STUDENT UNEMPLOYMENT

The most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.

 
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
15 September 2023

    Teachers are employees. They are educated, selected, hired, assigned, and paid for their work. Students are not selected, hired, or paid, so how could they be unemployed?

    Think of students as academic workers. When I was teaching U.S. History at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1980s, I noticed that they had to do almost no academic work. I would assign ten pages of reading and then go over it in the next class, so they didn’t have to do the reading.

    Doing nothing can have its charm. Dolce Far Niente, as the Italians say. But sitting in classes six hours a day or so, and not being asked to do anything, is not charming. It is dull, boring, exasperating. Yet this is what we ask high school students to do, except perhaps in chemistry or foreign language labs.

    The message this sends to students is that the work of teachers is terribly important, but the academic work of students is not. If you tell a worker or an employee that what they do doesn’t matter, what happens to their motivation and morale?

    This is what we do to students day in and day out. On the athletic field the story is very different. If they are on a team, they are expected to work hard, take responsibility and contribute to the success of the team. When do they experience anything like that academically? On the football or soccer field, every player is called on in every practice and in every game. Even if a player is on the bench, there is a constant risk for most of them that they may be called on at any time, and if they do not know what to do, the disgrace and disapproval will be obvious and swift. The same may be said for Drama productions, Chorus, Model UN, and most of the students’ other activities.

    In extracurricular activities, the student will often face a peer pressure to do well that is usually lacking in the classroom. Peers in the classroom may even think it is cool for another student to “get away with” having done no preparation for the class.

    While the Educator consensus seems to be that teacher quality is the most important variable in student academic achievement, I have long argued that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work. Seems obvious, but not to most thinkers in EdWorld.

    Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Doomed to Fail (150) that: “Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education.” Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (162) that “One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students’ academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers’ influence.”

    In a June 3, 1990 column in The New York Times, the late Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote: 

“...It is also worth thinking about as we consider how to reform our education system... As we’ve known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized, But when they were allowed to see the whole process—or better yet become involved in it—productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits—history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned—it’s no wonder that they are bored and disengaged.”

    To be unemployed is to be passive, and to be passive when you are young is frustrating indeed. We really must help students to get off the academic unemployment line and let them do the work they need to become educated.