How Letting My Kid Fail Empowered Her — & Forced Her School to Fix Its Failures

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My daughter had a rough 11th grade year at her New York City public school. First, there was a rotating series of Spanish instructors, then an ineffectual pre-calculus teacher. I could have solved both problems by hiring a tutor to help my daughter pass her classes and her state Regents exams, like so many families in “top” NYC schools do. But doing that would be letting her school and her teachers off the hook. It would be perpetuating the misperception that her school and her teachers were getting the job done, when they, in fact, weren’t. And it would not only hurt her classmates, who might not have the resources for a tutor, but also students who might enroll in subsequent years and be taught by the same inadequate teachers.

If I hired a tutor for my daughter, I’d be covering up the school’s and the teachers’ negligence. If I allowed my daughter to fail, however, I would be forcing her school and her teachers to face the consequences of their malpractice.

When I wrote about my position, it enraged many readers, with commenters observing:

It’s always great to use your children as sacrificial lambs to make a political point than to do your best for them!

This woman is nuts, you work to give your kids what they need to succeed — period. Nothing will change with the school system whether the kid succeeds or fails.

You want to teach the Board of Education a lesson by letting your daughter failed (sic) her Spanish Regents Exam? You need your head examined.

And 174 more comments to that effect.

Except, now that the academic year is over, I can report that my approach worked. And that the outcome benefited not just my daughter, but her classmates and future students of the school.

In math class, my daughter and a group of friends first went to their guidance counselor with complaints about their teacher, and then to the principal, who sat in on one of their classes and promptly brought in a new instructor. Now that they had a teacher who, as my daughter said, “actually makes sense when he talks,” she went from getting 48%, 23% and 14% on tests to a final grade of 94. (And it wasn’t just her grades, which can be subjective. After all the drama, my daughter received an 85 on her math Regents exam. She actually learned.)

For Spanish 3, after five weeks of having no teacher at all in a class that would be culminating with another Regents exam, my daughter and her classmates complained to the Advanced Placement Spanish teacher, who invited them to attend her office hours for intense tutoring.

“She gave us a list of [vocabulary] words to memorize,” my daughter reported. “In the last five weeks of school, she taught us five different conjugations we didn’t know we needed. She made us try. It was horrible.”

My daughter finished 11th grade with a final grade of 80 in Spanish. And, much to our mutual shock, with an 83 on the Regents.

First and foremost, I must thank those teachers who went out of their way to help, even when it, technically, wasn’t their responsibility. As I have written about the inadequacies of some teachers, I feel compelled to shout it from the rooftops with gratitude for the ones who go above and beyond on a daily basis.

Secondly, kudos to the students at my daughter’s school who took their education into their own hands and demanded better instruction than what they were getting. They are an inspiration to those of us who sometimes lose faith that schools ever will, or ever could, improve.

And, finally, a plea to my fellow parents and guardians: Yes, I know it’s hard to watch your kids struggle. Yes, I know we all want to do what’s best for our children, give them a leg up, “give your kids what they need to succeed — period,” as one of my critics insisted.

But that’s a short-term solution for a much larger, institutional problem.

No school, whether in NYC or elsewhere in the nation, will ever fix its failures unless it is forced to confront them. And no school will ever be forced to confront them if families, desperate to protect their children’s grade-point average, continue picking up the slack, making the school appear to be doing an adequate job when it is, in fact, outsourcing its instruction to parents and private tutors while taking credit for positive results.

My daughter and her friends demanded that their school properly educate them and chalked up a victory not only for themselves, not only for their peers, but for all American students who now have a blueprint for taking similar action: In order to succeed, you first have to demonstrate where you’ve failed.

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