From Learning Matters:
Do we need better parents?
If you live in or around NYC, John will be appearing in conversation with Randi Weingarten — the topic is “Unions and the Future Of Our Schools” — on Wednesday, December 14. Click here for tickets and info.
If we want our children to perform better academically, we need “better parents.” That’s what Tom Friedman wrote, perhaps ironically, on November 19 in the New York Times. The column provoked hundreds of readers to comment, and those comments provide insights into just how far apart we are as a nation, at least when it comes to public education.
Friedman cites an OECD study that reveals that “Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.” (My use of the verb ‘reveals’ is my effort at irony, in case you are wondering.)
Friedman cites another study, “Back to School,” from the American School Board Journal, which says that, when parents are involved in children’s learning, the kids do better. “Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” the study reports. It adds that these things matters more than attending PTA meetings, volunteering in classrooms, or helping raise money for the school.
There is a certain “Duh” factor — yes, involved parents make a difference in their children’s education — but what struck me was the heat and intensity of the responses, some of which I am excerpting below.
A few readers responded to Mr. Friedman’s comments about ‘better parents’ by changing the subject and preaching about the need for ‘better teachers.’
Janet of Salt Lake City was an early responder who wrote, in part: We need to place the responsibility for teaching squarely where it lies — on the teachers. A great teacher can teach anything to any child. Rather than wishing to turn every parent into the perfect parent, a goal that can’t be achieved, we need to provide the training and salaries that will attract the best and the brightest of our college graduates into a career in public education.
Moreover, suggested another respondent from Salt Lake City, SThomas: It’s the fault of the schools that parents aren’t involved. He wrote, in part: Unfortunately, most of these uninvolved parents were educated in the same school systems that are now failing our children, so naturally they lack the kinds of skill sets needed to instill in their children a thirst for learning. And it’s a vicious cycle: these same parents will then go on to elect next year’s school board members who will determine next year’s under-performing curriculum when compared to the rest of the world, thus setting up their children for failure in an ever-changing world.
Many readers attacked Janet, often in a ‘what planet are you living on?’ vein.
Persam1197 of NY was pretty typical: Janet, you said: ‘The public school system of every community has the responsibility to teach every student, regardless of the quality of the home life.’ I agree wholeheartedly, and that’s why placing the burden and responsibility of squarely on teachers as you suggest is misguided. It takes a village to raise a child, and, until our communities accept responsibility for our children, expect more of the same.
Do mom and dad need to improve?
Predictably, teachers — like Malcolm in Pennsylvania — responded defensively to the being criticized. I have taught in public schools for more than 20 years, in an inner city and in a rural setting. I wouldn’t mind being held highly accountable for achievement in children I see for 150 hours a year (50 minutes a day for 180 days) if the parents who are responsible for them the other 8,610 hours out of the year were also held highly accountable. “Accountable” means more than showing up for a 10-minute parent conference once a year.
A more common response, however, was supportive of Mr. Friedman’s point, often with hand-wringing. Here’s what Judy C of Phoenix wrote:
It goes without saying that when parents are actively involved in their children’s education, the children do better. Unfortunately, for many reasons, a lot of parents are uninvolved, and the raising of the child is essentially left up to the school. Sure, there’s nothing better than a good teacher; but really, a child’s primary, and most important, educator is his or her parent. Parents need to step up.
Don Myers of Connecticut agreed:
How the parent respects learning is the key to how the child perceives and respects learning. Learning is a 24/7 deal not just limited to the school and related activities. We treat the school with disdain and with no more respect than we do the baby sitter.
Dale, a former teacher in Idaho, suggested that parents actively instill anti-school attitudes in their children:
Many students regard school and their teachers as adversaries.
Jim G in DC agreed:
Hostility toward education does not come from the great teacher. It comes from the parent, or from the lack of a parent. We must break the cycle of poor student performance in economically disadvantaged homes, and we cannot expect the preschoolers in those homes to do the fixing. The parents must change.
Which prompted a question from Josh Hill in Connecticut:
Sure, but how do you improve the parents?
If the challenge is to improve parents, whose job would that be?
Susan of Eastern Washington noted that “Parents often do not acknowledge that they, and not any school, are ultimately responsible for their children’s educations.”
Why is this happening? Do parents not know they are responsible, are they aware but incapable, or are they willfully ignoring their responsibilities to their children in their mindless pursuit of money and status? (Those were all popular explanations, by the way.)
None of the comments I read addressed what to me is a critical issue, and that is a false distinction between ‘education’ and ‘schooling,’ a distinction that I believe has been perpetuated and reinforced by many educators. That is, too many educators act as if they are in charge, a kind of “Leave your children — and your tax dollars — at the schoolhouse door, and don’t bother us.”
(Many superintendents and principals then set up ‘parent involvement committees’ and other patronizing activities that actually reinforce the barriers between parents and schools. It’s like saying ‘yes, we will let you be involved in your children’s education, but only through channels and by serving on committees.’ No wonder so many parents are fed up with educators!)
So what’s to be done? Ken of Hobe Sound (FL) suggested that “One powerful change a parent from an at-risk family can apply to transform their child’s defeatist approach to school is to become very involved in their student’s education on a daily basis.”
Bingo! But how can that happen? Mr. Friedman quotes from his conversation with Andres Schleicher of OECD:
“Just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”
Sure, every parent can do that if they know they’re supposed to, but I believe that schools and teachers can actually make that happen, organically and naturally, with a carefully designed curriculum in the early grades that continues up through secondary school.
I have written about this elsewhere but here’s a short summary: beginning in kindergarten, teachers should create ‘homework’ that involves the parents or guardians of their students. It can be as simple as asking Mom or Dad about their favorite movie for the first-grader’s ‘show and tell’ the next day. Early writing assignments can be on family-connected topics: What was Mom’s favorite food growing up, and why? What was the first trip Dad or Grandma took? Why is XX your favorite (athlete, actress, political leader)? And so on. And this is not a one-off but a routine, at least once every week.
This works for math as well, with shopping and cooking and anything else that involves numbers.
When ‘homework’ is organic, the families cannot help but ‘fulfil their responsibilities, but not in an ‘eat your peas’ way. Parents will want to see what their children write, and what the teacher writes on the paper. More connections emerge.
I am thankful that we live in a country where we can speak freely, but in public education the ‘them versus us’ approach isn’t working. We all can and must get better, but finger pointing won’t get us there.
What was not happening at home was a mountain of homework. I never brought home work in elementary school except for an occasional essay or book report. I never took books home. I was a good student and received high grades. I never thought to ask my parents to help me with homework – it was MY work.
Teachers taught AT SCHOOL. I remember in first grade being involved with, what I now realize was the teacher’s assessment of our reading skills. She would take a small group of no more than 5 of us at a time (in a classroom with 25-30 kids) and while the rest of the class would be doing some form of written work or art projects – I can’t remember – we would read out loud in these small groups and she’d determine our skill levels. She would then create reading groups from these assessments and we’d still be in small groups of no more than 5, but at comparable levels of skill so she could really concentrate on helping based on her little groups of good, fair and poor reading levels.
We also would have student teachers who stayed in one room with one teacher for at least a year. This same student teacher would sometimes be hired at the school where she “practiced” her skills. Made sense – she already worked with the faculty and knew the kids.
My parents helped with annual fairs and attended PTA meetings. Fund raising was never at the frantic and desperate level we see it now. It was always supplementary. It was to provide “extras”.
Now, both parents (if families are set up that way) work or children live with a grandparent who is on a pension and retired, or is homeless or in foster care. Parents nowadays don’t have time to do what they used to in the past. Schools demand more from them than they did of my parents.
Students have too much busy work disguised as “homework” that takes time away from what little supposed “quality” family time is available. Children should not be carrying heavy backpacks full of books and notebooks when they should be doing this work at school. The only item I would bring back and forth from home to school as an elementary student was my lunchbox. My parents would be stunned at what is expected of parents today. It’s the school’s job to teach. Teaching should be done at school. Kids need to decompress and just noodle around sometimes. This doesn’t happen anymore. We live in fear. We don’t let our children explore. Their lives are so structured they don’t know how to really relax.
Life is different now. Parents have so much more stress and many more obligations to their time than ever. We all need a break. Teachers aren’t bad. Parents aren’t bad. We’re just allowing business interests determine how and what schools should be teaching children so they can sell their products. Our children aren’t learning – they’re being “processed” through an overabundance of testing (to help support the testing industry).
Children need to sing, dance, laugh and learn how to play well with others. All of my K, 1st, 2nd & 3rd grade teachers had a piano in our classroom (and knew how to play it). Every week all the grade levels would take turns in the auditorium (all first graders together, etc) and learn folk songs which also taught us history. We learned square dancing and other types of dancing and had festivals to show off our skills for parents. Learning was fun. It’s not fun anymore because those things are gone or will be soon.
I don’t know why, but we’ve squeezed the life out of public education. It’s not the fault of parents nor teachers. Our leadership has been tearing it down, year by year, until our educational system is now a pale shadow of what it once was. Shame on all of them for strangling the joy out of education. Shame on them for blaming everyone but themselves. Fully fund IDEA. Dismantle NCLB. Allow real academics and educators to create programs that don’t turn our children into widgets for test-taking industrialists. We can still salvage it. But it took years to get into this mess – it will take as long or longer to get it back into a system that works for all children.
I am not a parent. I see some parents who are uninvolved to be sure. I also see too many parents who are TOO INVOLVED – that is, they micromanage their kids, they regularly intervene on their behalf, they sometimes do the work for the children – yes, that happens and it is not that hard to spot.
I am in my 17th year of teaching. It may be my last, given my age (turning 66 in May). Every year I have taught I call all my parents at the start of the year. I try to be in regular contact at least via email. It is close to impossible when you have over 170 students, as I do in my 6 classes.
The education of a child is a collaborative effort. It includes school personnel and parents, to be sure. But at least at the high school level part of the responsibility has to be that of the students. Is it not far better to let the child experience what happens when s.he does not take responsibility in the safer environment of a school so s.he can learn how to take responsibility than to allow the child to go forward believing that someone – parent, administrator, even teacher – is going to provide a rescue?
Just a few thoughts from a classroom teacher.
Blaming the poor and abused for not conforming to the standards of the dominant society is a way of avoiding the racist and oppressive impulses of the larger society. From slavery to industrialism the schools have been the instrument of indoctrination and conditioning used to control those marginalized by persistent poverty and racism.
The miracle is that in spite of the malfunction of the schools so many of these children not only survive but thrive. Mr Friedman is not simply naive about the lives of the poor and the pressures that industrial society imposes on their lives, he is indifferent to the hurdles that a racist society places in the lives of the poor. A more equitable society might solve many of the problems he cavalierly attributes to the marginalized human discards of the modern industrial society.
Well said!! It’s what I call ‘regurgitation education,” and it’s killing us…
Too much of what is occurring is passive learning, with children becoming turned off to school at ever younger ages.
Today, children show up at school without their homework complete and think nothing of it. Parents don’t support the teacher, they argue with them about every little thing. (I know, I am a teacher and have been one for the last 25 years) It seems to me, at least in the area that I teach in, that parents want the teacher to do it all, except they don’t want their children to have any negative consequences, for anything.
And the teacher can’t do it all in school. There are just not enough hours in the day. Yes, we continue to fall behind the other developed nations, but that is because no one wants to give up this archaic schedule we follow. Children need to be in school more hours and more days. We do not live in an agricultural society anymore so entire summers do not need to be scheduled off.
If everyone would leave their agendas and egos at the door and really open up for an intelligent discussion of what is best for the children, maybe education would change. Until then, I don’t see much positive change occuring.
Another problem you bring up that has been mentioned, but not nearly enough done about it is a huge factor: lack of proper after school programs. As the parent of a student with special needs and a parent advocate for others in LAUSD we fought against our mayor’s attempt to take over LAUSD in 2005. Our Special Education Community Advisory Community wrote to him (he never replied) & I spoke out at a town hall we forces on him through then state rep Jackie Goldberg (he dodged real dialogue going to the state in attempts to end-run the city charter).
I asked in the letter & at the town hall (where he walked out before thee public comments) why he didn’t do more in his capacity as mayor to help schools and families. Provide jobs for families so children can come to school well fed & ready to learn. Provide more (& high quality) after school programs so children can have a safe haven until families come home from work. Provide affordable health clinics in or near schools. Police presence in difficult neighborhoods so children can walk to and from school without fear. There is so
much our government has failed to provide that used to be there. LAUSD must now spend a huge chunk of their budget on thier own police force because the city fails to provide cursory patrol. That money could & should go back into education.
I agree that the school day should be longer to provide that safe haven, with educational supports, after school. Parents work 7:30 am to 5,6 pm & later. We need to support them outside school so their children can succeed. Many problems blamed on teachers or parents are due to lack of community supports for families. There is no safety net. A child who sees drug deals and witnesses abuse or even murder will not be an attentive student. Many of our children (& their families) need access to counseling services to help them cope with the daily challenges in their lives.
As a member of our CAC over 10 years now (8 in leadership positions) I work with families who are 200 to 400% below the poverty level. They are well-intentioned or they would not come to meetings looking for help and training. They cannot solve all the problems they face without a little help from outside…and there is very little for these children. Of the almost 80,000+ students with IEPs in LAUSD, 90% are Title I students.
I have seen such an overwhelming need in these last ten years. To their credit, LAUSD’s Division of Education does support families of students with disabilities as best they can with an unfunded mandate (CACs require oversight & parent training, but unlike Title I, provide no funding for it). We’re lean &mean. Creative with minimal funding support, but it’s never enough. Our legislators do need to step up their game and help fami,ies in the community if they want to see thaws children succeed in school. It really does take a village. Politicians have forgotten to homor their side of the social compact.
She was just here, talking and working with almost 500 people, many in teams that included parents, students, educators and community members.
Epstein is one of the most practical, optimistic and useful people I’ve ever met about improving learning, not just schooling. Strongly recommended.
http://www.csos.jhu.edu/p2000/center.htm
Head Start is a systemic policy intervention aimed at addressing this issue, empowering parents to be advocates for their children. It is a critical part of Head Start that is seldom discussed or quantified. Yes parents need to be involved, as do teachers, administrators, and businesses not only through supporting schools but supporting parents’ relationships with schools. It needs to be the job of the grocery store, the church down the street, and the media. It falls on the shoulders of higher education, government agencies, and the corner store.
The truth is blame gets more notice than praise and partnerships. In constantly focusing on the blame we are never looking at the possibility of improvement.
The blame game is unnecessary. Yes, the breakdown of the black family (which we had to deny had happened) took hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. But the same occurred, across racial lines, with the rapid deindustrialization that happened overnight. It was triggered by the Energy Crisis of 1973, but accelerated by union-busting, incentives to move jobs from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, where they stayed for awhile until fleeing to the Third World.
Deindustrialization may have been inevitable, but if it had happened at a natural pace, families could have adjusted better. Then, Reagan accelerated it further by voodoo economics which incentivized the closing of factories that were still profitable. When economic futures disappeared overnight, too many fathers also disappeared.
Look at the percentage of black and white high school dropouts before 1970 that were incarcerated, and then look at the way it exploded after deindustrialization took off. We needed them in the game to teach kids inner directedness so that they would be helpless in the face of rampant consumerism.
The history that “reformers” don’t know is repeating itself. They don’t know how the story of how children’s first teachers, their parents, were undermined by the forces that they see as liberators. Back then it was called, “creative destruction.” It was great for the elite’s creativity, but the destruction wasn’t so much fun for children. “Reformers” have borrowed the union-busting techniques of the early 70s without knowing that union reformers, like Walter Ruether then and Randi today, had the better plans.
The “answer” is realizing that education is a team sport. We need community schools that bring the full diversity of adults into schools and bring isolated kids out into the full diversity of society. Kids learn from people who love them. The key to being effective in secondary neighborhood schools is being a parent first. That’s what the kids really want (social media is just the weak sunbstitute for their “father-yearning”)
The “answer” is not designing a few superstar teachers. We need to invite all types of adults (but especially twenty-somethings and Baby Boomers) into schools. But we won’t social engineer solutions. We need trust that these adults and kids will form loving and trusting relationships, and somehow we’ll create better schools.
Finally, and this is truly non-spiteful, since when do we only learn from great teachers? One of my most successful learning experiences in school, now 50 years ago, was an abysmal teacher who would regularly assign a paper “on anything” for a weekend. I would give her papers on “how to teach Junior English” and on elaborate methodologies. We hated each other, and I certainly learned plenty. The next year in English, I had the department head who asked, after a few weeks, how I’d gotten a “c” the year before. I smiled and said I earned it from one of the worst teachers he’d ever hired. He smiled, agreed, and said “that’s why I fired her.”
I hope you are writing a book….
2 days of classroom
1 day of community service
1 day working on a project he really cared about
1 day hanging out with their parents/guardian/mentor/volunteer (somebody who cares) learning about stuff
So simple and profound.
No one likes this analogy and I have no data to support it. Just have my observations. And for as many as dislike this perspective, fewer still practice it because by the time kids get to be this age, teachers are often frustrated with the system, the gaming that takes place. Parents are tired of the smart mouths and defiance (never mind the other issues of adult-teen conflict). Instead of empowering young people to take increasing responsibility, we put more rules and restrictions that seemingly have no meaning or validity on kids and call it disrespect when they dare ask why.
It does take a village, though as I increasingly like to view it through my dad’s experience growing up in Parker, Idaho. He was born in 1942 and the town never has been more than a few hundred souls, mostly in potatoes or ranching or in services that support those areas. If he and his buddies stepped out of line at school or just in playing or at the little market, they got called on it. And it wasn’t a phone call to Grandma Beck, the neighbor or community member would call the boys by name and ask if their parents would approve of their actions–usually borderline or potentially harmful or destructive. When kids were being kids, people were okay with that. All adults took responsibility for how their community felt. Now, forget it. We hardly dare breathe much less speak out to hold kids of any age accountable. And in that, I’d say we need better adults overall in the lives of our children.
Dysfunction seems to breed more of the same and even worse. Blaming teachers is just too easy. Only in America. Having lived in southern Chile for 2 years at the height of Pinochet’s military rule, I saw teachers honored and respected. And that was literally a Latin American dictatorship. They valued the effort a person put forth to seek out their own learning and the desire to help others do the same. Not in America. We scapegoat them, think it is clever to say if you can’t do anything else, you teach and so on. And then have the audacity to wonder why there is the lack of solid professionals in our classroom and that roughly half quit somewhere in the their first 3-5 years?
Won’t make me popular, but I see it and feel it daily. We are a spoiled and lost nation. We have demanded perfection from our elected officials, from our educators, from our children, while we neglect to give ourselves a good long look in the mirror. Everything that is wrong with education can be fixed by everything that is right with it. We simply need to put up or shut up. By association, everything that is wrong with America can be fixed by everything that is right with her. To borrow and alter a rodeo phrase, we need to nation up and get ‘er done!
Why? Perhaps in part because people are more driven to comment about what’s wrong than what’s right. Perhaps in part because there are some educators who are deeply unhappy with their jobs, the concerns raised by others about education, denial of what schools can accomplish, etc. Perhaps because some of us think the Friedman piece was too much about blaming the victim.
Thanks to John for making the effort to encourage others to think about what we’re grateful for, as well as what’s wrong.
In our work with educators, families and policy-makers, our Center is trying in every way we can to identify things that are going well, honoring those people and places, and trying to help expand those ideas. The finger pointing does not seem to help young people very much, or the people who care about and work with young people. Helping young people is, after all, what I think all this is about. Happy Thanksgiving, and please consider commenting on the things you are grateful for.
I am grateful for the parents who trust me with the lives of their children.
I am grateful for the administrators who recognize that I don’t easily fit into most molds and allow me the freedom to be totally out of the box if I think it will benefit my students
I am grateful for the likes of people who are willing to challenge conventional wisdom and explore alternatives – I have a long list here, and that includes Deb Meier, George Wood, Linda Darling-Hammond, Gerald Bracey, and Joe Nathan – yes, you.
I am grateful for having discovered my purpose in life as I approached 50
I am grateful for a woman named Linda Poole, who when the dean at Johns Hopkins did not want to admit me to the MAT program argued on my behalf
I am grateful to those who cover education who even when they disagree with me allow me to offer my point of view. That includes Jay Mathews and it certainly includes John Merrow.
I am grateful for the fact that we have not YET lost meaningful public schools, which is why I keep engaging in venues like this.
Is that enough?
I have been advovating that local Education Communities (my terminology) be organized to address local issues that are serving as hurdles to improved and effective education for all. All parties are encouraged to engage, bringing with them the particular solutions they champion. BUT here’s the key: rather than pushing their solutions (leading at best to non-sustainable compromise and at worse no action as every party stonewalls any attempt other than their own – THINK CONGRESS …), they work to clearly identify the local issues. But all parties agree to work to find the BETTER ALTERNATIVE. The better alternative is defined as a plan of action that is accepted by all parties as being better than the particular solution championed at the start.
OK, I can hear your reactions (in too many instances): This will never happen. What kind of happy pills are you on? My solution IS the better alternative. … Well, Steven Covey championed the third alternative (I use better alternative to acknowledge the possibility or actually likelihood that more than two solutions will be championed at the start) in is best seller, “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.” Even more fortunately for us, his new book out recently is titled “The Third Alternative: Solving Life’s Most Difficult Problems.” One chapter is “The 3rd Alternative at School.” I of course accepted the concept from the time of the first book and have tried it when appropriate – with some success but also failures, usually due to parties that wouldn’t buy into the effort. If you find this simplistic or unbelievable, please read AND CONSIDER the messages from the book!
I wish Tom Friedman had talked with Joyce Epstein of Johns Hopkins, who knows so much about how to increase constructive school/family/community partnerships.
One of the things I’ve struggled with over 41 years, since entering teaching, is how we can more skillfully share and implement what is working well. We sure have a lot of successful teachers and schools. John alluded to this issue earlier in the fall. I hope he will return to it.
Happy Thanksgiving break.
Here is the link to the NYT article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?ref=edlife
Although not wanting to be a Thanksgiving scrooge, I am thankful for living in an Open Society. That allows us to engage in a tough-minded debate into how to best fill the gaps at home, and elsewhere, of our most vulnerable children.