My thoughts (I was actually responding to the thoughts of another colleague):

I couldn’t agree more that collaboration and RtI can and should go hand in hand. If we want to move toward a culture that is data driven, end-result (outcomes) targeted, and student-need focused, then we need to put our best collaborative relationships together with our best early interventions for those students who are identified as not meeting the standard (as early as we can identify this), and work together figure out what we need to do to help students achieve. (I’m pretty sure that was a run-on sentence).

The days of, “I taught it, those students just aren’t doing their part” need to be distant memories. We need to see ourselves responsible for student accomplishment (or lack of it). And, by that definition, we will see where student’s didn’t achieve (and yes, we will have to say, I take responsibility for X who didn’t make it). But at least if we take responsibility, we can look at ourselves and ask if we did EVERYTHING we could to make sure X didn’t fail.

One response from a colleague I respect greatly. I post it so that I can post how I responded. I value the chance to make my thoughts more clear and better defined. In the end, I don’t think we disagree, but see both sides of the coin.:

When a student fails or fails to achieve anywhere near his potential, who is responsible?  When I think about responsibility and children, I think of a continuim.  As our children grow older, as parents we lengthen the apron strings.  We give them more responsibility and hold them to a greater degree of accountablility.  As educators, I always saw us doing that in like fashion.  If I teach 6 year olds, my level of responsibility and their level of resposibility for their learning is different than if I teach high school seniors.  As my daughters grew, my wife and I trained them to be responsible, hard working students.  Now that they are teens, they have taken most of the ownership for their learning.  I know in a few years when they go to college they must take full ownership.  I see a continium. 

My response:

I completely agree –the continuum is how it should be (and works for 80-90% of kids). We teach all kids in public schools, however, and the difficulty comes from those kids who we have to teach but who have not grown to that level of responsibility. We get kids whose past we can’t control; whose home life we can’t control. These get passed on to us. Kids whose who will never learn responsibility in their home, never see responsibility modeled in their home; some kids who have parents and families who have given up on them, and all of society wants to give up on them. All I am saying is WE (public educators) CANNOT, MUST NOT give up on them. We have to teach responsibility (that’s what these kinds of kids must learn; history, English and math are just content — and this content becomes a conduit for teaching responsibility — in high school or first grade). If you try to teach responsibility to them with a new strategy or technique every week then that’s what we must do.  I fully know that is unrealistic, but we must try anyway — which is what I meant when I said we will fail. We will have to say I should have done something else for X (even when I don’t know what else I might have done). Yes, we take responsibility for their failure.  But I can live with those failures (i.e. kids not making the standard) if I know I as a teacher (or better yet my team of teachers) have not given up (and even when we did all we could we got together to see what we can do differently next time). I’ve been in conversations with teachers who have given up on kids — and frankly it makes me angry  — angry at the teacher, not the kid. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve gotten angry at kids, too. But what you have to do is get over the anger at the kid and come back tomorrow with something else — something new to try to help that kid do what he or she needs to do. This is what makes teaching so exhausting, but it’s our job.

I once had an outstanding teacher friend tell me he heard a lot of teachers talk about how they like to teach the kids who are in school to learn, but didn’t want to waste time with those kids who didn’t want to learn. My friend said (and I agree) that saying something like that is a lot like a doctor saying they like practicing medicine with those patients who are well, but didn’t want to waste time with those patients who were always sick (an absurd thought, really). We have to be there for those kds who don’t want to learn and have no idea how (or desire to be) to be responsible. Who is going to be responsible for them if not us? Who is going to teach them responsibility if not us? We can (and sometimes must) teach responsibility by letting the consequence of the students action or inaction fall, but we must be proactive before it comes to that, so that we can say, “it’s going to hurt me as much as it hurts you” (to return to the parent metaphor that I am responding to). These words are the words of loving parent teaching a child responsibility. If a kid sees us saying and meaning these words, it may be that first step with that child that can make a difference. But it won’t ring true if they know and see we already gave up on them.  Still, after that consequence falls on the student, we should be the first one at that kid’s door saying, “here is what you need to do to remedy that F”, “here is what you need to do to make up that paper I didn’t accept”, ”here let me help you enroll in summer school to make up this class”, or “let’s look at this alternative school to see if it might be the place for you”, or whatever. Bottom line: TEACHING IS A TOUGH JOB, but kids are worth it and there is nothing more rewarding.  If you are willing to give up on students, I think you should consider giving up on teaching.

I am an Evangelical Christian (in the classic sense of Evangelicalism – really I hate the term as it is used today). In 2009, Evangelicals are almost synonymous in the public mind with Fundamentalists. I went through a Fundamentalist war in my denomination a few years back (one of the reasons I changed careers), and the Fundamentalists won (which means the denomination [and the cause of Christ] lost. In the classic sense, Evangelicals emphasize the Gospel. Today’s Evangelical emphasizes Politics (Pat Buchanan’s term is “The Culture War”). I grew up in church where Gospel was everything, and Gospel was how we were to change our world. When we emphasized Gospel, our manipulative invitations (and other peculiarities) were an exception to the way things were done, and they didn’t do as much damage to the cause of Christ. But in the late 1970s, everything began to change. Evangelicals discovered political activity, and they have done great damage to the cause of Christ (some time later they discovered Rush Limbaugh and even though politically I am in agreement with much of conservative philosophy, Limbaugh and his ilk have done much more damage as the GOP and Evangelicalism have become fused (see this book and this one). I feel I must lead with this rant because in some circles anyone reading this post will equate my reference to any speech by Obama as the thoughts of a “liberal public school teacher.”  I am anything but. I am a conservative, though I am a conservative who laments the death of thinking conservatives now that Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are our de facto leaders (what a vacuum of leadership we must have!).  Please read this post from the Internet Monk about how Christians should be careful about how we speak about our president even when we disagree – note, we (Christians/Evangelicals) did damage to our reputation by violating these principles during the Clinton administation. We accelerated the downward slide of our ability to speak Gospel to our world and be heard (see this link and this one on why conservatism is “dead,” though I choose to think it’s not dead but in dire straights until we can find another leader to pull our diverse elements together into a positive whole as Reagan did — NOT that Reagan was an Evangelical or even a Classic Christian [many forget history], but he was a great conservative). OK, this Rant is finished, so I can now post the comments I received from another teacher  who, in turn, just passed along what she reveived from another teacher.  I have taken the liberty of highlighting some sentences.  Along with the original writer of the post, I have MUCH that I disagree with from our president and his politics, but he is our president (and the republic will not come to an end just because the GOP does not win every time). 

Last night, during President Obama’s speech before congress, I was inspired by something he said. “Dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country — and this country needs and values the talents of every American.”  Though I may not have agreed with most of the President’s solutions, I feel that the sentiment of this line needs to become a clarion call to our students. Education is not just about them. It is a call to the very heart of this country. It is every student’s patriotic duty to become educated.  We as teachers assume a patriotic duty to teach our students. It is this attitude that can rejuvenate our hearts and maybe rise up the next “greatest generation.”  

President Obama committed last night to a goal of making our nation the most educated nation in the world by the year 2020.  Today, as you teach your students, realize that your job is equipping these students to make our nation stronger. Communicate to your students that their responsibility to their country, to the freedoms they have, is to learn. Whether it is to write, to do math, to use a computer, to understand economics, to contribute through the arts, to become civically minded, or whatever educational endeavor they are participating, all will contribute to the milieu that will make America the greatest nation in world.  

I hope you don’t mind my sending these thoughts to you, but as one who has served in the military and loves his country I am inspired this morning. We as educators have a great calling and responsibility. Hold your head up with honor and pride, for you too are defending and strengthening your country.

The point is well made. I have very little to add. As a Christian (Evangelical Christian) who is proud to teach in a public school (a giant contradiction in many Fundagelical’s minds), I find these words encouraging, and they serve to call me to renw my committment to the heart of my calling as a teacher.  May all teachers view their career as a calling — we don’t just have a job, we serve in a vocation.