Posts Tagged → parents

Doing The Right Thing

In a post this morning on the wonderful Answer Sheet blog, a guest writer connects those of us trying to push back against the current wrong-headed education “reform” efforts by business and government to people living under a corrupt former Communist government.

Ok, maybe a stretch.

But his major point is a good one: how do you mount a campaign against a system that is wrong in so many ways?

In the case of fighting back against the Rhee/Gates/Duncan/NCLB test-obsessed, data-driven, pseudo-reform movement now in control, he says educators can’t be the only ones involved.

What’s to be done? Working teachers living paycheck to paycheck are in a poor position to resist. Others, safer from retaliation, organize citizen groups, sign petitions, make protest speeches, write books, articles, op-eds, and letters to editors and to the president, the secretary of education, and members of Congress.

But nothing happens. If those inside the Beltway are to hear the message that the present reforms are simplistic and reactionary, that they’ve all been tried before, that they’re at odds with research and practical experience, that excellent programs have been pushed aside to accommodate endless reading and math drills, then the message will have to come from parents who love their kids enough to refuse to allow them to be short-changed by mind-limiting standardized tests. [my emphasis]

That’s certainly true.

However, I look around our relatively affluent overly-large school district and wonder how many parents are dissatisfied enough to enlist in an effort to overthrow the current system.

Most seem to be more worried about their kids racking up enough points to score a place in a college with an expensive name plate, not whether they are learning anything useful.

The first step is convincing parents and students that this familiar, insulated, comfortable, and relatively orderly system is not good for them, or the country as a whole, in the long run.

Challenging What Everyone Knows

In the op-ed section of the Post this morning, Alfie Kohn, one of the smartest voices in the debate about American education, challenges the myth that today’s parents coddle their kids more than ever, and as a result, those children are the most undisciplined generation in history.

It must be true since it says so in dozens of books and articles on the subject.

And, of course, there are plenty of stories about parents who refuse to set limits on their kids, and kids that are undisciplined narcissists.

Except, as Kohn notes, there are just two problems with those “what everyone knows” facts.

Social observers have been saying exactly the same thing about each generation of kids for more than a century.

And there is almost no research to support any of these claims, with what has been done largely based on questionable methodology.

In short,

There’s no evidence, then, that today’s parents are more permissive than parents of yesteryear, or that today’s young people are more narcissistic. But even if there were, no one has come close to showing that one causes the other.

Neither logic nor evidence seems to support the widely accepted charge that we’re too easy on our children. Yet that assumption continues to find favor across the political spectrum. It seems that we’ve finally found something to bring the left and the right together: an unsubstantiated knock on parents, an unflattering view of kids and a dubious belief that the two are connected.

Logic? Evidence?

When it comes to the debate over issues related to American education, it’s not surprising that both often go missing.

Just Ignore Those Silly, Hysterical Parents

In a recent Class Struggle post, Jay Mathews declares that the concerns about budget cuts expressed by parents in our overly-large school district (he calls it hysteria) are “silly”.

The source for his conclusion comes from the comments of parents quoted in another Post column about our economic problems.

They are hysterically concerned about things like increased class sizes, cuts in kindergarten time, major reductions in elementary school music programs, elimination of most summer school program, and more, and in doing so are “so divorced from reality as to be comical”.

So, why is none of this important to the quality of education in our schools?

Well, because our high schools still score well in his “challenge” index, the 2010 edition of which will be unleashed in a couple of weeks (you have been warned).

Beyond the fact that his index is one of the most fraudulent measures of school quality ever devised*, it should be clear to anyone paying attention that our budget problems will most severely impact the elementary schools.

Which will then impact the high schools a few years from now.

Anyway, after making a pitch for his index, Mathews goes on to make several unsupported claims about how the quality of our schools will be maintained, in spite of major, multi-year declines in revenue, all during a time when the numbers of students continues to increase.

He partially attributes this to the fact that the county is one of the richest in the country, with many involved parents like the ones who are quoted, adults who, according to Mathews, “don’t have a true perspective”.

Among other factors he also ignores the large and growing low income neighborhoods of our county, where schools must cope with increasing numbers of non-English speaking and special education students, all of who require additional services that will also be impacted by cuts.

Areas where parents are not the vocal kind that make hysterical and silly comments and who, for the most part, can’t or don’t provide the instructional support to make up for what their kids no long receive at school.

Of course, in the end, Mathews is right that our district is far better than many in this country and will likely continue to be even after the budget is sliced (although I don’t buy his confidence that we won’t lose a lot of great teachers in the process).

However, as we often tell students, the better measure of quality is not found in comparing ourselves with others but comparing ourselves now with where we should be in the future.

*Search this site for many posts explaining why.