Blame the Student

<p><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-03-07-forum-students_x.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-03-07-forum-students_x.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>For once, blame the student
By Patrick Welsh
Failure in the classroom is often tied to lack offunding, poor teachersor other ills. Here's athought: Maybe it's thefailed work ethic of todays kids. That's what I'm seeing in my school. Until reformers see thisreality, little will change.</p>

<p>Last month, as I averaged the second-quarter grades for my senior English classes at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., the same familiar pattern leapt out at me.</p>

<p>Kids who had emigrated from foreign countries — such as Shewit Giovanni from Ethiopia, Farah Ali from Guyana and Edgar Awumey from Ghana — often aced every test, while many of their U.S.-born classmates from upper-class homes with highly educated parents had a string of C's and D's.</p>

<p>As one would expect, the middle-class American kids usually had higher SAT verbal scores than did their immigrant classmates, many of whom had only been speaking English for a few years.</p>

<p>What many of the American kids I taught did not have was the motivation, self-discipline or work ethic of the foreign-born kids.</p>

<p>Politicians and education bureaucrats can talk all they want about reform, but until the work ethic of U.S. students changes, until they are willing to put in the time and effort to master their subjects, little will change.</p>

<p>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."</p>

<p>The sad fact is that in the USA, hard work on the part of students is no longer seen as a key factor in academic success. The groundbreaking work of Harold Stevenson and a multinational team at the University of Michigan comparing attitudes of Asian and American students sounded the alarm more than a decade ago.</p>

<p>Asian vs. U.S. students</p>

<p>When asked to identify the most important factors in their performance in math, the percentage of Japanese and Taiwanese students who answered "studying hard" was twice that of American students.</p>

<p>American students named native intelligence, and some said the home environment. But a clear majority of U.S. students put the responsibility on their teachers. A good teacher, they said, was the determining factor in how well they did in math.</p>

<p>"Kids have convinced parents that it is the teacher or the system that is the problem, not their own lack of effort," says Dave Roscher, a chemistry teacher at T.C. Williams in this Washington suburb. "In my day, parents didn't listen when kids complained about teachers. We are supposed to miraculously make kids learn even though they are not working."</p>

<p>As my colleague Ed Cannon puts it: "Today, the teacher is supposed to be responsible for motivating the kid. If they don't learn it is supposed to be our problem, not theirs."</p>

<p>And, of course, busy parents guilt-ridden over the little time they spend with their kids are big subscribers to this theory.</p>

<p>Maybe every generation of kids has wanted to take it easy, but until the past few decades students were not allowed to get away with it. "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, another chemistry teacher at T.C. Williams.</p>

<p>Every year, I have had parents come in to argue about the grades I have given in my AP English classes. To me, my grades are far too generous; to middle-class parents, they are often an affront to their sense of entitlement. If their kids do a modicum of work, many parents expect them to get at least a B. When I have given C's or D's to bright middle-class kids who have done poor or mediocre work, some parents have accused me of destroying their children's futures.</p>

<p>It is not only parents, however, who are siding with students in their attempts to get out of hard work.</p>

<p>Blame schools, too</p>

<p>"Schools play into it," says psychiatrist Lawrence Brain, who counsels affluent teenagers throughout the Washington metropolitan area. "I've been amazed to see how easy it is for kids in public schools to manipulate guidance counselors to get them out of classes they don't like. They have been sent a message that they don't have to struggle to achieve if things are not perfect."</p>

<p>Neither the high-stakes state exams, such as Virginia's Standards of Learning, nor the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act have succeeded in changing that message; both have turned into minimum-competency requirements aimed at the lowest in our school.</p>

<p>Colleges keep complaining that students are coming to them unprepared. Instead of raising admissions standards, however, they keep accepting mediocre students lest cuts have to be made in faculty and administration.</p>

<p>As a teacher, I don't object to the heightened standards required of educators in the No Child Left Behind law. Who among us would say we couldn't do a little better? Nonetheless, teachers have no control over student motivation and ambition, which have to come from the home — and from within each student.</p>

<p>Perhaps the best lesson I can pass along to my upper- and middle-class students is to merely point them in the direction of their foreign-born classmates, who can remind us all that education in America is still more a privilege than a right.</p>

<p>Patrick Welsh is an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.</p>

<p>Not that related to Berkeley but still enlightening.</p>

<p>Those who are interested in this subject may want to read some of the works of Thomas Sowell, who talks about the importance of culture in terms of academic achievement in great depth, and specifically the varying attitudes towards hard work and academic achievement. </p>

<p>To give you a small paraphrase of Sowell, we can talk about Chinese immigrants throughout the world. Many people have noted that Chinese-Americans are disproportionately represented in the highest levels of academic achievement in the US. For example, the top univerisities in the US such as HYPSM have a large percentage of Asian-American students, and Chinese-Americans specifically, especially in their science and engineering programs. One might remark that perhaps this is an unusual characteristic of the particular Chinese who immigrated to the US, until you note that the same overperformance also occurs among Chinese-Canadians, Chinese-Australians, Chinese-Brits, the Chinese who immigrated to SouthEast Asia, and basically anywhere where there has been significant Chinese immigration. For example, in the 1960's, Sowell demonstrated that of the engineering degrees granted by Malaysian universities, over 400 were granted to ethnic Chinese, whereas only 4 were granted to ethnic Malays, despite the fact that the Chinese represented only 25% of the population in Malaysia, and Malays represented over half of the population. The Chinese have also been heavily over-represented in the economic elite of Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines despite the fact that almost all of them are descended from poverty-stricken Chinese immigrants. When the Brits ruled Malaysia, they designated the Chinese as third-class citizens, with fewer legal rights than the (first-class) British colonialists, and less than the (second-class) Malays. The British built free schools for the Malays, but specifically barred the Chinese from attending them. The Malaysian Chinese community responded by founding their own private schools for their own children. </p>

<p>Former Malaysian President, Mohammed Mahathir, an ardent Malay patriot, once candidly said in his book "The Malay Dilemma", that the Chinese simply worked and studied harder than the Malays do. In fact, he used that as justification for the affirmative action policies within Malaysia that strongly favored Malays and discriminated against Malays by saying that in a fair competition, the Malays could not beat the Chinese, which is why the competition has to favor the Malays. He couched it in terms of that Malaysia was a tropical paradise and so the Malay people, culturally, got used to enjoying a comfortable lifestyle without much work, whereas the Chinese immigrants arrived from lives of deep poverty and privation, and so they had learned how to work extremely hard and put up with great hardships, capabilities that the Malays never learned to match. Mahathir has constantly decried the nature of the Malay people to not want to work or study hard, and to demand good jobs without having to earn them. Keep in mind that this is Mahathir that said this, Mahathir is no friend to the Chinese.</p>

<p>Sowell also discussed the "West-Indian/African" issue, which is that black immigrants from Africa, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and other Caribbean nations seem to perform better, both economically and academically, than native-born African-Americans, despite the fact that those immiigrants tend to arrive destitute. A disproportionate number of prominent African-American leaders are either immigrants, or descended from these immigrants. For example:</p>

<p>"...a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants..."</p>

<p><a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006608%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006608&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>In fact, one saying within the inner city is that somebody is "working like a Jamaican", meaning that he is working extremely hard, which only reinforces the notion that black Jamaican immigrants have been noted for very strong work ethics. </p>

<p>The point simply is that different people have different personal attitudes towards work and towards education. The truth is that certain communities strongly value hard work and educational achievement. Others don't, choosing instead to value other things. To some extent, we are all products of the culture that we were raised in. If we are taught as children that academic achievement is paramount, then we will tend to become successful academically. If not, then we will tend not to succeed academically.</p>

<p>TC Williams High? Remember the Titans?</p>