Nearly every day I hear a new story from the g-phrase about her kids at school. It’s a rare occasion that the story has a happy ending. I hear about the kids, the families, the school administration, the constant testing, and the hazards of being a public, elementary school teacher.

After a few years of watching this from the sidelines, my view on schools has changed drastically.

I’m of the opinion that most of America’s schools (at least in places like the Denver-metro area) are fine. They are decently funded, staffed with people who care about kids and teaching, and filled with kids who are, well, kids. They do well some days and poorly others. Learning may not always be a passion, but it’s an accepted duty. Most of the kids will grow up to be decent people. I’m honestly not worried about most of the schools and most of the kids.

But the failing schools can’t be fixed and I’m not entirely sure that issuing vouchers (which I still, cautiously, support) will help solve the problem. The problems could be fixed if people would stop focusing on all the bits that surround the core of the difficulties, but, instead, liberals and conservatives have chosen to dance around the real issues.

Conservatives focus on standards, testing, and fixing responsibility on failing schools and teachers. The liberals focus on pay, funding for special programs, and the re-shaping of teaching theories that make up a sort of self-help business porn for educators. All these things matter, but they represent neither the largest challenge nor the best fix.

Educators are an insular, defensive lot. They don’t like criticism from the outside, they don’t like suggested solutions that don’t come from one of their own, they follow teaching trends the way some CEOs follow management trends, and they, as a group, oppose anything that challenges their liberal orthodoxy. They aren’t the problem, either; I would say that most of the teachers that I have met have been intelligent, good people who do their jobs at least competently.

Teacher unions are worse. Under the cover of fighting for the good of the children, they often seem to fight against changes that might actually benefit the kids. See, the unions don’t exist to help kids; they exist to help teachers. They make it hard to get rid of the bad teachers, they make it harder to implement performance-based pay scales (which, incidentally, only helps the marginal and bad educators and punishes the best teachers), and won’t stand for anything that might take funding away from the public schools even if that money then flows to better performing private schools in the form of vouchers. In that sense, they are much like the auto unions who oppose closing any manufacturing plants even when a company no longer needs the manufacturing capacity; the union protects jobs at the expense of the company which, ultimately, results in even more lost jobs when the company stumbles.

But, no, they aren’t the problem, either. Part of a problem that keeps schools from performing as well as they should, without a doubt, but not the basic problem that, unless it is successfully addressed, will keep failing schools from ever being meaningfully reformed.

So, what is it that keeps schools from success?

The culture that surrounds the failing schools is a culture that fails the students. The parents, the community, the friends, and the “bigotry of low expectations” fail the children daily--and for those parents who do work to support their kids, the other children in the class often make it tremendously harder to serve the kids who came to learn. In the communities where the schools are more successful, the parents and the peers often help to reinforce the respect for the classroom and for learning along with holding kids responsible for their performance.

Catch that and hold onto it: when parents and the surrounding culture hold kids responsible for their learning in a supportive and constructive way, the need for standardized testing is no longer a matter of finding out which schools are failing, but of helping to define which teaching methodologies work the best. When the parents and surrounding culture refuses to hold kids responsible for learning or does so in a non-constructive way (yelling at a child for a bad report card doesn’t help, but helping him or her do their work and making sure they read regularly can achieve tremendous results), then the testing isn’t necessarily measuring the work that the school is doing. No, in that situation, the testing is just finding out how neglected the kids are outside the classroom.

If a mother, who dropped out of school, tells her children that she doesn’t expect much from them because she wasn’t particularly good at school, what will the result be? Can this person possibly provide the respect for education and teachers that are needed to help an “at risk” child be successful? Can she provide the help with homework when she barely reads on her own? Can she provide the proper motivation to deal with harder studies when she’s already, essentially, told the kid that he isn’t very smart and she doesn’t expect much from him?

Or how about the parents that instill a deep respect in their kids for their sports coaches, make sure that the kids learn their playbooks and show up to every practice, but won’t ask the children to read for half an hour a night or work harder on their homework? The parent is displaying far more respect for football than for arithmetic, and the little boy or girl is going to emulate that in the classroom. For what they think they can achieve (yes, I’m on the advice for bad parenting kick again), they may as well just buy the kid a lottery ticket, kick them out the door, and be done with it; the chances for success are that slender.

Now, imagine that a girl gets caught stealing from the school. The principal chooses a light punishment, even though this is far from the girl’s first offense. The light punishment is offensive enough, but the actions of the mother are worse. Imagine that the girl will be taken on a shopping trip on the day that she has to miss school for the theft--a little reward for a whole lot of theft.

It gets worse.

Throw in the fact that this was actually a large-scale theft with a number of kids involved, each one of them getting what was, essentially, a very light sentence. One girl’s mother is withdrawing her from school throughout the rest of the year and sending her to stay with relatives in Orlando. One boy’s family is taking him, on the day that he misses school, to a local theme park.

The children are being rewarded for doing something that was wrong.

Realize that we are either asking teachers to do the wrong jobs or providing them with the wrong tools for that job. We ask them, especially in the failing schools, to act as a surrogate parent. They are asked to teach the classroom bits, but also to teach morals and ethics and somehow transform the kids that are dropped off daily into being better little people. But they don’t have the tools to do that job, and it isn’t really fair to ask them to do what should be the parents’ jobs. Teachers have very little authority, and that authority is often undermined by administrators who are more concerned with the way that the school will look in reports than in actually doing what is right.

Here’s a scene: a little boy threw rocks at another boy, hitting him in the head. The rock thrower then encouraged other kids to throw rocks at that student. Other kids and at least one teacher witnessed all of this--but the school principal wouldn’t suspend the boy because it would look bad. Why? Because the little boy is African-American and the rate of suspensions for African-American boys at the school is already too high.

This isn’t an isolated incident. The principal in question doesn’t want to create a more difficult relationship with the surrounding community, but, by worrying primarily about appearance, she taught a little boy that he wouldn’t be truly punished for hurting someone else.

Parents further undermine whatever authority is left with the teachers. These parents refuse to believe that their kids could have done the bad things that the teachers say about them, don’t understand why their kids are failing classes (even though they themselves did nothing to help them pass the classes other than saying “do your homework), and think that there is some conspiracy against their little angels when they are punished for their wrongdoing. As a teacher in a classroom, how would you combat that?

The kids show little respect for authority in the classroom. When authority is asserted, it is often undercut by administration. If the authority is allowed to stand at that level, then parents either further undermine the teachers openly or by doing something special for their little bundles of soon-to-be adolescent joy. It’s mind-boggling that these parents might actually think that they are raising decent human beings who won’t end up in jail.

Money doesn’t solve this problem, and neither does standardized testing. More computers in the classroom don’t make it all better and neither does branding a school in this community as “failing.” The problem runs through the families that don’t know how to parent, the friends who mock high achievers, through community leaders who are quick to point to outside authority figures whenever something bad happens, and to the creeping despair in the teachers and schools that leaves high turnover rates in the staff and flummoxed leadership who worry more about community relations than education.

The g-phrase works in a nice school in a reasonably well-funded district. They have computers, a nice library, and a well-kept building. Last year she worked in a poor district. The building was falling apart (during one of my visits to her room, there was an electrical fire in the lighting--no one worried because it was something that happened on such a regular basis). Roof tiling was in extremely poor condition, the library was tiny, and there were few computers in the building. But the community was so significantly different that the kids in this facility were well adjusted, successful, and bright.

The money wasn’t the difference and the testing only managed to point out what everyone already knew: one of these schools was failing and one of them wasn’t. A new theory of teaching wouldn’t solve the problem, more teachers wouldn’t change much, better computer equipment would be irrelevant, and testing might help see the problem schools, but does nothing to change them.

The solution to the problem? Hold parents responsible for their kid’s performance. Don’t be afraid to push kids out of the schools when they are disruptive enough, but have intelligent systems for them to regain entry. Many of these parents see school as a free meal and a babysitter for their kids; if they have to actually start dealing with their own children again, their willingness to push their kids might change dramatically. Lastly, don’t be afraid to try vouchers and close the failing schools.

Vouchers may not solve the problem in that they don’t change the parents. They do change the friends and the surrounding culture, though, and new expectations might have a positive effect on performance. Unfortunately, it might also just be a matter of exporting the problem to new schools--it might pull down performance for others rather than raising the performance for the at risk youth.

There is nothing easy about dealing with the failing schools, but I’m convinced that the current debate and current solutions aren’t doing the job. They continue putting the responsibility with the teachers while absolving the families--and until you can change the culture, you can’t change the schools. Parents need to be supportive and engaged while supporting the authority of the teachers and the schools. Maybe more specifically, parents need to want better for their children than they had for themselves.

In failing areas, the parents don’t support the schools and don’t do what it takes to make sure their kids are being educated. In successful schools, the parents aren’t reliant solely on the schools; they are willing to hire tutors, they help with homework, they actively encourage their children, they provide them with the tools that they need to be successful, and then the help fill the gaps in the school budget by themselves with fundraisers and volunteering.

There’s a big difference in these communities and that is the difference in the schools.