Joe Nocera made a good point about education in the Times yesterday. “[S]ocial scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home. Yet the reformers act as if a student’s home life is irrelevant.”. . . .What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that school reform won’t fix everything. Though some poor students will succeed, others will fail. Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.”
We are not indifferent to the fate of public schools in these precincts, given that my wife is a science teacher. It has long been her entirely sensible contention that she is happy to be held responsible for getting results, as long as it is acknowledged that there are significant factors outside her control. In one recent position she held in a middle school, there was no dean of discipline in the school, and no system for enforcing attendance. Yet the failures of chronic truants were held as Ginny’s responsibility.
Before she became a teacher, Giny was a nurse. There is a practice in hospitals where the staffs review the cases of patients who have died. The point is to eliminate errors, to imporve performance, to make people accountable for performance. But no one is expected to be a miracle worker. If patients are overweight, are smokers, are addicts, are homeless, present pre=existing conditions, the effect of these conditions is acknowledged. But if kids who are truant, or ill-disciplined, or who don’t do homework, or who are sick or disabled, or come from broken homes, or who are poor and who haven’t had dinner, and so on, are generally ignored in the face of a score that is either up or down. And that, Chris Christie, is why we still need teachers unions.