Should Parents Be Accountable?

That's what this piece suggests. If teachers are to be fired based on test results, what do we do about parents who can't get their kids to school? Should they be fined? Should their names appear in the NY Post so their neighbors can shun them and they can fear leaving their homes?

Probably not. Who knows why kids do what they do? They don't, in fact, come with guarantees. I know some great parents who wind up with extremely problematic kids. Of course, there is such a thing as negligence, and we ought not to accept that from parents, teachers, or anyone. In NY, parents who won't come to school to discuss their kids are negligent.

Teachers who won't help those kids are negligent too. But all the help in the world won't help a kid who, for whatever reason, is not prepared to learn. As an ESL teacher, I see kids who've been dragged from their countries and cultures and really don't want to be here. Kids like that cling to their cultures and refuse to learn English. When kids come from homes characterized by poverty and despair, teachers can't push a button and get them up to speed.

Parents have more influence over their own kids. But kids, despite our best efforts, have minds of their own. If parents do their jobs, they'll try very hard to steer kids in the right direction. They will not always succeed. If teachers to our jobs, we'll try to make kids understand and excel. But we won't always succeed either.

It's not a coincidence that so-called failing schools invariably contain high concentrations of ESL and special education students. It turns out, remarkably, that kids who don't know English have a tougher time passing tests. Furthermore, kids with learning disabilities often take longer to pass said tests. "Reformers" shout "no excuses," but these are not excuses. They are facts.

Of course parents should be accountable for responsible parenting. And of course teachers should be accountable for responsible teaching. But no one should be asked to perform miracles. I don't, for example, expect politicians to magically erase poverty. But it's absolutely unacceptable they ignore it and lay its consequences on working teachers, unions, parents, or anyone.

Pogo (pictured above) was right. We're all responsible for our society, and if we're going to change it for the better, we'll have to do more than simply point fingers at one another.

Education Begins At Home

We've been saying here at NYC Educator for a long time now that we think that quality schools and quality teachers matter in education.

But we have also been saying that there are other factors that affect how well students do in school and one of the most important is what takes place in the home.

The Educational Testing Service - the fine folks who develop and administer 50 million standardized tests a year, including the SAT - have just concluded an education study that finds the same thing:

The study, “The Family: America’s Smallest School,” suggests that a lot of the failure has to do with what takes place in the home, the level of poverty and government’s inadequate support for programs that could make a difference, like high-quality day care and paid maternity leave.

The E.T.S. researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.

“Together, these four factors account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states,” the report said. In other words, the states that had the lowest test scores tended to be those that had the highest percentages of children from single-parent families, eighth graders watching lots of TV and eighth graders absent a lot, and the lowest percentages of young children being read to regularly, regardless of what was going on in their schools.

Which gets to the heart of the report: by the time these children start school at age 5, they are far behind, and tend to stay behind all through high school. There is no evidence that the gap is being closed.

Richard J. Coley, director of E.T.S.’s policy information center and a co-author of the report, concludes the following:

“Kids start school from platforms of different heights and teachers don’t have a magic wand they can wave to get kids on the same platform. If we’re really interested in raising overall levels of achievement and in closing the achievement gap, we need to pay as much attention to the starting line as we do to the finish line.”

Indeed.

The reason why this study is important is because it emphasizes something educators already know - our classrooms and our schools do not exist in vacuums. Our students come to us with lives and backgrounds that are far more influential upon their academic potentials and performances than whatever I do for 45 minutes a day, 183 days a year.

This means that if we really want to address the achievement gap in education, we have to look outside the school system for some of the solutions to the education problem.

We have to look to health care so that students come to school ready and able to learn.

We have to look to day care so that students begin the education process long before they start school.

We have to look to a living wage so that single parents don't have to work three jobs in order to make ends meet and give their kids the short shrift out of necessity.

We have to look to vacation time and dinner time so that families can begin to spend time with each other instead of simply seeing each other coming and going at the door.

What we hear from the billionaire businessmen, computer company execs and hedge fund managers masquerading as education reformers is that students do not perform well in school because the school day is not long enough, the school year is not long enough and the teachers are not good enough. So if we just increase the school day and school year and add more standardized testing/accountability mechanisms for both teachers and students, we can fix the problems with education.

But as the ETS study found, these solutions are false.

At the high school I attended years ago, a Jesuit school on the West Side of Manhattan, school officials have a rule that all after-school activities must be over by 5 PM and all students must be out of the building by then.

You see, these school officials think it's important that families spend quality time together at the dinner table if at all possible and they know that if kids are still at school after 5 PM, it's difficult for families to do that.

Now many families may not be able to spend time together at the dinner table out of economic necessity, but nonetheless these school officials see families eating dinner together as part of the education process (albeit the home part of it.)

What a novel idea - an hour spent talking with mom and dad about what happened during the school day is worth more than an extra hour spend with Mr. ____ or Ms. ____ at some after school activity.

What we need to do is rebuild an American society where families that have the time and the money to be able to do this can exist.

Currently, we're heading the other way.

Many Americans have to work longer and harder to make less than their parents did.

It takes two incomes now to do what it used to take just one to do 30-40 years ago.

Increased debt has replaced wage gains for many Americans.

Until we have a conversation in America that starts with "Hey, how come only the top 5% have made an economic gains in the last 20 years...", none of this is going to change.

But the one thing we can do is fight the billionaire media moguls, the computer company execs, and the hedge fund managers who favor re-feudalization of society and want to socialize kids to it as soon as possible with their education reforms of working longer and harder to make less.

The Book

Ms. Lee and I are talking to a student about his cutting problem. He tells us he lives above a church and that his parents, out of the country, pay the church to take care of him. He then names a half-dozen kids I know, male and female, who are doing the same. It's clear this church's concept of remote parenting entails letting the kids do pretty much whatever the hell they please.

Ms. Lee is horrified.

"You have to watch them like a hawk, especially in this city," she tells me later. Ms. Lee's three kids have all gotten into elite NYC high schools. When she talks parenting, I always listen, hoping to stumble upon one of her secrets.

"Who's going to help these kids?" she asks. "Nobody, that's who."

"It's not just the obvious things, either," she continues. "You have to watch everything. One day my son came home and told me he wouldn't have to do science homework all year."

"Was he just lucky?" I ask.

"Not with me," she replies. "I went to the school and they told me they didn't have enough books, so he couldn't have one. They had given it to someone else."

"How did they decide who to give books to?"

"They told me my son was a good student. They said his partner really needed the book. You're punishing my son because he's smart, I told them. That's unacceptable. He'd better have a book this week, I said."

"What happened?"

"He got a book the next day. What are these kids gonna do without parents?"