A fascinating column by Alexandria teacher Patrick Welsh appears in today’s USA Today. Maybe the problem with the educational system in the United States today isn’t the schools or the teachers, he suggests, maybe it’s the students!
Drawing upon his experience as a teacher at T.C. Williams High School, Welsh observes that the best students in English class are foreign students. Native-born students, many of them from affluent families, enjoy a huge advantage when studying their native language but they get lower grades on average. The difference: The foreign students study harder.
What many of the American kids I taught did not have was the motivation, self-discipline or work ethic of the foreign-born kids.
A study released in December by University of Pennsylvania researchers Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman suggests that the reason so many U.S. students are falling short of their intellectual potential” is not “inadequate teachers, boring textbooks and large class sizes” and the rest of the usual litany cited by the so-called reformers — but “their failure to exercise self-discipline.”
Compounding the problem is a widespread parental sense of entitlement. Teachers who hand out low grades are accused of destroying the children’s future.
Nowadays, it’s the kids who have the power. When they don’t do the work and get lower grades, they scream and yell. Parents side with the kids who pressure teachers to lower standards,” says Joel Kaplan, [a] chemistry teacher at T.C. Williams.
The root problem of our educational system may be the prevailing American culture of entitlement and the decline of the work ethic among American students and their parents. Politicians don’t get elected by blaming the shortcomings of the educational system on voters, but the fact is, this is a problem that no amount of money can solve. If we want to address the shortcomings of education in Virginia, we must start with ourselves.
