Parents and Schools

Recently Rob posted a couple times about Steve Job’s comments on the American Education system. As a response to that we got inundated with a number of teachers’ union apologists. This comment though made me think.

No one seems to have mentioned the most important thing about our education system- everyone is stuck on blaming the teacher’s unions for the failure of our system. The most important part of a child’s education begins at home with the PARENT.How well a child does in school is almost always related to the parent’s involvement with the child. When a parent is at the PTA metings, goes to the after school activities, and lets the child know that school is the top priority, I don’t care what the income level is or what school the child attends, 99% of the time, that child will do well in school. Stop blaming the teachers-blame the source of the problem- the parents. Childern learn by example- if the parent doesn’t think that school is imporant, why should the child? The best advice? Get involved instead of blaming everone else for your child’s academic failures.

Now I don’t have proof that this is a union member or anything like that. It appears that this person used a fake email to make his comment. However it sounds like a teachers’ union apologist to me. I have had a friend who is a teacher complain that “parents never do anything” so that leads me to believe that this is a common thought among teachers. I really do hope that his person is not a teacher himself, because his spelling is worse than mine.
It’s true that the most important thing I can do is be a parent above all else. The most important job being a parent is preparing my kids to be successful without me. So I fully accept that it’s my responsibility to see that my kids are educated. One way I see doing that is advocating the best possible method for the kids of being education. I don’t believe that the current monopoly system of government schools and union protected teachers is the best method.
Society has created the schools and hired the teachers to provide education. But now it seems the schools feel that when they fail it’s the fault of the parents. As the comment writer pointed out parents that care usually succeed in educating their kids, often in spite of the public schools.
But if society has created the school system to help all kids, not just ones with superior parents. How about the kids of parents who themselves were products of the failed education system. (How about the kids of parents that have deeper problems?) How are these parents supposed to go about doing the task of educating their kids when they didn’t get an education of their own? Even though I’m a highly educated person (college graduate) I don’t always know the right way to go about introducing a subject to my kids. I think it’s unconscionable that the schools are demanding more resources while pushing more of the responsibilities onto the parents.
In my case the school has my children for seven hours of the day. I would say that an hour of that would absolutely be unproductive time (lunch etc). So that gives the school six hours of instruction.
I try to get home by 6 pm at night. That’s our set dinnertime. We eat dinner and get straight to homework at 6:30. I can’t get more than an hour and an half of good working time before the kids are beyond paying attention. There are times that it seems that I’m doing the original teaching on a subject meaning that I don’t think that this material got more than a casual glance in school. During school meetings we are told that the teachers only have so much time for each subject because they are required to cover so many different subjects in the day. That’s not the fault of the teachers but of the state for mandating an unreasonable curriculum.
We can’t do homework every night which is something the schools don’t seem to understand either. We also have the kids in some out-of-school programs (such as the notorious Cub-Scouts), church and sports. We don’t go overboard on activiites but when are the kids supposed to do their homework?
The homework we do get usually consists of math, reading and spelling. It seems to me that the these subjects must not be getting enough time in order to spend it on something else. I wonder what they do spend their time on. I had one other parent complain that the teacher says they don’t have enough time to teach but expect the parents to help out with a ‘recycling project.’
I’ve said that it’s the my responsibility to see that my kids are educated. But to the extent that I’ve hired the public schools to help with the job I expect them to be focusing on teaching the necessities. I don’t hire people expecting that they will engage in the fluff and expect me to do the core of their job.
I think by and large my kids are attending a pretty good school. So if I have these complaints what about the kids and parents in a failing school?
The education system has more than enough resources to do the job. Since they can’t come up with a better strategy than expecting all parents to be above average we need to come up with a better system of providing education to our young people. School voucher are coming, someday.