This parent writes about how he and his wife decided to enroll their children in an urban public school and to remain closely involved in their schooling and their lives. As black parents, they knew all the risks, and they decided not to move to the suburbs. As college graduates, they wanted the best for their children, and they made an informed choice.
As it happened, both kids got a good education, both went to top colleges, and both are on their way to good professional careers.
This is a testament to the power of informed parenting.
In the Scholastic-Gates survey of teachers, teachers were asked what they wanted most. The greatest number said they wanted families to be more involved. (What mattered least: longer school days and hours, merit pay).
This family showed what a difference it makes when families do their share–and more.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, I think it would help if we all acknowledged the obvious failures in the public school system so that they can be addressed and maybe some day, fixed.
My biggest problem with public schools is the lack of academic excellence. When students can graduate high school with little knowledge, if any, of grammar, history and math facts, there is a real problem.
Here is a post from a home-schooler on a blog:
“One well known homeschool program, Abeka, uses video recordings of class lectures combined with book work. It’s like sitting in the actual classroom. Our children were so far ahead of public school students that they aced the GED after Grade 10 and entered college two years early. Both have now graduated from fully accredited Universities and our son has a Master’s Degree.”
Read more: http://www.city-data.com/forum/politics-other-controversies/1672565-should-u-s-withdraw-unesco-ban.html#ixzz24T2L5UD7
Our schools need to go back to educating students. They cannot become a hospital, (cradle to grave) OR the parents and then still expect to deliver a quality education.
If you want the schools to be community centers where they can get physicals, condoms, sex ed, alcohol ed, dental exams, social engineering, political indoctrination, new age religion, etc. then something has to give.
What gives? Academic excellence.
That will not be tolerated by parents who still parent their own children and expect a quality education for their kids.
So maybe we need to decide what public schools will be in the future. A medical facility or an education establishment that focuses on educating students in the best way possible.
IF you want the STATE to become the PARENT, you can’t expect good parents to hand over their children to the STATE. They will run as they’ve been showing you. And when they run, they will not want to pay the public schools money that they have to spend on a private or home-school program.
That’s just the reality that no one seems to want to understand.
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I am as strong a believer in academic excellence as anyone you will ever meet.
There is no evidence whatever that home schooling is superior to public schools or any other kind of formal schooling.
There are somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million children who are being schooled at home.
Some are being schooled by well-educated parents. Some are being schooled by uneducated parents.
Parents have a right to school their children at home, but they are not right to claim that home schooling is superior.
It may be for the children of a small numbers of parents with advanced degrees, but not for others.
And I repeat: There is no evidence.
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A parent knows when their kids are not learning math facts. They know when their kids are not learning grammar. They know when the school is passing out condoms and undermining their authority.
They don’t need a study to show them.
The home-school programs are almost dummy proof. If you look at a Saxon textbook, it’s easy for a parent to use it and the kids learn math facts in the process.
In the public schools our kids get Everyday Math which forces our public school students into Kumon and Sylvan.
Parents know what is going on, they really do not need studies to tell them.
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There is zero evidence for the superiority or even the adequacy of home schooling.
If an uneducated parent is in charge of schooling their child, they lack the resources and knowledge of a staff of educated professionals.
Saying something doesn’t make it so.
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I would suggest going through the Seton home-shooling curriculum. Then walk into our public school and compare the materials.
Amazingly parents with no formal education can use these programs and offer their children a superior education.
Why? Simply because they use a program that still focuses on the basics.
I’m sure you can acknowledge the advantages a student would have going to a school that offers the “Core Knowledge” curriculum vs. the fuzzy math, etc. curriculum?
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MWB,
“They know when the school is passing out condoms and undermining their authority.”
Please cite study showing that schools are passing out condoms. I think that is one more in a long line of urban myths. And, even if it were common that schools did so (and I don’t know of any evidence that it is a widespread practice) how does that “undermine their authority?”
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Duane, again, if you want the schools to become the parent, hospital and community center, the result will be that good parents will simply remove their children from that public school.
We see it in NH. The rate of home-schooling is going UP and the number of students enrolling in public schools is going down. You can visit the NH DOE’s web site to get those stats.
The choice is now yours to make.
As far as handing out condoms. Not only did they do that without parental knowledge, they also handed them out in a kit that contained flavored lubricant and candy.
Here’s the story: http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=news&sc3=&id=114811
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MWB,
One anecdotal story does not prove or even imply that public schools are “handing out condoms undermining parental authority”. Now, I certainly wouldn’t have okayed what they did at that school, especially for the age group. But to state that public schools undermine parental authority by handing out condoms (and you only cite one school where this has occurred) as you have done is ludicrous and risible.
Since this example appears to be an extreme exception please again explain how public schools “undermine the parent’s authority”
“Duane, again, if you want the schools to become the parent, hospital and community center the result will be that good parents will simply remove their children from that public school.” I said nothing about schools becoming hospital, etc. . . so I’m not sure why you brought that up again. And your comment about “good parents” seems quite belittling to those parents who choose to take advantage of the education offered by the public schools. Are those parents “bad” then?
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I think it is really unfair to state that academic excellence has been compromised in public schools. That’s a really negative thing to say about ALL public schools in the entire nation. One class that does not teach what you think they should does not a loss of excellence create.
I was my university’s valedictorian 15 years ago. I was a national Advanced Placement scholar in high school and won state awards for academics.My students, in my class and others, are doing much more complicated and sophisticated work at younger ages than I ever experienced. I teach at the junior high school where I attended as a teenager. It has gone from a small suburb/rural school to a low-income, suburban school. And yet, the kids work harder and have higher expectations.
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Duane, I live in the hotbed of social engineering because I’m very close to the Mass. boarder.
What I sense from you is the unwillingness to honestly look at what is driving parents away from public schools.
I do not think “overall” it’s the teachers OR the unions. I’m not a big fan of the unions because of their political partisanship and I don’t think they are doing a good job of representing teachers right now. However I’ve kept my kids out of the public schools for a variety of reasons but NEVER because of the teachers or the unions.
IF we can’t be honest about what many of these schools have become, why parents are pulling their kids out and what can be done to turn that tide around, then we will get no where.
Teachers will continue to be frustrated.
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My school has lost students to a charter school because the parents in that area do not want their children to mingle with the low-income, minority students from other areas that the school serves. The parents who have already had children at my school are not sending their children to the charter, because they know that we have a quality program. It’s the parents who have not had children at my school that see minority students and think “bad.” That has nothing to do with the quality of the school.
MOM, I am not trying to insinuate that you are that kind of parent. I am just saying that participation in charter schools happens for a lot of reasons, many of which have NOTHING to do with the local charter school. Instead, it’s poverty, segregation, distance to schools (the charter school is closer to some people than the public school), or the whole, false, “public schools are failing” mantra that is being spouted by charter school organizations and their ilk.
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^ Why the increasingly low bar for graduation? Because politicians have decided to bludgeon schools and teachers with graduation rate, an egregious exercise in failure to understand correlation and causation, to say the least.
If that’s the metric that politicians want to use, however wrong and misguided, then school systems will find a way to raise the graduation rate. Devaluing a HS diploma is certainly the easiest way to do that. Graduation rate, like so many other outcomes, is a reflection of myriad factors, few to none of which involve what happens inside the walls of a school. As a grad school prof liked to say, “graduation rate begins in the womb”.
Knowingly or not, your commentary proves Dr Ravitch’s point re: the immense value of family involvement and investment in students’ lives.
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I completely agree that the graduation rate politicians use as a measure of success is now is a false measurement. Sadly the media/press uses it with little knowledge of what it really means.
The fact that a home-schooled student can receive a quality education, using a quality curriculum should be analyzed and not so easily dismissed.
When fuzzy math puts a child on a path to Algebra I in 9th grade and Saxon puts them on a path to Algebra I in 7th grade, that should be noted and analyzed.
The politicians force children to stay in school and not drop out. That’s quite different than quality textbooks vs fuzzy curriculum.
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You seem to imply that all that is needed for a quality education is video taped lectures and a good textbook. You have just agreed with the deformers that there is no need for an experienced, educated teaching staff. Five weeks of class management techniques and a script of the basics should handle it?
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No I’m saying without quality curriculum/text books, you’ve set the teacher and the student up for potential failure.
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I don’t use a textbook at all. I use primary historic sources. Does that make my students failures?
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You are constantly pointing out the need for quality textbooks. Have you tried writing one for each of the curriculum areas? Perhaps you could begin your own publishing company.
This post had nothing to do with textbooks. It was about the value of parent involvement.
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There are grassroots parent orgs all over the country fighting fuzzy math in their classrooms.
Kids in our state no longer learn cursive writing. They are lucky to get any kind of grammar instruction.
In Hollis NH parents took their disdain for Everyday math to their School Board. It took them TWO years to get it replaced. Only to have the school replace it with another lousy fuzzy math book.
Why? Because NH’s state math standards are fuzzy and the school administrators would rather align their programs to lousy standards than listen to parents.
You can read about it here: http://www.nychold.com/let-falcone-0701xx.html
Again, the problem was NOT with the teachers OR the unions, but the materials they were forced to use in the classroom.
Parents are pulling their kids OUT of the public schools for a variety of reasons. If you’d rather not hear WHY. That is your choice. If you’d rather understand the problem, I’d suggest : LISTENING!
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Jennifer, do you not see the difference between a teacher being forced to use a program they know will fail their students and a teacher who chooses her own sources to teach history?
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MOM: Of course I do. But your comment stated that “without quality curriculum/ textbooks, you have set up the teacher and student for potential failure.” I was simply responding to your own quotation. I hope that you see that I (and, I assume, other commentators) are not trying to get in an argument with you. We just want a quality education for ALL students.
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Thank you for the clarification. I have a teacher in another town (In NH) who was selected a few years ago to sit on a committee to choose a math program for her district. She was one of 3 teachers chosen. Instead of giving her 3 good options, they gave her 3 fuzzy math programs. She went into it with an open mind but eventually resigned from the committee because she could not give her approval to any of them. She knew she’d be failing her students if she used any of them.
The school felt the need to align the program with the state standards. NH had fuzzy math standards so they aligned with those standards knowing the program would be a failure.
This teacher went from teaching 5th grade to kindergarten because according to her, she couldn’t do less damage in that grade.
She also began home-schooling her son in math after school with a better text book so he wouldn’t fall victim to the lousy math education the school was now forcing upon the students via the teachers.
This teacher spoke out to the school board and parents but was quickly silenced by the administration who told her to essentially shut up.
Fast forward a few years, the school is FINALLY rethinking changing out the book. How many students slipped through the cracks while they were more concerned about federal $$$ than they were math education for their students?
IF curriculum/textbook/ issues are not addressed as a real problem in some schools, then you will be ignoring some of the real reasons people pull their kids out of public schools and support school choice.
I believe there are other reasons like: lack of discipline and social engineering that drive people away.
I think the few bad teachers certainly cause problems for SOME parents, but I DON’T think that is the driving force for parents to withdraw their kids.
However right now there is an all out assault on teachers and unions as if that is the MAIN problem.
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Every Day Math seems to be a sticking point for a lot of people who came out of a traditional math program, like me. Apparently, it takes considerable training to implement successfully. Students who go through the program are said to have a better conceptual understanding of math. They know why long division works rather than just memorizing the algorithm, like I did. It wasn’t until I had to teach division to some learning disabled students that I sat down and pulled it apart. Once they understood the conceptual basis, the process was logical. They still made mistakes, but they could catch their own mistakes. They could tell if their answers made sense. I tutored a student whose school taught the Every Day Math program. It drove me crazy since I had none of the teacher materials. I could not figure out any pattern to the instruction, and it did bother me that my student did not know his math facts. His family was not good at monitoring time he was supposed to spend on computer based fact games, so it was a battle. He would have struggled in any math program without adequate supervision.
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Its’ a sticking point because I’ve had to tutor kids in math and have heard from many parents whose children never learned the basics because of this program.
I do wonder, how anyone expects students to work a polynomial long division problem when the standard algorithm isn’t taught in EDM.
My point is this, if parents are forming grassroots organizations all around the county to fight a math program, I’m not sure what more evidence we need that they are being ignored.
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