Teacher-student commitment to learning needed
This is a response to “Race to the Top education grants: a tipping point for Washington students” [Opinion, May 14].
I agree that a vigorous debate is required concerning not only the “pictures of teaching and learning,” but more fundamentally, the oftentimes overlooked background role and responsibility that students and their parents bear in the education equation.
We could place the entire onus for success upon the schools and evaluate teachers and principles ad nauseam, but unless and until students become actively involved in their learning and parents apply more expectations directly to their children in the educational process, the perceived unsatisfactory outcomes would not change.
When students come to class unprepared or armed and absorbed with the latest tech device, they are not fulfilling their part of this learning enterprise. When parents look first for teacher and school inadequacy when their children’s grades are subpar instead of examining their students’ behavior, this only reinforces students’ view that they bears no responsibility for learning.
The upshot is that the teacher bears the sole responsibility for this partnership. Every partnership suffers when not all partners are committed equally. This mutual student-teacher commitment should be part of the debate and indeed maybe even part of the highly touted evaluation process.
— James Stark, Seattle