“You can’t blame me,” my student said. “Don’t you know that even if we do something bad it’s still your fault?”

I was fairly taken aback. I was speaking to one of my brightest students, and she had just told me that she hadn’t studied one bit for that day’s state mathematics test.

My concern wasn’t that she might do poorly on it: this whole year she’s been a step ahead of the rest of the class in terms of ability. Her work gets done before everyone else’s, and, more than just a functional calculator, she’s legitimately good at puzzle solving and lateral thinking.

I was taken aback because I was astounded that even one of my successful, motivated students would pass the buck.

As a teacher, I’ve gotten sadly accustomed to being blamed for things. I read negative op-eds and news articles about my job all the time, and there are plenty of high-profile people who think it’s cool to shakedown an entire profession in order to settle their own personal grudges. I’ve gotten used to that.

And I’m even used to being blamed by students — especially ones that want to weasel themselves out of some situation of their own creation. I don’t begrudge them: they’re thirteen. Accountability is hard for them. Facing their own insecurities is even more difficult, so when they’re blaming me for their Fs, I understand why: they’re struggling and they’re thirteen.

But I’m not used to my motivated students jumping on that train. They’re the ones who have, either through a parent or a family member or a teacher or themselves, established that being successful at school is something that they’re capable of doing and something that they want to do. They’re the ones who will listen to the lesson even if it’s boring, and they’re the ones who will do the homework even if they don’t need the grade because they’ve reached a place where they work for school, rather than needing school to work for them.

So it surprised me when she so bluntly and succinctly smacked me with the “your fault” argument because she’s not one of the students who needs someone to blame.

I asked her why she said that. “Well, that’s what they be sayin’ about all you teachers,” she responded. “I can fail the test and it don’t matter, but don’t they pay you off the scores?”

They don’t pay me off the scores — not yet, at least — but it certainly feels like they’re headed that direction. Just that morning I read a memo from my principal about psyching my students up for the test. “Don’t say that this is a test of what they have learned,” the memo read, “say it’s a test of what we have taught.” When he talked about this item in our test-prep staff meeting, my principal casually mentioned that we wanted the students to feel like we were the ones getting tested in order to remove some of the pressure from them. I fully understand the need to ease the high-stakes of high-stakes testing for our kids, but isn’t it also important that we hold students accountable for their own learning? That’s what all this testing is about, right? Right?

It doesn’t feel like that. I wish we were concerned about helping students have more ownership of their own learning. I wish we were pushing more students to be like the motivated and successful one I opened with. Instead, it seems that the main concern isn’t building drive in our students but building guilt in the teachers. “Ah, I see here that only 60% of your students mastered Standard 2.0. How do you think you could teach that standard better?”

It’s a common conversation, with the emphasis on self-improvement conveniently limiting the discussion to only my instruction while implicitly shaming me for it at the same time. Nobody I know ever says, “Actually, I think I did a damn good job with those lessons, and, if I knew how to do it better, don’t you think I would have done that in the first place?”. They’d get a condescending so-you-think-you’re-perfect eyebrow raise in response and a reference back to the “hard” data that “clearly” and “objectively” says otherwise. When responding to this all-too-common kind of question, it comes down to looking either arrogant or incompetent, and it feels like the current educational system is trying to systematically make us feel like we’re both.

And it’s going to keep being that way until we stop looking at education with a “make every single horse drink all the fucking water” mindset, as we simply cannot force our students to learn. There aren’t enough hooks or differentiation strategies or gymnastics we could perform regularly to ensure that 100% of our students are getting 100% of the things 100% of the time. Furthermore, we shouldn’t be expected to reach that goal without first acknowledging that the students themselves have the most significant roles in their educational outcomes. At some point, students have to learn to grapple with things. They have to learn how to take work home from the day and mull over it on their own and look in their textbooks to try to really figure it out. They have to learn how to google around or ask their friends how to do something.

But, more importantly than any of that, they have to want to do any and all of that. They have to care enough about learning and about what they’re learning to feel like those are important things to do, and they have to feel like those are important things to do before they’ll actually do them. They have to take some ownership of their own education, and I wish everyone in education were focused on enabling them to do that.

I try to enable them to do that, but it’s tough. It’s not something that just happens for most students, it’s something you have to build. It’s something that takes time, and it’s something that takes a lot of different people — teachers, students, parents, principals, op-ed writers — working together to create. It’s not testable, and it’s not written into the standards, but it’s what underlies everything that we do as educators.

And that’s why it was so disheartening to hear my student pull the blame card on me for what she knows were clearly her choices. She realized that she’d been given license to fault me and, warranted or not, it’s what she believed and it’s what she took advantage of.

And I can’t make my kids care if they believe I’m the one to blame. I can’t do it when my students believe that their challenges are my burden, and I can’t do it when they figure out that the person who takes the fall for their lack of motivation is the very person who has been trying to break through that apathy since before they set foot into my class.