If a student isn't learning, who's responsible?

Teachers told that if students don't learn -- or even show up consistently -- it's their fault for not building relationships or being sufficiently engaging. It's never the student's responsibility to pay attention, participate in class discussions, do assignments or avoid distracting classmates. It's not the parents' responsibility to nag them about studying at home and get them to school. It's all on the teachers, and it drives them crazy.

American children used to hear the story of young George Washington admitting he chopped down his father's cherry tree.

Those days may be ending, writes Rick Hess in Education Next. "Personal responsibility" was racist, for awhile, but common sense is making a comeback.

Speaking at Columbia in 2017, he made a pitch for teaching foundational values, such as "respect, personal responsibility, and timeliness," he writes. An audience member found “personal responsibility” offensive, saying, “It sounds like you want to blame students if they don’t succeed.”

That view became common, affecting "debates on everything from school discipline to student loans," Hess writes.

"Anti-responsibility sentiment has started to recede on the left," but may be growing on the populist right. Prominent influencers "regard self-centered, performative 'toughness' as a good thing and self-restraint as a sign of weakness."

Schools don't work unless there's "an expectation that each person will do their part," Hess writes. That's more than "what they happen to feel like doing on a given day."

Arguing that we can’t expect certain students or parents to be responsible for their actions is the rankest kind of prejudice. It suggests that they are nothing more than passive victims of circumstance, incapable of participating in the democratic social compact. It denies them agency and strips them of dignity.

It's possible to "endorse personal responsibility without denying that we’ve too often done wrong by students, or that schools have their own responsibilities (ones that, for instance, they conspicuously failed to honor during the pandemic)," Hess writes. "The more one insists that students and families must be part of the solution, the more credibly one can hold everyone else to that same standard."

In Agency, Ian Rowe calls for young people to "overcome the victim narrative and discover their pathway to power."

The book "rejects two competing visions of the American dream: one holding that individuals are powerless to withstand historic inequities, the other maintaining that suffering individuals must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps to thrive," writes Ray Domanico in City Journal. Families and faith-based institutions can work with schools to enable to students to “take ownership of their own learning and habits," Rowe argues.