Placing the blame for school failure

April 15, 2004

While in a philosophical mood recently, we tried to get a "big picture" of school failure here in the United States.

What inspired this reverie was our frustration at trying to teach tenth graders the Pythagorean theorem. After meeting much resistance and failure, we did quite a bit of probing, and the problem turns out to have nothing to do with tenth grade Geometry.

The problem is in these kids' preparation, more specifically, with the body of math skills which they've gained from nine or more previous years of schooling. In other words, what their previous teachers have taught them.

If it sounds like we're blaming their previous teachers, you're correct, but please don't take this as a case of "teacher bashing." While it has become painfully obvious that their teachers have not taught them what they should have been taught, we're not going to take this opportunity to lash out at teachers as a group, but rather at the folks who hired and trained these incompetent individuals to be teachers.

This would mean principals and school boards.

Quite simply, the failure of schools is a failure of leadership. While principals, school board members, and other administrators don't actually do any teaching, they sure are responsible for teaching to occur on their watch.

In the case of too many inner-city schools, teachers are hired who have no business being in a classroom, and folks who have the potential to be decent teachers are given little or no supervision, and few incentives to do the hard work of teaching our youngsters knowledge and skills.

One way to turn around our schools is to hire better leaders. We've quoted Jack Welch's "Four E's" in a previous entry, in which he outlined several necessary characteristics a leader should have: Energy, Energize, Edge, Execution, and Passion. Basically, a leader should have positive energy, the ability to motivate others, the courage to make decisions, the will to get the job done, plus a passion for the task at hand.

Hiring better leaders isn't a panacea (we still need to address some of the bureaucratic nonsense at the state and federal level), but it would go a long way to improving our schools.