THE POWER OF ATTITUDE

Failure in the classroom is often tied to lack of funding, poor teachers or other ills. Here's a thought: Maybe it's the failed work ethic of today's kids. That's what I'm seeing in my school. Until reformers see this reality, little will change.

Last month, as I averaged the second-quarter grades for my senior English classes at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., the same familiar pattern leapt out at me. Kids who had emigrated from foreign countries - such as Shewit Giovanni from Ethiopia, Farah Ali from Guyana and Edgar Awumey from Ghana - often aced every test, while many of their U.S.-born classmates from upper-class homes with highly educated parents had a string of C's and D's.

As one would expect, the middle-class American kids usually had higher SAT verbal scores than did their immigrant classmates, many of whom had only been speaking English for a few years. What many of the American kids I taught did not have was the motivation, self-discipline or work ethic of the foreign-born kids.

Politicians and education bureaucrats can talk all they want about reform, but until the work ethic of U.S. students changes, until they are willing to put in the time and effort to master their subjects, little will change. A study released in December by University of Pennsylvania researchers Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman suggests that the reason so many U.S. students are "falling short of their intellectual potential" is not "inadequate teachers, boring textbooks and large class sizes" and the rest of the usual litany cited by the so-called reformers - but "their failure to exercise self-discipline."

The sad fact is that in the USA, hard work on the part of students is no longer seen as a key factor in academic success. The groundbreaking work of Harold Stevenson and a multinational team at the University of Michigan comparing attitudes of Asian and American students sounded the alarm more than a decade ago. When asked to identify the most important factors in their performance in math, the percentage of Japanese and Taiwanese students who answered "studying hard" was twice that of American students.

American students named native intelligence, and some said the home environment. But a clear majority of U.S. students put the responsibility on their teachers. A good teacher, they said, was the determining factor in how well they did in math. "Kids have convinced parents that it is the teacher or the system that is the problem, not their own lack of effort," says Dave Roscher, a chemistry teacher at T.C. Williams in this Washington suburb. "In my day, parents didn't listen when kids complained about teachers. We are supposed to miraculously make kids learn even though they are not working." As my colleague Ed Cannon puts it: "Today, the teacher is supposed to be responsible for motivating the kid. If they don't learn it is supposed to be our problem, not theirs." And, of course, busy parents guilt-ridden over the little time they spend with their kids are big subscribers to this theory.

Maybe every generation of kids has wanted to take it easy, but until the past few decades students were not allowed to get away with it. "Nowadays, it's the kids who have the power. When they don't do the work and get lower grades, they scream and yell. Parents side with the kids who pressure teachers to lower standards," says Joel Kaplan, another chemistry teacher at T.C. Williams. Every year, I have had parents come in to argue about the grades I have given in my AP English classes. To me, my grades are far too generous; to middle-class parents, they are often an affront to their sense of entitlement. If their kids do a modicum of work, many parents expect them to get at least a B. When I have given C's or D's to bright middle-class kids who have done poor or mediocre work, some parents have accused me of destroying their children's futures.

It is not only parents, however, who are siding with students in their attempts to get out of hard work. "Schools play into it," says psychiatrist Lawrence Brain, who counsels affluent teenagers throughout the Washington metropolitan area. "I've been amazed to see how easy it is for kids in public schools to manipulate guidance counselors to get them out of classes they don't like. They have been sent a message that they don't have to struggle to achieve if things are not perfect."

Neither the high-stakes state exams, such as Virginia's Standards of Learning, nor the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act have succeeded in changing that message; both have turned into minimum-competency requirements aimed at the lowest in our school. Colleges keep complaining that students are coming to them unprepared. Instead of raising admissions standards, however, they keep accepting mediocre students lest cuts have to be made in faculty and administration.

As a teacher, I don't object to the heightened standards required of educators in the No Child Left Behind law. Who among us would say we couldn't do a little better? Nonetheless, teachers have no control over student motivation and ambition, which have to come from the home - and from within each student. Perhaps the best lesson I can pass along to my upper- and middle-class students is to merely point them in the direction of their foreign-born classmates, who can remind us all that education in America is still more a privilege than a right.

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UK: A NEW CONSERVATIVE STUDENT LIFESTYLE

The all-night student who parties until dawn and lives off stale pizzas and black coffee in university digs is, it seems, a myth. Undergraduates are indeed sipping Starbucks, but they are eating healthily, drinking less and living at home to save money. They are also socialising away from university, as more than half hold down a job for up to 20 hours a week and a fifth are teetotallers.

Unions and academics caution, however, that the new lifestyle undermines the purpose of higher education and that students are in danger of missing the opportunities it offers.

Faced with looming debts, nearly half a million or 449,488 of the 2,247,440 students in Britain are now choosing to live with their parents while studying at university, according to a survey of 2,200 undergraduates commissioned by Sodexho, an institutional catering company. Of those, four fifths pay nothing towards their rent and little towards their upkeep. While the cushioned home life might have its attractions, researchers point out that two thirds never join in campus life, they are five times more likely to work part time and commute up to four hours a day.

The most common rent for those who do pay is between 61 and 70 pounds per week, spent by 17 per cent of students. Nearly a quarter, 24 per cent of students, live on a weekly budget of between 41 and 50 pounds after paying rent. Professor Stuart Sanderson, associate dean at Bradford University School of Management, said: "They live at home, commute long-distances, work in term-time and pursue their social life almost entirely off campus." He said that these students "are missing out on the wider aspects of a university education while better-off undergraduates can spread their wings and whoop it up a little with their peers".

The findings, which come before the 3,000 pounds deferred tuition fees this autumn, worry student leaders. Veronica King, Vice-President of the National Union of Students, said that with more students living at home and undertaking part-time work, universities' "central ethos" risked being undermined as well as causing concern among business leaders. "Students are choosing to work part time, which means they are less likely to get involved in the student union and if they live at home, they have another barrier to joining societies and getting involved in fundraising activities," she said.

Universities UK said yesterday that the survey confirmed many of their own findings, particularly that students now spend a fifth less on alcohol than they did in 2001. He also pointed out that, although higher tuition fees would be introduced from September, no one would have to pay them back until after they were earning more than 15,000 pounds per year

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CHICAGO NUTTINESS: IT TAKES PUBLICITY TO GET SOME SANITY


Most high school students eagerly await the day they pass driver's education class. But 16-year-old Mayra Ramirez is indifferent about it. Ramirez is blind, yet she and dozens of other visually impaired sophomores in Chicago schools are required to pass a written rules-of-the-road exam in order to graduate _ a rule they say takes time away from subjects they might actually use. "In other classes, you don't really feel different because you can do the work other people do," Ramirez said. "But in driver's ed, it does give us the feeling we're different. In a way, it brought me down, because it reminds me of something I can't do."

Hundreds of school districts in Illinois require students to pass driver's ed, although the state only requires that districts offer the courses. A state education official says districts that require it should exempt disabled students. "It defies logic to require blind students to take this course," Meta Minton, spokeswoman for the state Board of Education, told the Chicago Tribune in a Friday story.

About 30 students at two Chicago high schools with programs for the visually impaired recently formed an advocacy group in part to change the policy.

A Chicago Public Schools official said the district would be open to waiving the requirement. "I can't explain why up to this point no one has raised the issue and suggested a better way for visually impaired students to opt out of driver's ed," said Chicago schools spokesman Michael Vaughn. Vaughn said parents of disabled students can, by law, request a change in their child's individual education plan, which could include a driver's ed exemption. But teachers and students said that is a little-known option, and that they have been told driver's ed is required to graduate.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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