I think you have an excellent point here. My experience has only been in teaching college students, whom you might think would be mroe motivated since the don't "have" to be there and it costs money. Not so! They are often shocked when they are penalized for turning work in late (even though they were told in advance there would be a penalty). Many of the questions asked on the first day of class can be boiled down to "how much work do I actually have to do to pass this class"? Education is only as good as the mind of the student. It's a two way street. You do the best you can, and they should do the best they can.

They are often shocked when they are penalized for turning work in late

I would use that policy, but that would mean my students would have ot turn in homework.

I ran across this while searching for a reference on Jamie Escalante, and it reminded me of something I just read: Link

Here's an excerpt:

My dad sent me an issue of Educational Leadership which is all about urban schools. The first article describes a study in which they found that there are three groups of teachers in struggling urban schools - those who blame the children for not keeping up their end of the bargain, those who blame the children's families for the same, and those who don't blame anyone but simply do not allow any children to fail - not by lowering standards, but by showing the children they care, by pushing them to keep working until they meet the teacher's standards for good work, by being there again and again and again. They found that the teachers in the third group often achieved remarkable success with their students, and they found two schools that cultivate that attitude among all the adults in the building, and these two schools are far more successful on tests and the like than one would expect based on results from schools serving a similar population.