Whose fault is it if students don't learn?

Leadership, Sept, 2001 by Dennis R. Parker

INTELLIGENCE AND OPTIMISM ARE DYNAMIC TRAITS THAT CAN BE "GROWN."

I have spent the past year working closely with more than a dozen of the state's lowest-performing schools. A major tension in this work is a clash of beliefs about what is or isn't possible with poor and minority students, and who's to blame for failure.

Can high percentages of these students meet standards and close the achievement gap? Federal and state statutes both require it. But if our underachieving students and schools continue failing, who's to blame? Kids? Parents? Society? The state? Teachers? Administrators?

The litany of one-note causes I often hear are well beyond our immediate control: poverty, racism, funding, the Legislature, television, parents, immigration, etc. And worse, they're usually followed by armchair, "silver-bullet" solutions. Such conversations end up as more of an exercise in tail-chasing than of educational reform.

Although many reformers now look for legitimate "barriers" and "causes," personal blame still raises its ugly head regularly. For, notwithstanding mountains of standards, legislation, data and research-based innovations, schooling remains a highly personal enterprise.

Many teachers and principals legitimately respond to student failure with anger, guilt, self-righteousness, self-defense, despair, helplessness ... feelings not likely to lead to the motivation, optimism, commitment and solidarity necessary to change a bad system for the good of the people within it.

Others -- with new information and encouragement -- are willing to take a leap of faith and adopt a "can-do" approach.

But is it reasonable to be optimistic in the face of overwhelming evidence that poverty and minority status correlate highly with school failure? Frankly, no. Is it reasonable to work so hard, yet accept the blame ourselves? Again, no. But, ironically, there is growing evidence that these orientations are really our only attitudinal options if we expect to be successful with traditionally underachieving students.

Charles Bosk, a sociologist from the University of Pennsylvania, once interviewed young doctors in a neurosurgery training program -- both those who succeeded and those who resigned or were dismissed (New Yorker, August 2, 1999). He would leave the room shaking from interviews with the latter, because they could not even recognize they had made horrible mistakes ("I've had a couple of bad outcomes, but they were due to things outside my control"). The successful doctors also made mistakes but accepted responsibility ("I make mistakes all the time. There was this horrible thing that happened just yesterday"). They became the best doctors, because their acceptance of their errors led them to rethink their work, revise, and learn from their mistakes. It was their sense of personal responsibility that resulted in a self-generated growth in know-how and future success. The others, thank goodness, washed out.

This outlook is related to the well-researched, interrelated concepts of internal vs. external locus of control, self-efficacy, learned optimism vs. learned helplessness and theories of dynamic vs. static intelligence -- areas typically ignored in our chase after standards and test scores.

For example, Martin Seligman (Learned Optimism, 1998) says optimism is more important than truth. Optimists don't have more control than pessimists over what happens to them. They just act as if they did. They sell more life insurance, get elected president, are better athletes, and suffer less infectious and chronic disease. In his book, Seligman offers structured ways for parents and children to actually learn optimism.

Likewise, Carol Dweck of Columbia University (Self-Theories, 1999) reveals how parents and schools can help students learn that intelligence is not static but dynamic and can be grown. The result is highly motivated students who expend great effort and achieve dramatic gains.

In 1960, Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-cybernetics) argued for the efficacy of the "AS IF" principle, sometimes known as "Fake it `til you make it."

We would do well to act more as if we were responsible, in control and optimistic about schooling other people's children. In fact, helping our students acquire these traits may be the best way to learn them ourselves. The stakes are too high not to find out more and give it a try.

Dennis R. Parker is a faculty member of the School Management Program at UCLA.