Physicians, psychotherapists, social workers, and professors–the helping professions–share their expertise with patients, clients, and college students. But expertise is insufficient. Patients, clients, and college students play an important part in their healing and learning.*

#For a chain-smoking patient, a primary care physician knows that this behavior has a high probability of leading to lung cancer—even the patient knows that—yet the doctor’s knowledge and skills are insufficient to get the CEO of a private equity fund to quit smoking. While doctors can influence a patient’s motivation, if that patient is uncommitted to getting healthy by ignoring prescribed medications–the physician is stuck. Getting better also requires a patient’s agreement to improve health.

#For clients in therapy, recognizing they have problems and working to solve them is part of the therapeutic bond they forge with a therapist who asks questions and provides support and acceptance. To get better, then, clients must also take responsibility for solving their problems.

#In higher education, professors give lectures and conduct seminars. While there is some talk of holding professors accountable for what their students learn, that rhetoric has yet to move beyond words. Undergraduate and graduate students are expected to study, write papers, and pass tests.

Yet for K-12 public schoolteachers, another helping profession, the reverse is true. For the past quarter-century, responsibility for student learning has been placed on teachers’ shoulders (much less so in parochial and independent private schools, however).

And that is the puzzle. How come K-12 public school teachers are responsible for student learning and in the other helping professions that responsibility is shared with patients and clients?

Since the late-1970s, federal and state policymakers, major donors, and business leaders have built a reform-driven machine that places full responsibility for student learning squarely on teachers. That potent machine legislated state curriculum standards and tests, and the federal No Child Left Behind law. That law distributed monies to states and districts such as cash bonuses to high performing schools and, in some instances, to individual teachers (see here, here, and here).

During President Obama’s years in the White House (2008-2016), for example, the federally-funded Race To The Top competition allotted billions of dollars to public schools; The Gates Foundation supported districts working toward identifying factors of teacher effectiveness. All of these initiatives measured and evaluated school performance holding both schools and teachers responsible for student learning (i.e., test scores).

Penalties for poor school and teacher performance were to close schools and reassign or fire teachers. The super-glue then and now that holds these disparate reform-minded groups together is the assumption that students’ mediocre or failing performance is due primarily to schools’ and teachers’ efforts. They are solely responsible.

Recall the common explanations for low student performance over the past few decades: lousy curricula, improper instruction, and teachers’ low expectations. No surprise, then, that reformers driving this machine believe in both schools and teachers taking full responsibility for student learning (i.e., test scores). When they do, schools and teachers would work harder on matching curricula to lessons, improve instructional methods, and raise their expectations for students. Then, and only then, test scores would rise

Given these assumptions focused on teachers, students are hardly motivated to work hard except in those schools where students do take responsibility for learning. Such places do exist in cities, working-class suburbs, and rural towns where students do their homework, participate in class discussions, and improve their reading, writing, and math skills. Consider those high achieving schools that have waiting lists of parents to sign up their sons and daughters and garner media headlines in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, and other big and small cities.

In these schools, principals, parents, and the larger community make clear that students are to behave well, do academic work, and treat one another respectfully. There are incentives, supports, and, yes, penalties in place to help students become responsible as teachers fulfill their professional commitments.  Both students and teachers are held accountable by the norms of the school community and parents. There are well developed resources that support both teachers and students. Such schools and districts, however, are the exception.

Thus, the fact of the matter is that loading upon teachers full responsibility for student results, as has occurred in the past few decades, is a mistake. It is not either the teacher or student being responsible; it is both the teacher and student. So without making clear to parents, taxpayers, and voters that students share responsibility for learning while providing supportive workplace conditions for teacher learning (e.g., time for professional development, time to observe colleagues and confer afterwards), that mistake will  persist.

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* I am indebted to the work of  David K. Cohen for his thoughtful and careful analysis of the helping professions including teaching over the years. See his Teaching and Its Predicaments (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).