After this book came out, people used to say to me, "When are you going to write a book about how teachers fail?" My answer was, "But that's what this book is about."

But if it is a book about a teacher who often failed, it is also about a teacher who was not satisfied to fail, not resigned to failure. It was my job and my chosen task to help children learn things, and if they did not learn what I taught them, it was my job and task to try other ways of teaching them until I found ways that worked.

For many years now I've been urging and begging teachers and student teachers to take this attitude toward their work. Most respond by saying, "Why are you blaming us for everything that goes wrong in schools? Why are you trying to make us feel all this guilt?"

But I'm not. I didn't blame myself or feel guilt, just because my students were so often not learning what I was teaching, because I wasn’t doing what I had set out to do and couldn't find out how to do it. But I did hold myself responsible.

"Blame" and "guilt" are crybaby words. Let's get them out of our talk about education. Let's use instead the word "responsible." Let's have schools and teachers begin to hold themselves responsible for the results of what they do.

I held myself responsible. If my students weren't learning what I was teaching, it was my job to find out why. How Children Fail, as I said, was a partial record of my not very successful attempts to find out why. Now, twenty years after I wrote most of How Children Fail, I think I know much more about why. That’s what this revised version of the book is about.

I've decided to leave the original exactly as I wrote it, and where I have second thoughts about what I then wrote, I’ve put those to. It may seem to some that it took me too long to learn what I have learned, and that I made many foolish mistakes, and missed many obvious clues. I feel no guilt about this. I was trying as best I could to discover something difficult and important, and I suspect there was no path to it much quicker or shorter than the one I took. In this book you can see where I began, some of my twistings and turnings, and where I am today.

There is now a lot of talk about raising our standards higher, about "making sure" that children know what they are "supposed to know" before allowing them into the next grade. What will this lead to in practice? Mostly, to a lot more of the fakery I talk about in this book— i.e., giving children intensive coaching just before the tests so that they will appear to know what in fact they do not know at all. Also to a highly selective enforcement of these rules—we can expect to see many more poor and/or non-white children held back than affluent whites. Finally, we will find out once more what by now we should have learned: that many or most children repeating a grade do no better the second time through than they did the first, if even as well. Why should they? If a certain kind of teaching failed to produce learning the first time, why will it suddenly produce it the second time? In many cases the children, now ashamed and angry as well as bored and confused, will do even worse than before—and will probably disrupt the class as well.

In other words, this brave crusade against the evil of "social promotion" is not likely to last long or produce many positive results.

Recently, at a meeting of the Education Writers Association, in New York, I heard Dr. Ronald Edmonds, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, talk about some important research he had done at the request of the New York City public schools. He and his colleagues tried to find out what makes some schools “effective," by which they meant a school in which the percentage of poor children who learn a satisfactory amount of what they are supposed to learn in any grade, enough to be legitimately promoted, is the same as the proportion of middle-class or affluent children.

The first thing worth noting is that in the entire northeastern section of the United States the researchers were able to find only fifty-five schools that met this very modest definition of "effective."

The researchers then examined these schools to find what qualities they had in common. Of the five they found, two struck me as crucial: (1) if the students did not learn, the schools did not blame them, or their families, backgrounds, neighborhoods, attitudes, nervous systems, or whatever. They did not alibi. They took full responsibility for the results or non-results of their work. (2) When something they were doing in the class did not work, they stopped doing it, and tried to do something else. They flunked unsuccessful methods, not the children.

If we could only persuade more teachers and administrators to think this way, we would soon see improvement in our schools. But there seems little chance that this will happen in any near future. All the tendencies point the other way. The worse the results, the more the schools claim that they are doing the right thing and that the bad results are not their fault. A final observation. The destruction of children's intelligence that I describe here was going on more than twenty years ago.