Inner drive and pocket change

When asked by a reporter why some of his school’s students scored poorly on standardized tests, a sheepish official apologized that his school does better educating “kids who have the inner drive and the family support.”

It’s not that children without drive or supportive families are unimportant. The more unmotivated, unsupported students there are, the worse things will get for them and for the nation. But we should stop being surprised, and schools should stop apologizing, when unmotivated children without families behind them don’t succeed.

Schools aren’t blameless. Critics accuse teachers and public education of lagging behind changing times. But when it comes to change, schools are at fault not because they’ve been too traditional, but because they’ve embraced a procession of innovative follies that promised a novel – meaning easy – way around the arduous task of educating a nation that’s increasingly disinterested in the labor of learning.

Some teachers aren’t competent, and if they can’t or don’t improve, they should lose their jobs. But those few don’t explain the multitude of undereducated American children and young adults.

Nor do poverty, race, or a green card equal destiny. Children whose families lack money for books or a balanced diet face disadvantages. Immigrants confront language barriers, and even though we’ve elected and reelected a minority President, minorities still encounter prejudice. But America’s century, the twentieth, was built by immigrant entrepreneurs, laborers, and intellectuals, and their children and grandchildren. Along the way each generation grappled with poverty and discrimination.

The difference is they understood something too many of us apparently don’t. Overcoming disadvantages requires working even harder than the people who don’t have them. It doesn’t rely on instant success for gratification. It reckons time in generations, not weekends.

I’m not saying all Americans, young or old, black or white, rich or poor, blueblood or immigrant, are irresponsible or lazy. Most aren’t. But the proportion is shifting. A decent people cares for those who can’t care for themselves, but those who labor, accept their civil responsibilities, and bear the bulk of the nation’s burdens cannot much longer bear the burgeoning multitude of their countrymen who are lulled by complacency and addicted to entitlement.

How do we reverse the decline? Many reformers propose motivating students by paying them to care. Some schools hand out iPods and cars. Others resort to cash incentives. In Dallas officials began paying second graders two dollars for every book they read. Students in the nation’s capital could clear up to 100 dollars every two weeks just to show up and behave, while an Ohio high school was doling out thirty bucks a week to seniors who attended class. New York City opted to shell out for test scores, while a Chicago plan devised by former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan rewarded students for passing grades, up to two thousand dollars a year.

The results of these “incentive” schemes are at best inconclusive, but what’s the real cost of bribing students to boost their scores or temper their bad behavior? Will ever larger doses of pocket change restore our national character?

Why not pay street thugs not to mug us, or reckless drivers to be less reckless? When two dollars a book loses its charm, which it inevitably will, do we keep upping the ante? Do we want to be a nation with no intrinsic sense of duty, no selfrespect, or even any sustainable self-interest? Shall we borrow more money from China and dole it out to mask our children’s apathy?

Paying students to learn is like paying patients to take their pills or heed their doctor’s advice. Students aren’t employees. They’re receiving a service that benefits them and the nation. A man who must be bribed to keep himself alive is a man who won’t live long. A nation that must bribe its children to secure their own future is a nation without a future.

Some social engineers argue that “kids and adults” don’t “know how to achieve success,” that students somehow don’t connect “substantive work” with achievement. They suggest that schools and government offer instruction in “childraising skills.”

Most parents raise their children commendably. And a review of forty-one parent involvement programs found “little empirical evidence” that they’re “an effective means of improving student achievement.” But even if they produced some positive effect, what does it say if a people need strangers, schools, and government to teach a substantial portion of its citizens how to be parents, or even worse to take the place of many parents.

A people who have lost the connection between hard work, sacrifice, perseverance, and achievement can’t expect success. If we lose our inner drive, if we lack the support of those who should support us most, we stand in peril of losing our tenuous grip on life itself.

We and our students do stand in peril. But we’re not without hope. That inner drive, quickened by insight and nurtured by circumstance, hasn’t yet been altogether extinguished.

It can still be found within you.

That resolve, not coins, has the power to save us.

Schools aren’t blameless. Critics accuse teachers and public education of lagging behind changing times. But when it comes to change, schools are at fault not because they’ve been too traditional, but because they’ve embraced a procession of innovative follies that promised a novel – meaning easy – way around the arduous task of educating a nation that’s increasingly disinterested in the labor of learning.