The new school year has begun and my principal friends are telling me that they are already hearing complaints about the behavior of this year’s senior class. After years of listening to the same complaints, I finally had heard enough and one day I said to our administrative staff, “If we don’t like how our students are behaving, we need to look in the mirror. We have had these students in this school for three years. What have we taught them? Instead of blaming the kids, we need to look at ourselves. If we want our students to change we have to change. They are only doing what we have taught them either by our actions or our inaction. It is our responsibility to teach them what we want them to know and to be able to do. We drive the bus!” From that day forward, whenever someone started complaining or blaming our students we would look at each other, smile and say, “we drive the bus.”

Like many high schools, our school had every excuse to fail—high poverty, high mobility, a large number of second language students, gangs, and a decaying facility. Blaming the poverty of our students and making excuses might make us feel better, but it did nothing for our students. It didn’t matter to them if we could explain away low achievement. After all, it was their lives and their future that was at stake.

The reality is that we, in high school, are the last in line. If we couldn’t help them, there was no one standing in line after us who would. Without our help, our students would be sentenced to a lifetime of marginal employment and second-class citizenship. Blaming students only distracted us and detracted from our mission of helping them graduate ready for postsecondary education and training.

That is why I read Robert Samuelson’s article in the Washington Post with stunned disbelief. Samuelson went through the usual litany of school failures including decades of flat NAEP scores, drops in student achievement from elementary to high school, teacher pay, and dropouts. There is nothing new here. We’ve heard it all before.

The source of our troubles

Samuelson gives two reasons for the failure of school reform efforts:

First, school reform is difficult. On this point, I agree. Meaningful, responsible, and lasting change is as difficult in schools as it is in most organizations. Here is where my disagreement with Samuelson begins. He contends that reforms fail because “no one has discovered transformative changes … that are scalable—easily transferable to other schools.” The operative word here is “easily.” Whereas Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, insists that there are no “silver bullets” when it comes to school reform, Samuelson seems to think that our failure is in not finding the quick fix that will help all schools improve.

Reality Check

We proved for years that we knew how to help some students succeed to high levels. We did very well with the students who should do well. We didn’t do very well with poor, disadvantaged, and under-resourced students, and in that arena we all have a lot to learn.

When are we all going to accept the fact that raising the performance of each and every student is a much more difficult task than anyone had anticipated? Successful students are not successful by accident. Success is about work, effort, and deliberate practice. Improving schools is difficult. It takes time and hard work by, parents, teachers, and principals, and it means a lot of hard work for students.

Reaching previously underserved students requires a change in mindset and subsequently a change in our culture from one in which success is a scarce commodity to a culture in which success is an expectation. Changing the culture of our schools means that we have to change our culture and no one believes that that would be a simple, one to two year, task.

It’s the kids, stupid!

While it may be human nature to want to discover the simplest solution to a complex problem, attributing low student performance to “shrunken student motivation” crosses the line from the rational to the absurd. Blaming students for the problems of education is like blaming a hospital’s problems on sick patients. “We couldn’t cure the disease because our patients wouldn’t get well.”

Think of it. This whole time the answer has been right under our noses. It’s the kids. It’s their fault. The debate is over. Let’s fold the tent and close the schools, because nothing we do will work with these danged kids.

“Who’s driving the bus?”

Experience has taught me that moderately dysfunctional schools blame the feeder schools. Dysfunctional schools blame the parents. Truly dysfunctional schools blame the students. Blaming the kids is a waste of time. In fact, if you are wasting your time blaming anyone, stop! It isn’t helping.

Blaming the kids is a last act of desperation by someone who has run out of answers. Let’s just admit that we don’t have all the answers and then we can get on with the work of finding solutions.

My career as a high school administrator spanned four different decades, and I can tell you that today’s students are the best of the lot. If you asked me to choose students from the 70s, 80s, 90s, or the 00s, I would not hesitate to choose today’s students.

Stop Blaming

Our schools must improve, but blaming parents, teachers, or principals, and especially the  kids won’t accomplish anything. The world, not just our country, is more competitive. We can no longer outwork or outproduce the rest of the world. Today, we must outthink and out create the rest of the world. Ideas, not land, trade, or factories, are the “wealth of nations.” If ideas are wealth, then schools are today’s factories.

Improve, we must, but we won’t get better taking the easy way out. The search for “easy” and “quick” needs to end. We are wasting valuable time and scarce resources as well as eroding public confidence with our obsession with quick fixes.

We must do the right thing, and, more often than not, the right thing is the hard thing to do. We must ensure that each and every student reaches mastery by teaching a rigorous and relevant curriculum in a warm and inviting school environment.

Students must be able to read, write, speak, think, and compute at high levels and to apply those skills in the real world. It is our responsibility to teach our students whatever we want them to know and be able to do.

Students will not exceed the quality of their teachers. It is not up to the kids to improve our schools. It’s up to us. We drive the bus!