Student Achievement: Whose Job is it?

At the end of each grading period I like to push my 9^th grade English students to reflect on their work and their accomplishments. I do this by asking them to think about the following things: What did they do to ‘own’ their achievement, what do I (the teacher) need to do better to help them learn, did they reach their goals, and who is responsible for their academic success. The first time that I did this, I predicted that students who did nothing but perfect their paper ball throwing skills would get under my skin by saying that they worked hard and deserved to pass with flying colors. I was dead wrong.

While there was the occasional student who came to class only one time during the grading period and thought that they did “okay,” more often the answer was very different. When asked about who they thought was responsible for their academic success, they surprisingly and without hesitation said almost 100 percent of the time: “I am.” Not the school, not their parents or family members, not even the teacher; they seemed to view themselves as the sole stakeholder of their academic futures.

Yet the sad reality of this knowledge is that most of my students did not work hard enough to do well in my class -- and they seem to know it, and to a certain extent, even accept it. In these reflections students write insightful and honest comments like, “I need to stop playing and show people how smart I am,” or, “I did not try hard enough because I never did my homework and I was always late.” But despite the ability to reflect on paper, it has rarely translated into much more. So, the question I find myself asking is: are the students writing this because they think this is what I want to hear, or because they really believe they aren't doing their part? Furthermore, if the latter is true, why doesn’t this reflection translate into better work in the classroom?

As it stands, I take full responsibility for the achievement of my students. Although I know that there are many other factors connected to achievement, such as socioeconomic status, parental support, and my students’ academic histories, and that in reality I am only a small part of a very large puzzle, I still operate as though I am the make it or break it force in my students' lives. It’s all I can do.

And so in my second year as a teacher I have read maybe hundreds of articles about the teacher’s role in getting students to learn, I stay up late at night writing lessons, I spend my day herding students into my classroom and then fighting I-pods and cell phones to get their attention, I spend my weekends making phone calls and reaching disconnected numbers, I spend hundreds of dollars at Staples and Office Depot, and I often feel very alone and very helpless in trying to get my students to achieve, because if research claims that the teacher is really the key to student achievement, then I must be doing something wrong. My students aren’t achieving nearly as much as they should, and even though my students think they are responsible, I know that this is a shared endeavor.

But even though I often feel like a failure as a teacher, and I see that my students often choose not to do the work when it isn’t fun or entertaining, the truth about the teacher’s crucial role to student achievement comes out slowly and in snippets, whether it is during lunch when I overhear what students are learning and doing in other classes, or after school when my students tell me entertaining, yet somewhat alarming tales about their years in the Baltimore City public school system. I know that I make my students work hard every day, but through my students I hear too often about teachers who did not. According to one student, there was the teacher who showed movies every Friday, the teacher who feel asleep during class every day, and the teacher who was always late.

So while I continue to expound to my students that they need to take responsibility for their success, this leads me to echo a very simple and straightforward belief: teachers have a resounding impact on student achievement through high expectations, rigorous instruction, and getting students to understand that every moment in that class is essential. When students are consistently asked to work hard throughout their school experience, then they will work hard. As teachers, we can ask for nothing less.

But the reality is that even in my own school, teachers have very different ideas of what it means to teach, and they give our students very different ideas of what it takes to make the grade. To the left of my classroom is a Biology teacher who has shown Transformers, Final Destination, and 2012 in 6 weeks time. When I ask my student how he is doing in this class, he tells me, “I have an 88 in that class, and I honestly don’t know how. I don’t do anything.” He emphasizes the word anything.

So while I know that parents and students play a major part in student achievement, I begin to see more and more that it is the teacher’s responsibility to show students what they are striving for, and to set the achievement bar high, so that we can teach them the lesson that is of equal importance to the content we teach: Hard work is essential for success.

In my classroom, and in other classes they attend, many are learning a hard lesson, and despite their previous guise of success in classrooms with low expectations, as a teacher I will continue to show my students that it is important to be responsible and to work hard. But when I think about student motivation and student achievement in my classroom, I begin to see that when students can earn a high B in a class while watching movies, then is it really so unbelievable that students come into my classroom unmotivated and unable to meet the demands of my classroom? Even more, why is it that my school and scores of others in Baltimore City and around the nation seem to have equally low expectations of their teachers?