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.

The truth is, our board has put off making this decision for half a decade. We are an urban district (In a formerly large town which was, prior to that, a medium-sized town. It’s a town that still has a hard time thinking of itself as an urban). But the hard truth is white flight is occuring; families that move in who can afford it are moving to the more suburban school districts that surround our city. Even though we have one pocket of semi-suburban neighborhoods still within our district’s boundaries where we’ve build schools in the past two years to relieve overcrowding, most of the rest of the district is losing students. We have upwards of 4,000 fewer students now than we did a decade ago. We have a few half-empty schools and quite a few schools that are not half-empty, but are getting there quickly. Still, prior boards have avoided making the hard choices.  Here is an editorial from our local paper which speaks in favor of making these hard choices.  We’ve had public meetings and asked for information from groups of stakeholders, employee groups, parents, staff. They have enough information — really they have a ton of information. Here is another article about the information they have.  They started with some basic presuppositions, and a collection of data about school usage and programs in the various schools. All schools (not just those on the list) were asked to evaluate and list their own strengths and areas to improve. Then a consultant was brought in, and all of this information was tabulated in a plan that they took to employee groups, employee leaders, and to the public. They actually asked and solicited information, and they listened. The plan was changed and each change was posted (currently the district has Draft 18 on their site). At each public meeting they asked focus groups to record and give input about various options. Still, we have people crying that this decision is being made too fast.

The school board is caught between doing doing what is fiscally responsible and largely unpopular, and putting off the decision or doing some small measure that pretends to solve the problem.  It’s a tough position. I don’t envy the tough spot in which they sit. The problem with a true democracy is that people won’t make the tough decisions. Self interest gets in the way. That’s why our founding fathers made this country a democratically elected republic. That’s essentially what a school board is. A democratically elected republic presumes that those elected to the board will have the guts to make the hard and even unpopular choices.

I think we have a good board. Current information suggests that all but one member recognize the difficulty, and are willing do the tough but necessary job. I hope they make the hard choices. If they don’t make these choices, we will be talking about a fiscal crisis in a year or two. Decisions made in a crisis are not likely to be decisions that work to improve student achievement.