Have Your Say: Are teachers alone responsible for educational outcomes?

To the Editors,

An April 18, 2019 letter to The Haldimand Press gives voice to a quite common viewpoint: teacher performance alone determines the quality of educational outcomes. Certainly, our children do deserve excellent schooling. And standards may indeed be falling. If so, people are right to be upset. But it’s also true that over-simple reactions won’t help.

Like other complex systems – for example farming, health care, law enforcement, etc. – education combines numerous interconnected parts. However, critics may be tempted to simplify by focusing on a single element. If so, which should be chosen? Many factors in educational systems are just too demanding for non-specialists to investigate. Such difficulty rules out commenting on tricky elements like cost-benefit analysis, long-term goal setting, or facilities management (among many others). So, what’s left? People of course!