Stringfield (1993) points out that educators and community members should identify and address specific problems instead of looking for someone to blame:
"I believe that one of the greatest barriers to improving the academic lot of children at risk is a reticence on the part of educators to describe the problems educators face at various levels. Regardless of justification, this lack of specificity leads to an endless searching for something or someone out there to blame. Parents blame schools; teachers blame parents and administrators; administrators blame teachers, unions, colleges, and voters; affluent taxpayers blame all of the above and move to suburbs that have reputations for good schools. Generic blaming of others will only continue the current gridlock and perpetuate current problems.Teachers and schools provide two examples of the fallacy of generic statements of the problem.
Teachers: Some of the world's most remarkable people are teachers. Some of these people provide extraordinarily high quality instruction under almost unbelievably trying circumstances. And yet, some who are paid to be teachers sit behind their desks, hand out ditto sheets, make assignments, and criticize young people for not being attentive. Brophy (1988) notes that the teacher-effects literature best differentiates the top 75 percent of teachers from the remaining 25 percent. Education is a long-term proposition. From kindergarten through middle school, most students have at least a dozen teachers. We need to not generalize about the goodness of teachers.... Some teachers are virtual saints; others need a great deal of support and training, or gentle but firm encouragement to find careers for which they are better-suited and less harmful.
Schools and Principals: Schools can be a large part of the solution. Levine and Lezotte (1990) describe many characteristics that are often shared among highly effective schools and principals. Lightfoot (1983) provides rich descriptions of several remarkable schools and principals. Many of us have visited schools that made us wonder, What's the problem? Education's in great shape.
However, the very presence of unusually effective schools implies the existence of unusually ineffective schools. Stringfield and Teddlie (1988) describe a path for creating ineffective schools. That downward spiral, repeated hundreds of times per year, includes appointing an administrator with little prior successful experience and even less training in working with students at risk. That principal should only visit classrooms in order to comply with state or local evaluation requirements. He or she should take no interest in curricula or instruction, or in hiring (which can be managed from the district) or firing (which can be difficult). If such a person is placed in charge of a school serving an affluent community, beyond a point the community will push for the replacement of the principal. In a school serving families who already feel powerless and alienated from public institutions, the principal may stay for decades. Given that such a person does not conduct meaningful personnel evaluations, teachers who sit and pass out assignments will like teaching at those schools and stay. More energized staff will find the situation increasingly frustrating, and tend to transfer out. Over time, these schools, typically serving poor communities, come to be led by at best indifferent administrators, and they will be staffed with more than their share of at best marginal teachers. The cumulative effect is not merely school ineffectiveness, but a virtual immunization against school improvement processes.
Some schools are wonderful. Others may require substantial changes before any new program or restructuring process can succeed. Most generalizations about schools fail to consider complex local realities. If schools are going to improve, they and their supporting districts need to begin with an honest, if not necessarily published, assessment of the strengths and weaknesses that exist in individual classrooms and individual schools, not generic schools or even generic schools serving Latino (or African-American or American-Indian) students." (pp. 97-98)
