Filed under: corruption, education, failing, illiteracy, no child left behind, parental apathy, parental involvement, poverty, teacher accountability, title 1
My school district is coming out of a 5-year haze of corruption. The school board, the superintendent, the central office were all involved in embezzlement, laundering, etc, etc, etc. For five years…they padded their pockets while the students suffered. Thankfully, in April, a new school Board was elected, the superintendent and most of the central office staff were fired. We are coming out of the haze.
The new regime has requested that all teachers and administrators within the school district list out all of the problems within the school district. I’m on page four and not done…but i keep finding myself wandering onto the same question and the same rant over and over….
Is the educational system designed to fail Title 1 school districts?
The structure of the educational system relies on a set of assumptions surrounding the role parents will take in continuing education outside of the classroom. These assumptions, that form the basis of the educational system, are typically made by well-educated, affluent white men raised by more than one parental figure. I shall call them the “governing men.”
The governing men assume that the parents will monitor and insure the success of homework and studying and act as “tutors” if the student does not understand a concept. They assume that the parents will be home to insure that the homework is done. They also assume that the parents will take an active role in their child’s education.
People living in poverty do not fit into these assumptions. Many parents have some level of illiteracy that does not afford for them the skill set to tutor their child. Many parents work long hours that leave the children at home alone and without the supervision needed to monitor work habits. Many parents, due to their own lack of adequate education are apathetic towards their child’s education….and often times hostile toward the educational institution that failed them.
There is a buzz surrounding “parental involvement”…afterall, it is one of the many tenants of No Child Left Behind. Yet, there is no adequate protocol and guidance given to schools for parental involvement with parents that don’t fit into the foundational assumptions. Schools are left hanging when looking to involve a parent with a 7th grade reading level, that works three minimum wage jobs, has no car, has her two kids, her daughters baby and her sisters two children living with her in a two bedroom apartment that she can barely afford and is hostile towards school administration…
The above description is for the majority of the families I teach. We are failing to involve these parents. A school cannot succeed without some level of parental involvement….How do we reach out to them?
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This was always a source of confusion to me as a parent. I went to a private school from 6-12th grade, and my parents never participated in my education beyond buying the supplies that I needed– they couldn’t; I was learning things that they had never been taught. So, even though I was better-educated when my daughters were in school, I was perplexed by this idea that I was supposed to continue educating them after they came home from school. Also, we had little money, and I worked a hard 8-10 hours every day in addition to transporting the girls to their athletic and social activities. I really did not have time or energy for ‘tutoring’ every evening. The freaking annual science projects were the worst. As a humanities major, I had little interest in science experiments, and yet we were supposed to do this thing with data and displays and etc. entirely at home, and exactly one science teacher in all the years that my 2 girls were in school offered any guidance whatsoever.
Whew, I’m glad all that is over! And my girls came out being pretty well educated in spite of my resistance, largely I think because of the two or three things that I could do that made a huge difference: we had no television in the house at all, the girls had an unlimited budget for buying books for themselves (mostly through the Scholastic program), and we kept a computer working and available for them, which was, for us, a pretty big expense.
Anyway, I’m not sure that you need to convince parents to do more. They do a lot already, and children are naturally curious and interested in learning. Maybe you just need to get them to turn off the TV.
Comment by Marijo Cook October 27, 2007 @ 10:41 am