It has been too long since a Comment of the Day featured Michael West’s commentary; maybe I take his almost always sharp and though-provoking observations for granted. He goes back to 2012, and has graced this blog with 16, 612 comments, many in the course of intense debate.
Here is his Comment of the Day on public education, sparked by the post, “Ethically Provocative Quote of the Month: Duval County School Board Member Charlotte Joyce”…
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I genuinely feel for the public educators that are *just* trying to do their jobs and seeing parents fleeing to non-public options and are as frustrated as the parents are about the collapse of public education. A large component of my family are either educators or in direct support of educators and they all are frustrated. However, public education under command of the unions are just one more Democrat money laundering, politician-lobbying and vote-buying scheme as educational bureaucracies bloat like a beached whale.
Educators, again, under command of unions, seem far more interested in demanding greater pay raises despite diminishing returns – to me, that’s a bunch of blind selfishness. Look, educators play an incredibly important role in the community – but I’ve watched over the years as their own attitudes about that importance have, believe it or not, outpaced the actual importance. Public education, as an experiment has only been around a little more than a century. It’s okay if the experiment fails when more successful options arise.
Let’s also not forget that failing education is part of a larger societal failure that includes parents. There will be NO education, no matter how exceptional educators are, if parents do not care. I’ve increasingly seen (and my dad, who began teaching high school in the early 1980s and retired in the mid 20-aughts, can testify to) that even average parents assume that education is 100% the problem of teachers and then below average parents assume that education is really just glorified day care. That will NOT do at all. We got out of the public schools and found a nice charter school that was *actively* sought by parents – and the community reflects that – it is populated with kids whose parents care and are all actively involved in their kids homework, reading with their kids, and school events. The difference is profound.
Ethics Alarms 
it didn’t help that some parents gave some teachers more of a break than they should have. In the karate kid movies Mr Miyagi once said that there was no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher. There were more than a few parents in my day who always assumed the opposite. After all, the teacher was the one with the degrees while the stupid kids were just stupid kids who needed to learn to do as they were told.
Conformity was King, and if you had trouble conforming, then you needed to learn to conform. The nail that stuck up had to be hammered down. In the meantime the teachers got higher and higher salaries and some stayed on even after they should have retired, to the point where the kindergarten teacher in my home town was still teaching at over 80 and getting well over 120,000 a year while her assistant did everything because she was physically incapable of doing much.
I used to have some respect for teachers, but, after all that’s been revealed in the last few years I simply don’t trust them. Public education has become basically a racket. In some cases it’s worse than a racket, it’s a breeding ground for problems later. There is simply no forgetting that one teacher who was profiled here who was basically teaching his students to be revolutionaries and said that anyone who had a problem with it was a fascist. He was fired but not without a big payout, how many more are still teaching?
“In the karate kid movies Mr Miyagi once said that there was no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher.”
I’ll certainly agree, that while I assert that the best teachers with the least caring students (almost entirely the parents’ fault) will never have good outcomes, I would also believe that the best possible students with terrible teachers won’t have good outcomes either. But I would actually take the excellent student/awful teacher dynamic over the awful student/excellent teacher dynamic.
For the most part, in elementary and decreasingly in middle school, teachers are mostly following very regimented curriculum that doesn’t need a lot of in depth exploration of subject matter – that is to say, even an “awful” teacher can do that.
I don’t like the Miyagi quote. It’s too much the idea that masterful jedi-like wizard teachers can pry out the diamonds from even the roughest students. I think it’s a cinematic lie. Some kids are flat out un-trained by lazy parents and un-encouraged by the same to give a flying crap about education or respect for teachers. Furthermore, society shouldn’t expect every single teacher to be brilliant super teachers and perform Oscar-worthy-movie-material magic on those students either. It costs the good students too much.
Even the best teachers will have to spend disproportionate time with the worst students, robbing the best students of the benefits of good teaching. In stage directing, the best directors get out of the way of the good actors and concentrate on the weaker ones. The bad directors don’t know the difference.
Yes.
And of course I recognize that there is a balance – teachers don’t have license to give up on students are who aren’t 100% ideal even if society should be willing to give the system the ability to decide that there is a “cut off” of “give up-able”*** students.
Teachers do have to try to pull as much out of their students and push as much into their students as possible – even the less than “perfect” ones. But there’s a cut off somewhere.
***When students are so utterly problematic that the kind of attention they require would deprive the rest of the students of time they deserve, the system should isolate these kids into special programs.
We used to do this. We hardly do any more.
The balance here is what’s the cut off? I think in the never ending push-pull dynamic of the battlefield of the margins – we have allowed the cut off to drop so painfully low that very problematic students are left in classes where they shouldn’t be. This cut off should be raised significanlty.
To take further issue with the Miyagi quote-
Yes as a matter of fact there are bad students independent of bad teachers. This is one of those little subtle word games story tellers play when communicating their worldview. It’s playing on the idea of a student as a child- “why sir! That child can’t be called bad! It’s his *parent’s* fault he is a ‘bad’ child.” And so we associate the idea that there can’t be “bad students” because it isn’t their fault and the remedy must be miracle working teachers!
But alas – the story tellers here have translated “bad student” in our minds to “bad kids”. Except there are indeed bad students – because they aren’t meeting the standard of being a student: A person who wants to learn and is dedicated to learning is by definition student. Simultaneously a person placed in a position in which they are expected to want to learn and dedicate themselves to learning is also a student (whether they want to be or not).
No one is bad except by comparison to a standard. A bad student is only a bad student if we know what a good student should be and Mr. Miyagi wants us to pretend like the teacher can completely cure the student’s lack of adhering to the standard. This may not be the fault of the kid at all but they are, indeed, *bad* students, whether or not they have good or bad teachers.
But it certainly isn’t the job of teachers to make children into good students even if some teachers do have that ability to pull this from children. A student is a bad student if their parents haven’t done the pre-requisite work of parenting. And the parent has the greatest influence and duty to turn their child into a good student – the teacher has some influence.
Wow. I’m humbled. I didn’t think that comment would be worthy of recognition.