A recently proposed and then withdrawn Tennessee law would have linked the amount of a family’s welfare check to the performance of its children in school. Under the bill, the families of children who were under-performing in school would see a reduction in benefits until the parents attended a parent-teacher conference or sent the student to tutoring.

The state representative who proposed the bill, Stacey Campfield (R) argued that parents play an important role in their children’s educations and should be held accountable for their academic performances. While Campfield might be on the right track in acknowledging that more than just student performance is a factor in the low achievement of impoverished children, decreasing welfare benefits is entirely the wrong direction to look.

There are obvious negative effects of this misguided piece of legislation. Poor children already struggle in school to fit in with their more affluent classmates, to often have to function on malnourished diets or inadequate health care, and to set their personal hardships aside for seven hours out of the day to focus on assignments. Placing the livelihood of their entire family on their small shoulders is unfair and simply wrong. The bill would not have shifted responsibility to the parents; it would have added responsibility and stress to the lives of children.

Young people in school should not need to worry about whether there will be food on their tables that night, but the reality is that too many students in America do. School should be an environment that fosters learning and healthy lifestyles, not stress and worry.

As a nation, we have an education problem, and it needs to be fixed. More than half of American fourth-graders cannot read proficiently, and the United States ranks 25th in the world for math performance. Assigning blame to students and their families for this failure is nowhere near efficient.

A shift in focus is in order. While it is important for students and families to take responsibility for learning, if the system is not able to help them do that, how can we expect them to excel? What we need in America is across-the-board education reform.

From the way we enroll students to the methods we use to educate them to the ways we allocate resources to them, we need major change. It should not be the case that some young people are stuck in a poor school system simply because of their zip code. School should not be another worry to add on top of everything else a struggling family has to worry about.

While no reform can happen overnight, education should already be the top priority of our lawmakers. Cliché as the phrase may be, children are the future of our nation. Better educational starting as early as grade school can open higher education opportunities to more children, giving the U.S. a more educated future generation of teachers, policymakers and other professionals. It seems so simple: Reform education, and the future of America almost instantly becomes brighter. Yet, some lawmakers seem more concerned with giving away that responsibility to educate young Americans instead of stepping up to claim it.