an employee expect to receive his entire salary, let alone a glowing performance review, before his first day on the job? Why would a landowner pay a contractor in full before any work was done?

More importantly, where is the student's incentive to do his work if he knows that he has a 100 average right from the beginning? How does a student imagine her grade goes down from there? The student must figure, if she does the assignment and gets less than an A, her average will go down, but if she doesn't do it her average can't go down because she didn't do anything "wrong." In other words, if you do your work your grade goes down, but if you don't do it your grade remains the same. What kind of sense does that make? How else can you explain why students would or could ever choose not to submit assignments? Shouldn't any reasonable person know that if you don't submit an assignment you won't get credit for it? When I taught on Long Island, I had students flat-out refuse to submit certain assignments or do certain kinds of work, for no reason other than that they simply didn't want to or didn't "like" it, yet they had no conception at all that such refusal would or could result in failure of the course or even a lower grade. Somehow, I was the only one in that school who felt even the least bit troubled by this staggering disconnect from logic, reason and common sense.

I had a student tell me last year that I could not fail him for the first marking period because, as he put it rather forcefully, "I wasn't here!!" Let me rephrase and reiterate this, for emphasis: The child claimed that he should pass the course, because he was absent for the entire time in question. He had obviously done none of the course work, since he was not in class to do it, and thus had not demonstrated proficiency or improvement, nor could he participate or conduct himself properly in a class which he did not attend. Yet he insisted that it was unfair and wrong for him to fail, because he "wasn't here." He should pass, because he was absent.

No, really.


Setting aside for the moment the inherent, profound illogic of that contention, does it matter why he was absent? In this case, this particular student was absent from that class simply because he was chronically late to school and it was a first-period class; he "couldn't" get to school any earlier. But where do we get this idea that a student should automatically pass a class from which she has a long-term absence due to illness, injury, family emergency, etc., which is neither deliberate nor the result of her own negligence? At some point, don't we have to realize that a student has to actually take the course before he can pass it? This is how the first question discussed above connects with the second; i.e., the question of blameworthiness should be moot. Even if a long-term absence is not, per se, "her fault," a student cannot expect to pass a course she has not actually taken. That is simply absurd and no good can come from it. What we should do, the only logical thing to do, really, is find a way for her to take the course, even if it means staying in school an extra year.

The point is that in many cases it shouldn't matter whether a student's absence or other non-fulfillment of an objective requirement is his "fault" or not. Aside from the fact that teenagers and their adult enablers never regard their conduct as blameworthy to begin with, sometimes blameworthiness is simply not an issue. This idea that the absence of blameworthy conduct somehow changes an objective set of facts to the point where we are actually willing to act as if the thing didn't happen at all, or that it's "unfair" to follow the natural result of those circumstances if the child is not "at fault," makes very little sense. Life teaches us all eventually that sometimes unpleasant or inconvenient things happen even when we are not at fault. These situations need to be dealt with proactively, not artificially discarded retroactively.

We have an entire generation of children who believe that they should pass all of their classes with straight A's simply by virtue of having their names on the teacher's roster, and that they are entitled to have any unpleasant or unfortunate situation un-done and corrected in their favor so long as they are not to blame for creating it. In such an environment, no actual learning can occur.

Who's Who in Public Schools

In order to understand how legal principles apply to a high-school educational setting, we need to understand the precise nature of the teacher-student relationship, and the respective roles thereof. Civil law, particularly tort and contract, is essentially about the rights, duties, obligations and remedies of individual and corporate citizens as against other individual and corporate citizens, whether by mutual agreement (as in contract) or implication (as in tort). By contrast, criminal law and other statutory schemes involve the rights and obligations of citizens as against the state (i.e., the government, of both the U.S. and the several states) and vice-versa.

Even though the public schools are government entities, and school officials including teachers are therefore agents of the state, they do not represent or carry government authority in the same sense that police departments and regulatory agencies do, at least not in terms of the teacher-student relationship and the role of the student within the system. The government does control and oversee things like teacher certification, employment and collective bargaining agreements with the teachers and administrators and their respective unions, standardized testing, and to some degree, curriculum and assessment. In other words, the state has authority over the schools and the teachers, but the teachers do not seem to have that same authority as agents of the state over the students. Where parents can demand and receive things for their children like higher grades, reduced or abrogated punishment for misconduct, academic program changes, places on athletic or cheerleading teams, and the like; where teachers can essentially be compelled to change or ignore their own rules and standards in individual cases, they cannot be said to have inherent governmental authority.

Where is the disconnect? Why does the schools' authority as derived from the state and local governments that create them not extend to the teacher-student relationship? If adolescents are subject to the criminal laws and to the authority of police officers, why are they not subject to school rules, academic standards, and the authority of teachers in the same way? The principal reason, as suggested above, is that parents do not see teachers as authority figures in the same sense as police officers, or even workers at the Department of Motor Vehicles. While I don't mean to suggest that the schools do or should have the same function as the police, they both provide essential public services, and more importantly they are both charged with seeing to it that citizens behave in a certain way. The police must ensure that citizens obey the law (although it is the citizens' responsibility to know the law); teachers must ensure that students meet academic standards. We don't want to empower citizens to take the penal law into their own hands, or determine for themselves what the law is; why, then, do we want to empower students and parents to take academic and disciplinary standards into their own hands?

The problem, as I see it, is a fundamental misunderstanding of two critical elements:

(1.) What is the nature of the "service" which a teacher, as a public servant, provides?
(2.) What are the duties and obligations of students with respect to their teachers?

Without launching into a lengthy philosophical examination of precisely what it means to "teach," the service which a teacher provides is, or at least it should be, to provide students with instruction in the knowledge and skills which they will need to be successful in higher education and in subsequent employment. This obviously cannot occur without the participation of the students, and there needs to be a means of measuring not only whether or not the instruction is adequate, but if the students are responding and performing appropriately. The former is for the state and local educational authorities to determine; the latter is for the teachers to determine. At least, that is how it should be.

However, in the current environment the parents and students have essentially taken it upon themselves to determine both. The stereotypical paradigm has become: Every parent thinks his child is a straight-A student, and if some teacher does not give her an A, or if the child doesn't "like" that class, then that teacher must be doing something wrong and the school had darned well better do something about it. Which in most cases, it does.

In what other context do we endow private citizens with such authority to not only challenge but essentially determine for themselves the rules, regulations and determinations of a government entity? The courts have certainly not found that individual parents and students have any such authority; see, e.g., Blau v. Ft. Thomas Pub. Sch. Dist., 401 F.3d 381 (6th Cir. 2005) ("While parents may have a fundamental right to decide whether to send their child to a public school, they do not have a fundamental right generally to direct how a public school teaches their child."), citing Leebaert v. Harrington, 332 F.3d 134, 142 (2d Cir. 2003) (The fundamental right to control the upbringing and education of one's child does not include "the right to tell public schools what to teach or what not to teach him or her."); Brown v. Hot, Sexy and Safer Prods., Inc., 68 F.3d 525, 533 (1st Cir. 1995) (parents' fundamental right to control a child's education does not include the right to control curriculum at their child's public school). Why do the schools give it to them anyway?

The point is that teachers cannot effectively provide the public service for which they are employed unless they can exercise the public authority with which they are vested as agents of the state. In taking away that authority, parents, administrators and educrats have essentially altered the fundamental nature of the "service" provided by teachers. I don't think I need to repeat, again, what that is.

If teachers are not considered authority figures in the public sense, then the relationship between the teacher and student (and, peripherally, the parent on one side and school administration on the other) must be examined in a private/civil law context. The most practical analogue seems to be the employer-employee relationship. Since the ultimate purpose of schooling is to prepare students for an adult life of employment (and/or entrepreneurship), it makes the most sense to place the student in the role of employee. If I'm the teacher, I'm the boss; I make the rules, you the student work for me, and if you want to be "paid" (i.e., receive a high or passing grade), you need to show up for work on time, do the job, follow the rules and procedures, produce the product, do it well, and if you're not doing it well take steps to improve. I as the teacher have the authority and expertise to evaluate your work, yet I am also subject to the laws and regulations governing my business (i.e., academic standards handed down by the state and by school administrators).

An education is a commodity, and a very valuable one at that, more valuable even than a salary (a salary can be taken away; an education, once you receive it, cannot), but like any other commodity of any value it must be earned, worked for or exchanged for something else of value. If I'm the teacher, I have something you need, in the form of the knowledge and expertise to master the subject and the authority to evaluate your performance in the form of a grade. I have an obligation to provide you with this valuable commodity, as well as the tools and instruction with which you can obtain it. Yet you, the student, have an obligation to me as well; if I owe you this commodity, you owe me your best effort and best behavior. In this way it is much like a contractual arrangement; the student's obligation to do his work and follow the rules is consideration in exchange for the teacher's services.

The prevailing paradigm, however, is nothing like this. In the eyes of many parents, they and their children are the employers, the teachers are the employees, the parents' tax dollars fully comprise their duties and obligations (i.e., consideration), thus the teacher has no authority and is entirely subject to the parents' and children's whims and demands. Alternatively, and somewhat more disturbingly, the scenario is rather like that of a bailment; i.e., the parent is the customer, the teacher is the businessperson/employee, and the student is the commodity. It is analogous to the relationship of a car owner and a mechanic; the parent is the owner, I'm the mechanic, and the student is the car.

Consider this scenario in the context of what I discussed previously about expectations. If a customer brings his car in for service or repairs, and the mechanic discovers a problem of which the owner was not aware, or if the car develops a new problem after being serviced, it's certainly not the car's fault. Even if the customer does not maintain the engine properly or drives the vehicle harshly, he will still blame the mechanic if anything goes wrong. The customer typically doesn't know or understand much about automotive repair or the function of the internal-combustion engine, yet while the customer expects the mechanic to have that expertise, he will always be suspicious of the mechanic's diagnosis.

Whether auto mechanics are fundamentally as trustworthy as teachers, or more or less so, is not the point. While it is horrifying to think of children, particularly those of high school age, as property or as commodities, this is how many parents view their children in the context of their relationships with teachers and their role in school. While it may make some degree of sense for very young children in an elementary school setting, it makes no sense at all on the high school level. We cannot keep telling teenagers to "be themselves" and assert their independence and autonomy as human beings, then act as if they have no role in the determination of their own academic success (or failure). Adolescents, while not fully-developed psychologically, should nonetheless be mature enough to make reasonable, intelligent choices, and if they're not then they must learn, by being held accountable when their choices are wrong.

My parents, who grew up in the '40s, respected the authority of the schools and my teachers. The burden was on me to do well in school. Today's parents, who grew up in the '60s and '70s, learned through the dual trauma of Vietnam and Watergate to disrespect and distrust government authority and embrace self-determination (it wasn't called the "Me Generation" for nothing). It will take a very courageous stand by school administrators and teachers as a whole, or perhaps even in one place, to put an end to the self-esteem movement in schools and take back the authority which they need to truly and effectively educate our youth.

Conservative Pedagogy, Liberal Assessment

From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2000 (applicable citations only):

con-ser-va-tive (adj.) - 1. Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change. 2. Traditional or restrained in style. 3. Moderate; cautious.

lib-er-al (adj.) - 1. a. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. b. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded. 2. a. Tending to give freely; generous. 3. Not strict or literal; loose or approximate.

I regard myself as very liberal when it comes to pedagogy. I teach all sorts of things and use all sorts of materials that one might not expect to find in a typical high school English class, I'm not afraid to approach controversial topics, I eschew pre-fab dittos and create my own materials. I manage to do this and still give due deference to the literary canon, the ELA Performance Standards handed down by the state, and the English Regents Exam. Yet I am very conservative when it comes to grading and assessment. I only give A's for truly exceptional work, I hold students accountable for handing in work late and for inappropriate behavior, I don't forgive carelessness or laziness or indulge insignificant discomforts or inconveniences, and I never, ever respond to students' work with obsequious, unqualified praise.

Put simply, too many of today's educrats, at least among those whom I've encountered, essentially care about all the wrong things. As I mentioned in my first post, the schools have become far too conservative with the teachers and curricula, and far too liberal with students and assessment. The ubiquitous "self-esteem" movement is largely responsible for the latter, as discussed at length in previous posts; here I will be discussing the former and some of my experiences therewith, but I don't pretend to understand its source or cause.

When referring to pedagogy and curriculum, “conservative” for my purposes means strict, unwavering adherence to one particular philosophy of what and how to teach. It also indicates a reluctance to even consider, let alone embrace, alternative methods, controversial texts and topics, or the very idea that there may well be more than one way to reach academic and curricular goals. Many schools and school systems employ a hyper-conservative approach to curriculum and pedagogy, essentially dictating to teachers precisely what they must teach, and precisely how they must teach it. There is usually an implicit (or, in some cases, explicit) forbiddance of and intolerance for unconventional materials or unorthodox methods, and such an exclusionary mindset tends to be completely arbitrary; teachers who prefer alternative ideas are told simply, “That's not how we do it here.”

Where a school does adopt new ideas or alternative methods, it does so wholesale and merely creates a new unilateral and exclusive mandate for its teachers. Teachers in New York City are now compelled to employ the “workshop model” of instruction, exclusively, under threat of “U” ratings and disciplinary action, even if they had been effectively and successfully using other methods for years. This, of course, occurs now after city school administrators spent decades insisting that the only acceptable, “correct” method was the traditional Developmental Lesson Plan. I've had supervisors in city schools insist that no learning would ever take place if there was no “Aim:” on the chalkboard. Not even the instructional device itself; the actual word “A-I-M:” absolutely had to be there, or the students could not and would not learn. In my whole life of schooling, and in my travels and conversations with professionals in other cities and states, I have never seen this device used outside of New York City. I learned a great deal in school without ever seeing the word “Aim:” written prominently on the chalkboard. Other school systems seem to get along fine without it.

Having school-wide standards of operation and a specific set of content to cover (in content areas, that is, of which I must reiterate English is not) is fine. But how far do administrators need to go in controlling each teacher's classroom day-to-day, or even minute-by-minute? How much of a teacher's own personality, unique skills, and most importantly experience, can count toward the pedagogical choices he makes? Should schools be recommending certain teaching methods, or should they be unilaterally mandating and enforcing them? Should a curriculum consist of specific knowledge and skills goals, or should it be a uniform set of methods and daily lesson plans, an entire school year pre-scripted, where a teacher must and can only follow the script? Should teachers skilled and experienced in one method be forced to employ a different method, merely at the arbitrary whim of a new supervisor? Is there really only one single “correct” way to teach?

In a Long Island school where I taught, the chairwoman of the English department (a very strange and difficult individual) stressed “consistency,” as she put it, over everything else. Uniformity of method and philosophy throughout the department was her primary concern; how each individual teacher could best help the students learn, or what each individual teacher felt comfortable and confident in doing, was entirely irrelevant. There was no justification for this apart from “This is how we do it here.” I can only guess that the goal was to have every teacher in the department teach the exact same material the exact same way, with no variation whatsoever, so that it essentially would not matter which teacher a student had at any grade level, or if a student switched from one teacher's class to another in mid-year. In the latter case, I don’t know if such a rare and individualized occurrence is sufficient to justify such a high degree of uniformity, but I can think of no other justification.

At one time, this person criticized and sanctioned me for teaching my students the difference between verb types, with which I noticed they were having difficulty in their writing, because it was “not on the curriculum.” She insisted that it was more important to teach specific grammatical concepts that were “on the list” for that quarter, out of context and for their own sake, exclusive of all others, rather than those which the students actually seemed to be struggling with and needed to learn. That research study after research study has shown traditional out-of-context grammar instruction to be wholly ineffective at improving student literacy, and I had been trained in graduate school to teach grammar in context, mattered not at all. Neither did the fact that the students' writing improved almost immediately once they recognized the different verb types and learned how to use them.

In a city school where I taught after that, a small performing-arts high school which was new at the time, the administration was attempting to develop a curriculum integrating Social Studies and English, which they called "Humanities," although in reality it was nothing of the kind. It amounted to nothing more than forcing the English teachers to teach Social Studies content and follow the Social Studies curriculum, exclusive of any other materials or concerns. Part of this process involved a directive to select literature titles based on the time periods, places and cultures being covered contemporaneously in Social Studies, but the approach was ultra-conservative, exclusionary, and entirely at the discretion of the principal who was a former Social Studies teacher and curriculum coordinator (and a deeply sick, evil person), and a third-year Social Studies teacher who basically ran the school because she was sleeping with its founder. Neither of these individuals knew much, if anything, about literature or English Language Arts. Their first response to any title suggested by an English teacher was always to reject it, to assume that it did not "relate" to Social Studies, to look for and find a reason not to allow it.

Any English teacher who proposed such a title, or a more inclusive approach to the process, was suspected and accused of trying to undermine the "Humanities" paradigm. To teach, or even mention, any book, poem, story, film, etc. which the principal did not feel was directly, explicitly and obviously related to the contemporaneous Social Studies content was considered "resistance" and would, in the principal's words, “not be tolerated.” Most notably, no one ever explained why it was so vitally important to eliminate English altogether and teach an extended Social Studies course in its place. Neither was anyone concerned that the approach stood in defiance of the English Language Arts Standards and Regents Exam. All these years later, I still can't figure out why anyone would think this was a good idea.

Most New Yorkers have heard the stories by now about “micro-management” in city schools. Teachers have been written up and given “U” ratings for having the wrong number of staples attaching student work to bulletin boards, for not having chairs or carpets arranged in the prescribed spatial pattern, for using white chalk instead of multi-colored chalk, or whatever other technical “infractions” having nothing to do with actual teaching that their supervisors can find to criticize. Is any of this really necessary? Is this what matters? Is this what educational administrators should really care about?

It reveals another example of the sort of schizophrenic absurdity that pervades the school system. Teachers are constantly being told that all students are unique and learn in different ways, by the same people who insist that we all must teach the same material using the same methodology. Obviously, no teacher's methods, philosophy or personality is going to be ideal for every student. Different people have different ideas of what a “good teacher” is. Some students respond to challenge, others to coddling. Teachers are human beings, just like students, but as we celebrate and bend over backwards to accommodate the uniqueness and individuality of kids, our own uniqueness doesn't seem to matter, and in many places is actually devalued, discouraged, or even punished.

What effect does this have on students? From what I've observed, it fosters intellectual bigotry. It creates astonishingly literal-minded young people, who believe that anything new or unorthodox is wrong, that there is no value in inquiry, that there can only be a right or wrong answer to any and every question, that there can't possibly be more to anything than meets the eye.

What possible good can come from telling a teacher, as I was essentially told by these supervisors, "You are forbidden to teach the materials you like; you are forbidden to use the methods that work for you; you are forbidden to do what you do best." ... ?

Moral Hazard

When studying the law, it is not enough to learn what the law is; one also must develop an appreciation of why the law is what it is. What are the factors and forces that courts and legislatures take into account when making decisions about what the law should be?

In a common-law system, courts in civil cases generally make decisions about who carries the liability or bears the risk in a given situation based on the kind of behavior which we as a civilized society believe should be encouraged or discouraged. We make trespassing a strict-liability tort because we want to encourage people to stay off others' property. We place the burden of risk on drivers rather than pedestrians because we want to encourage people to drive more carefully, and because automobiles can cause greater damage more readily.

Most civil law questions boil down to: Who should have the entitlement, who should be held liable, and why? The question of negligence is a pre-eminent one in nearly all aspects of civil (tort) law, and even has applications in the criminal context. Negligence is a failure to act with due care, a failure to do what a reasonable person would do in similar circumstances. The question then becomes, who is the "reasonable" person, and what is "reasonable" behavior? The answer usually reflects what I mentioned above, i.e., what kind of behavior do we, as a society, want to encourage? What would be the most efficient outcome, in terms of allocation of resources? Who is best able to bear the risk, and why? What is the proper balance between individual autonomy and social welfare?

There are many factors which contribute to the distribution of entitlements and risks in civil law under a negligence theory. One of these is moral hazard, which suggests that if a person knows he is not going to be liable in a given situation, he will be less careful. If you, the driver, know that you will not be held liable for hitting a pedestrian, you have no incentive to watch out for pedestrians and avoid hitting them, let alone buy insurance, and a lot of people will probably get killed as a result. If you are a homeowner and know that you won't be held liable for someone tripping and falling on your sidewalk, you have no incentive to repair it and keep it safe. We want a safe environment for everyone, so we place these duties upon drivers and homeowners to take steps too keep things safe, which is more sensible and efficient than placing the burden on the rest of us to avoid these hazards.

I could go on and on about tort principles, but the point of this discussion is that many of the common-sense principles involved in negligence law are completely cast aside in public high schools when it comes to how we deal with students, in terms of both academic and disciplinary accountability and, yes, liability. In many places, the very concept of liability on the students' part is anathema; i.e., the students cannot possibly be liable for anything, because they are mere children (a term which applies to high school students as well as younger ones) and thus not responsible for their actions. This has become a convenient, all-purpose fall-back position for just about everyone in just about every case: At the end of the day, even if the child has clearly committed a violation of a standing rule or has failed to meet a reasonable requirement, they're "just kids," so we can't or shouldn't hold them liable. Where tort cases generally seek out blameworthy conduct to determine liability, the general rule in schools seems to be that nothing a student does can ever be considered blameworthy, simply because he is a minor.

Does this really make sense as a rationale for ignoring basic legal principles of relationships between parties and their rights and obligations with respect to one another? Does it make sense to shift all of the rights and entitlements to one party, and all of the duties and obligations to the other, simply because of the former's minority status? The law certainly doesn't think so; minors are not immune from civil (tort or contract) liability because they are minors. See Daniels v. Evans, 224 A.2d 63 (N.H. 1966); Dodson v. Shrader, 824 S.W.2d 545 (Tenn. 1992). Yet the schools, for whatever reason, don't seem to want to hold students liable for anything, under any circumstances. When pressed for an explanation, no one in my experience has ever been able to get past the idea that "they're just kids, they don't know any better, give them a break." Do the students really benefit in the long run from being taught at a young age that nothing is ever their fault?

This is where the principle of moral hazard comes in. As I discussed at some length in the previous post, if the student knows he won't be held liable in a given situation, he will have no incentive to do the right thing. To illustrate, I have a rule in my classroom that lateness to class is a strict-liability (another legal principle) offense. If you are late, you are late; don't tell me why because it doesn't matter. Students will then inevitably complain that they are coming from gym or from their studio class or whatever else they believe makes it impossible for them to arrive on time, which in turn leads to my consulting with the teacher in question and having him or her tell me that the students are given plenty of time to get to their next class; the cycle repeats itself and nothing is resolved. To attempt to monitor each individual student's movements between classes every class period every day would be absurdly inefficient; neither I as an individual nor the school has the resources to do that. It would not be reasonable.

That leaves me, the teacher, with only two choices: blanket immunity, or strict liability. I either have to forgive them for being late or hold them liable, wholesale, regardless of the reason. The students, of course, will complain that it's "not their fault" they're late, and that it's "not fair" that they should lose points for it if they can't help it. The problem with that is if they know they will not be held liable for being late, they will have no incentive to even try to get to class on time. In fact, they would have an incentive to take their time rather than hurry up. This is moral hazard. While it may be cynical to assume students will generally not make a good-faith effort to get to class as quickly as they can, I would not only defy anyone to prove otherwise based on experience, but the contention misses the point in any case. The point of having liability rules, as discussed above, is to give people incentives to behave in a certain way. We want students to get to class on time, and barring that we want them to get there as soon as they can, so they need an incentive to hurry up. Strict liability for lateness does that. Blanket forgiveness does not. If a student truly cannot get to class on time, he needs to make up for it in other ways, i.e., behavior and participation, to keep such habitual lateness from affecting his grade.

The same principle applies to the topics of performance-based assessments and expectations which I discussed at length in the previous post. If students know that they will not be held liable grade-wise for not submitting an assignment, they won't submit it. If they know that they only need to claim ignorance of or uncertainty about the assignment, then that's what they'll do. Where schools essentially relieve students of this duty and place it on the teachers (simply put, blaming the teacher when the students don't do their work), they violate an essential principle of civil law. If the desired behavior, the thing we want to encourage, is for the students to do their work and learn, a policy like this will not have the desired effect; it will actually do the opposite. It actually encourages students not to do their work, not to learn, not to improve, not to even know what to do or pay attention to instructions. It's completely counter-intuitive.

The law typically places risks and burdens on those who are in the best position to avoid or bear them. The person with the most direct interest in a student's grade should be the student. Consequently, the person in the best position to bear any risks associated with that grade should also be the student. The student is the one who must make the choices of what to do from day-to-day, moment-to-moment, within each of his classes and academic requirements. Isn't it the student's responsibility to know what she needs to do and do it? Isn't he the one whose interests are at risk? Isn't the student in the best position to avoid the risk by knowing, and doing, what she's supposed to do? Logically, and under any reasonable conception of civil law and liability, the answer to all of these questions should be "yes." Yet somehow the schools don't seem to think so. I had one supervisor tell me that "it's not his fault" if a student "doesn't understand" an assignment and thus makes no attempt to do it, because I "probably didn't explain it right"; another justified the students' brazen plagiarism by telling me I "must have made the work too hard, so they had to cheat."

Are you kidding me?

What, then, is the rationale for this? What can possibly be accomplished by shifting the burden of student performance entirely to the teacher, of purposefully ignoring the principle of moral hazard in determining student liability in an academic or disciplinary context? What can administrators who think this way, and who say things like this to teachers, possibly be thinking? How does this help students learn?

The answer, I think, is obvious: self-esteem. Again, we reach the nadir of not wanting the children to "feel bad" or "turn off," so we have to cast logic and reason to the wind. It must follow that we don't actually want the students to learn, neither the academic skills and content nor the practical, real-life principles of responsibility and accountability. If this is not the primary goal of a school, then that place cannot rightly be called an institution of learning. Why do we need qualified, expert teachers if their primary job is not to generate actual learning in their respective subject areas? Do I really need an advanced degree just to pat every child on the back and tell them all how brilliant they are?

This whole business about absolving students of liability because they're "just kids" does not hold water with me, especially in a society where adolescents typically demand and enjoy adult autonomy in many aspects of their lives. Students bristle against being treated like children in not being allowed to do certain things, and insist that they are entitled to the same rights as adults on such topics as carrying cell phones, using elevators in multi-story school buildings (which are, in many cases, reserved for teachers and handicapped students only), and other often less-benign behaviors. Put simply, students want (and parents give them) adult autonomy but not adult accountability.

In a word (one I think students need to hear significantly more often), NO. Students cannot complain about their "rights" being curtailed because they're minors, and then use their youth and inexperience as an excuse for wrongful behavior. Students need to be taught how to behave in a civilized society, part of which means that blameworthy conduct leads to unpleasant consequences, and mistakes must be paid for, no matter how old you are.

Raising Grades, Not Achievement

A recent article in The New York Times revealed that in recent years, high school students’ class grades and GPAs have been steadily rising while their actual measurable reading skills have either declined or remained stagnant. There are more straight-A students in high schools now than ever before, yet college professors increasingly lament their students’ poor reading and writing skills. How can this be? How can grades be going up if skills, knowledge and understanding are going down?

As a teacher, I did not find this revelation to be the least bit surprising, and there is a very simple explanation. I have found in my experience that the number-one concern in secondary schools today is not raising standards or actually increasing students’ skills, knowledge or understanding. It is, rather, boosting the students’ self-esteem and “making them feel good about themselves,” regardless of their relative degree of skill, knowledge or understanding. In today’s secondary schools, the operative expression is, “Everyone’s a winner.” Teachers are taught at teachers’ colleges, and instructed by school administrators and supervisors, to never criticize student work, to always tell students that whatever they do or say is absolutely fabulous, and to never, ever, under any circumstances, tell a student that his answer is wrong or that her work is substandard. To do so, they say, would be “psychologically damaging;” we are afraid that the child will “turn off to learning” so we are compelled to validate every “opinion” he has, even if that “opinion” is that 2+2=19 or, as a 10th-grade student of mine recently wrote, that “Martin Luther King freed all the Native Americans from slavery.”

The result of this, unfortunately, is that we are producing a whole generation of young people obsessed with their feelings, opinions and personal happiness, with no conception at all of what it takes to be a responsible citizen and productive member of a merit-driven society. We spend their formative years constantly telling them how brilliant and wonderful they are, then send them out into a world that will not think so and will not tell them so. Students who grow up believing, and being taught to believe, that their feelings are more important than anything else and that they can always undo their mistakes have substantially greater difficulty adjusting to the realities of the workplace, and the adult world as a whole, than those who learn accountability and responsibility at an early age. In reaching this nadir, in teaching young people that their opinions matter but their choices don’t, the education system has thoroughly failed to properly balance the students’ short-term self-esteem against their long-term intellectual and moral development.

Manufacturing Excellence

Rather than assess student work on a set of objective standards against which all students are measured, in many places teachers are told to essentially give an “A” to any student who maximizes his or her individual ability (or, alternatively, to give an “A” for merely doing the work, regardless of its quality). Many of my friends and colleagues, particularly those who teach in middle schools, have reported being given such directives by supervisors. One math teacher was forbidden to mark more than a certain number of answers wrong on any given test or quiz, no matter how many the student actually answered incorrectly. Another was told to do specifically what is described above, i.e., adjust the performance standards for each individual student so everyone can receive the highest mark. Secondary schools have thus been progressively moving from objective to subjective standards of assessment.

To illustrate, the Comprehensive English Regents Exam provides a performance-assessment rubric that establishes and describes six levels of performance for essays. 6 is the highest level, 1 is the lowest; 3 is generally considered the minimum passing score. Should a teacher choose to use this rubric to assess a class assignment or exam, an objective assessment mode would be to give an “A” to a student whose essay meets the 6 standard, a “B” for meeting the 5 standard, “C” for a 4, “D” for a 3, and an “F” for a 2 or 1. While this certainly seems reasonable, what often happens instead is that if a student is only capable of writing, say, a level-4 essay, we give her an “A” for producing that level-4 essay because that’s the best she can do (this would be a subjective standard), even though the objective standard provides and defines two levels of performance above that. The 5 and 6 (mastery-level) standards are really quite difficult to attain; only the best high-school writers can do it. Classroom teachers thus feel compelled to lower the standards in order to give most or all of their students A’s and B’s, because we don’t want to “make them feel bad” by giving them C’s or D’s when they “did their best,” and if the 5 and 6 objective standards are out of reach for some students, that’s “not their fault.”

The troubling aspect of this, however, is that when we consider carefully this sort of individualized standard-setting we must realize that it essentially allows students to set their own standards. If a student knows, consciously or unconsciously, that she will deserve and receive an “A” no matter what the actual objective quality of her work, so long as she claims to have “done her best,” she will have no incentive to improve her skills, expand her knowledge, and develop the ability to perform on a higher level. Why learn to write a level-5 essay if a level-4 essay will get her an “A”? It actually leads students to believe, and I have actually had students tell me this, that having lesser inherent abilities, skills and intelligence entitle the student to higher grades. Somehow, we have found a way to give students a powerful disincentive to learn, grow, develop and improve.

No one seems to believe anymore that low grades and constructive criticism will motivate students to increase their knowledge and improve their skills; that a low grade means the student must perform better to receive a higher one. The belief, instead, is that low grades and constructive criticism will “hurt their feelings” and cause them to “give up,” or, my personal favorite new cliché, “turn off to learning.” Therefore, we must avoid criticism entirely and give high grades across the board, so the students won’t feel bad and give up, and the way to increase student knowledge and skills is...

...what, exactly?

Do we really believe that telling students that everything they do and say is just wonderful will motivate them to actually learn more, to actually perform better? How far do we really need to go to preserve students’ self-esteem? When do we reach the point where we enable, even encourage, the sort of self-indulgent “turning off” we fear will occur when we tell a child that Dr. King did not, in fact, liberate the Indians?

We have, sadly, reached the point where our students often achieve success by our simply labeling whatever they do as excellent, rather than by our demanding and recognizing actual excellence. We shun the latter approach because, quite simply, not every student can perform at the highest levels, but we want every student to feel like an achiever, so we have to find or manufacture excellence in everyone’s work to avoid offending the sensibilities of the merely adequate. Yet excellence has no meaning if everyone is, or even most people are, excellent. An “A” is not an achievement if everyone in the class gets one. Our concern for students’ self-esteem has grown beyond reasonable proportions, to the point where schools have forgotten, and in some cases willfully ignored, what they are really supposed to do.

Assessment: Performance, or Just Fill-In-the-Blanks?

An alternative to this sort of grade inflation and individualized standards which I have also encountered in public high schools is: avoiding performance-based assessments altogether and sticking with traditional, purely objective assessment tools like multiple-choice and short-answer tests and quizzes as the sole means of determining a student’s grade average. In one school where I have taught, I was compelled to use such devices exclusively, to make them as easy as possible, give the students the answers in advance, and mark them very generously. In other words, the purpose of the assessment was not to measure student knowledge and skills, or even to determine whether the students were learning; the primary purpose instead was to ensure that the students received high scores, 100% wherever possible, so they would “feel good.” (I wish I was making this up or exaggerating, but I’m not; my supervisor specifically instructed me to design my tests and quizzes with this precise purpose in mind. Her words: "Give them the answers, then give them a quiz so they can get a hundred, so they'll feel good." I kid you not.) I was not permitted to base my students’ grades on performance-based assessments like writing projects and reader-response notebooks because, in the words of my supervisor, they were “too subjective” and I could therefore not “justify the grade.”

The students in that school put it another way; they considered any grade they received on an essay or notebook as “just your opinion,” an obvious by-product of the aforementioned subjective/individualized standards. If students can decide for themselves what constitutes an “A,” then it is easy for them to dismiss a teacher’s evaluation of their work as merely a matter of opinion, and it follows that they may confidently assert to themselves (and their parents) that the teacher was “wrong” to give such a low grade. In other words, the student’s assessment of his own work matters more than the teacher’s, and consequently the student learns absolutely nothing. The student (or parent) decides for himself that his work deserves an "A," dismisses the teacher's criticism and evaluation as subjective or arbitrary and therefore "wrong," and brings pressure to bear on the teacher to raise the grade, whether directly or through a supervisor, in which case the student usually gets what he wants. How on earth can anyone possibly learn anything under these conditions?

While it is substantially more difficult, complex and time-consuming to assess performance than to mark multiple-choice answers right or wrong, the assessment of a writing project or response notebook is no more “subjective” than anything else. Where assessment rubrics are used and applied, with levels and standards of performance clearly defined and differentiated, and papers are compared against the rubric and against each other, all measured by the same standards, the assessment is therefore objective. This is how the Comprehensive English Regents is assessed, and how grades in higher education are determined, particularly in English. Any knowledgeable, experienced teacher of English Language Arts can readily, consistently and objectively recognize different levels of writing skill. There is nothing “subjective” about it, nor is it a matter of “opinion.” The suggestion is absurd.

There is nothing wrong with multiple-choice/short-answer/content-based assessments per se, and while I tend not to use them I am not altogether opposed to the concept. However, as I view English Language Arts as a performance-oriented academic discipline of an entirely unique character among traditional secondary-school subject areas, as the ELA Regents is a performance-oriented exam with no prescribed body of content whatsoever, and as students receive significant experience with short-answer-type content-based assessments in other subject areas, it seems to make the most sense to use performance-based assessments in English. Yet despite the new standards and the design of the ELA Regents, too many administrators still see English as a content area no different from Social Studies or Science, and insist that it be taught as such. (One school in which I taught went a step further, forcefully mandating the teaching of Social Studies content in English classes, but that’s a separate issue…)

In other words, students in high school English classes are typically asked only to answer basic content questions about literature, define arbitrarily-selected vocabulary words out of context, and write formulaic, template-driven compositions where most of the thought, organization, construction and development is done for them so they are practically guaranteed a maximum grade. The so-called "writing process" which I was forced to use in one school was in actuality a rigid procedure only one step removed from having the students simply take dictation. Literary response, inquiry, appreciation and exploration, analytical and interpretive thinking, thought- and process-based writing instruction, etc., have no place in many modern-day English classrooms. (I even once had a supervisor tell me, in these exact words, “This is English, not writing.”)

The problem that content-only and short-answer-only proponents have with performance-based assessments is not that they find them objectionable or lacking in educational value, or even “too subjective.” It is simply that performance-based assessments are (a.) more challenging, (b.) more difficult and time-consuming to mark and grade, and (c.) perhaps most importantly, susceptible not only to the differing inherent abilities of teenagers but to their potential for recalcitrance, laziness, irresponsibility, short attention spans and limited resourcefulness. A student could conceivably do little or no work in or out of the classroom and still pass a content-based test, or at least receive some credit for answering some of the questions correctly, but if a student neglects to produce and submit a performance-based assessment product, such as a reader-response notebook or writing project, he can receive no credit at all and his grade average must therefore suffer tremendously. Performance assessments are anathema to students who are lazy and irresponsible, who are not resourceful problem-solvers, who take no initiative, who are not willing to devote the time and effort outside the classroom to produce the product, who are quick to give up when faced with a challenging task, who use their intellectual energy and effort to find ways to avoid work rather than accomplish it.

In my experience, everywhere I have been, in any given class at any grade level, for any performance-based assignment which the students must produce on their own without direct supervision, anywhere from half to 2/3 of the students will submit it; occasionally fewer, never more. Some will submit it late, others will submit it incomplete, but at the end of the day roughly 1/3 of any given class will hand in nothing at all and think nothing of doing so, without ever having asked for help or expressed any reservations about the assignment. They just simply won't bother to do it, and they'll worry about avoiding the consequences, which they always assume they'll be able to do, later.

Even though employers in most businesses are less interested in what a person knows than in what he can produce, we spare students the burden of having to produce actual work-product and limit our assessments to their ability to correctly fill in pre-printed blanks in a classroom setting because we fear, indeed we know, that too many of them simply will not produce. Performance-based assessments require the students to think, to solve problems, to bring resources to bear, to make intelligent determinations independently, to plan ahead, to manage time efficiently, to produce a measurable end product, and to meet a deadline, all of which are universal, essential and invaluable skills in just about any business, but which some educators believe that high-school students can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t have to, do.

The Role of Expectations

The end result of all this, it seems, is diminished expectations. We either think they can't or won’t do it, or discover that they don’t do it, so we lower our expectations by not requiring or expecting them to do it. We accept the reasons they give us for not having done the work, whatever they may be, and either relieve them of the requirement, give them more time or somehow make the assignment easier; anything to prevent them from failing and avoid placing the burden of performance and responsibility on the students, not to mention making ourselves look bad by having large numbers of students fail our courses. Students therefore know that it is not their responsibility to do the work, it is rather the teacher's responsibility to get them to do the work. If they don't do it, they won't be blamed; the teacher will. What they learn as a result is that the solution to any problem, the appropriate response to a challenge, the way to handle adversity, is to do nothing.

One cannot teach students anything if there is not some degree of expectation that the student will make an effort to learn it, make an attempt to do the work, be willing and able to improve gradually until she masters it, and accept the consequences of not actually trying. I’ve grown weary of hearing other adults tell me that “kids can’t” do this or that, or forgive them for not doing it because “they’re just kids.” Young people can do anything, but (1.) we have to teach them how, and (2.) more importantly, we must expect it of them. The idea which I’ve often been told, that if students produce poor work (or no work at all) then that means we haven’t taught the material or skills properly or haven’t adequately explained the requirement, is useful to teachers as a philosophical approach but as a practical matter is at best only half right, at worst utter nonsense. Even the best teachers’ most skilled and effective instruction is useless if we don’t concomitantly place expectations on students to respond and perform. Put simply, students will not “get it” and will not produce the work if they know, consciously or unconsciously, that they really don’t have to. If a student is given an assignment but knows that she’ll be forgiven if she doesn’t do it and complains about it, why should she do it? Where is her incentive to produce the work when avoiding it would be easier and, more importantly, have the same outcome?

There is no point in “raising standards” if we do not also raise expectations. Raising standards essentially means establishing a level of excellence, and a precise description thereof, that exceeds the existing one, and telling students: You must perform at this level, you must produce work that meets this description, in order to receive an “A” grade. Yet if we then turn around and say, “High school kids can’t do that,” or that “This is too hard for him,” or "We don't want her to feel bad," and thus give “A’s” for producing lesser work, or make the work easier by employing assessments designed mainly to increase grades, extending assignment deadlines or otherwise obviating accountability, then we haven’t raised standards; we’ve actually lowered them. If a student can’t reach the “A” standard, we need to teach her how to get there from where she is, not tell her that she’s there already or substitute a lower standard for the “A” just for that student. We also have to expect her to perform at that high level to receive an “A,” and not permit or enable her to “turn off to learning” because the "C" grade she received “made her feel bad.”

Consequences: Aliteracy

All this is instructive when we consider the question of why our students’ reading skills are so poor, especially in comparison with their grades. Aside from the fact that young people don’t read much and don’t value reading, and aside from the obvious clichés about the distractions of electronic media and socialization, the reason why young people don’t read well is that neither we nor they expect them to read well. What I mean by that is that when we give students a literary text to read, and a student doesn’t “get it” or doesn’t “like it” or finds it “boring” or lodges some other ubiquitous complaint, we “let him off the hook” either by lowering standards, changing requirements, or essentially doing all of his thinking for him.

I had a supervisor once tell me that we could not possibly expect 10th graders to understand To Kill a Mockingbird, thus it was my responsibility to “explain it” to them. By “understand” here I mean only basic comprehension; i.e., read it and have a reasonable idea of what it’s about. By the time a student reaches 10th grade, he should be able to read something in his native language and have a fairly good idea of what he just read, should he not? If it was indeed true that these students were incapable of gleaning even an elementary understanding from reading an unchallenging text like Mockingbird, this seemed to be perfectly OK with that supervisor. I found myself wondering what was the point of having the students read the book in the first instance, since she clearly expected their entire understanding of it to come from me.

The reason why high-school and college students are not very good readers is simple: because no one has ever told them that they’re not very good readers, and no one has ever expected them to be good readers. What no one wants to acknowledge, and certainly no one wants to tell students, is that the key to becoming a better reader lies with the reader himself; you, the reader, must expect and be expected to understand and appreciate the material you read. I’m not suggesting that every high-school student has to “like” or be able to fully interpret and analyze whatever he’s given to read; my point is that we need to acknowledge and emphasize the reader’s role in the reading experience, and understand that for the purposes of literary study the burden of basic comprehension lies with the reader. In first grade, we learn how to read. In fifth grade, we learn to understand what we read. In high school, we learn to study literature. These distinctions are important.

Beyond basic literacy (ABC’s, phonics, etc.), reading is a skill, just like any other, and as with any category of skill some people simply aren’t very good at it. The question, then, is how do we objectively assess and improve reading skill? How do readers become better readers? Skilled readers exhibit four essential qualities: fluency, curiosity, patience, and imagination. By the same token, unskilled readers lack these qualities to varying degrees. When students struggle with reading, rather than brush the issue aside by rationalizing that the material must be too difficult or inherently unappealing, we all (students and teachers) need to examine the characteristics of the reader, specifically the reader’s degree of each of these qualities and how they can each be improved. We need to begin by examining how the reader approaches the text, and the task/experience of reading in general.

When a student lodges a complaint about a text, whether it regards the student’s understanding or personal (dis)liking thereof, the student’s thinking usually boils down to the idea that there must be something wrong with the book. If I’m the student, I “don’t understand it” because it uses words and language that are unfamiliar or confusing to me; I “find it boring” because it addresses topics and/or ideas in which I have not already developed and cultivated an interest; I “don’t like it” because it does not fall within the range of my personal tastes. In other words, it’s "the book’s fault" for not meeting my standards and expectations, for using words I don’t know and addressing things I don’t care about; my not “getting” it and not “liking” it have nothing to do with me, therefore I should not have to read it, answer questions about it, write about it, or have my grade based on it.

As teachers, we cannot accept this, not if we truly want to make better readers of our students. While this is not truly a question of “blame,” we cannot allow students to, simply speaking, “blame the book” and absolve themselves of their studies. If the words and language are unfamiliar or challenging, that means the student lacks fluency; she should recognize the necessity of learning the language and see the reading as an opportunity to learn the language, rather than reject the text and give up on the reading because it’s “too hard.” Of course, we need to help her do that, but we do not help her by doing her thinking for her or “letting her off the hook” by lifting the requirement and giving her something easier or that she “likes.”

Moreover, it is simply not possible for any literate person to “not understand” something he reads in his native language. The understanding may be incomplete, under-developed or even inaccurate, but “I don’t understand this at all” is simply false. We cannot accept this either. For one thing, basic comprehension is a 5th-grade skill. High-school students must be expected, and expect themselves, to glean and develop some understanding of what they read in their own language. “Understanding” is not an all-or-nothing proposition; it is not a binary inquiry of whether the reader “gets it” or not. We need to help them, yes, but not by spending all of our time translating English into English.

We need to teach students to ask questions, but of the sort that will help them further their own understanding, rather than the sort that asks us to do their thinking and understanding for them. Saying “I don’t get it” is not asking for help; it’s asking someone else to exert the intellectual effort for you. The lazy or recalcitrant mind says “I don’t get it” and waits for an explanation; the curious, active mind develops a basic idea then asks a question whose answer will further develop, clarify or complete that idea. We do our students no favors by expediting their “understanding” and allowing them to skip the thinking process.

When high-school readers reject a book because they “don’t like it,” or it “doesn’t interest them,” or because it’s “boring” or whatever other excuses they typically proffer, that indicates a lack of curiosity, patience and/or imagination. Complaints like this are profoundly ingenuous; the student merely wishes to avoid the necessary time and intellectual effort. There is a difference between what a student cannot do, and what he is unwilling to do. Again, we cannot as educators indulge, accept or enable this if we want our students’ reading skills to improve. Students who complain about books in this manner, and adults who indulge those complaints, completely miss and deliberately sidestep the critical issue. We need to ignore and avoid engaging with things that simply don’t matter, and concentrate on what we are truly charged with accomplishing.

A skilled reader can find and discover an interest in whatever she reads, and it is her job, not the author’s, to do that. We should encourage the development of curiosity, patience and imagination, and while we never want reading to become drudgery or seem punitive, our students must understand that they, not the books, bear the burden of interest and the burden of understanding. We in turn, as teachers, bear the burden of fostering and cultivating that understanding, interest and appreciation, of teaching students to take their understanding of a text to higher levels of literary response and analysis, preparing them not only for the ELA Regents Exam but for the study of literature and language arts in higher education.

Unfortunately, many educators and parents feel that the burden of interest and understanding is too great to place on high school students, and again for fear of having them “give up” or “turn off,” we one way or another relieve them of it, either by taking it on ourselves or eliminating it altogether by lowering standards or changing requirements. At the end of the day, especially when it comes to reading, no one seems to want to place any part of the burden of learning on the learner. Yet we proceed to send these students off to college, where professors do expect them to understand and interpret what they read without any intellectual hand-holding, and the students find themselves ill-equipped to handle the responsibility. These skills do not suddenly appear on their own when one becomes a college freshman; one needs to have them by the time one gets there.

There are those who might argue that my approach is far too cynical and harsh on the students; that it is unreasonable and unfair to expect this sort of performance or place this sort of burden on adolescents, and that many of them truly do struggle and are not merely trying to "get over." Yet these are the same folks who think we ought to be constantly telling students how brilliant they are and how exceptional their work is, whether it's true or not. I've had students complain to me about the work being too difficult and expectations too high, and at the same time grouse about my not giving them enough credit for being intelligent and capable, entirely oblivious to the irony and absurdity of lodging both complaints at once. They can't have it both ways. One cannot "give kids credit" for being smart and resourceful while simultaneously making requirements as unchallenging as possible to make sure everyone goes home happy, because of some misguided, unfounded belief that "the kids can't handle" anything more substantial. Giving kids credit for their intelligence and capabilities means holding them to higher standards and expecting that they can and will perform to meet them, not obsequiously praising whatever they do and say.

Our students will not become better readers, or better learners, until they value it, and to value it they must have a stake in it. The only way that can happen is if they understand that it is their responsibility, their choice, to embrace reading as a skill, understand that they need to get better at it, and seek out a way to make that happen instead of seeking out a way to avoid it. Otherwise, they’ll just be looking at words on a page and waiting, ultimately in vain, for someone else to do their reading, thinking and understanding for them.