Here's an article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on what ordinary people can do to promote public school reform. These sentences caught my attention:As a city, a state and a region, we can revolutionize school curricula, impose new testing regimens and move from traditional schools to charter schools to something in between. We can blame teachers, strip them of tenure and punish or reward them until the cows come home.
But it’s difficult to see how anything we do will matter unless children have caring and encouraging adults on their side when school is not in session.
The article states broadening community involvement in public schools is important. Question: How can you broaden community involvement when students are once again taken out of their failed communities and bussed into the suburbs? Open enrollment may allow children to escape "failing schools", but it is difficult to seriously entertain community involvement with students who commute one hour each way to and from school.
If the common core standards, new assessments, charters, open enrollment and virtual schools won't fix the problem, and the ticket to a good education is community involvement, how can the government and legislators mandate people to care for the children in that community? Perhaps that's the underlying missing piece in the education puzzle.
Figure out how to find the piece to that puzzle: Adults who don't/can't/won't care for children and don't/can't/won't value education. That's a puzzle the government or legislators can't complete. And as long as school decisions on curriculum and standards remain far away from the local level, parental involvement will become more and more removed as well. Why would parents become involved in a system in which they have no voice?
Well said.... the answer is that removing local control will result in even less involvement from parents. The strength of our system has been local control and involvement. The Common Core is just one of many things that are stripping parents of any say in the schools that they pay for.
ReplyDelete"Question: How can you broaden community involvement when students are once again taken out of their failed communities and bussed into the suburbs?"
ReplyDeleteAnd how can you broaden community involvement when all decisions are based upon a 'common core' as determined by a far removed centralized power?
To encourage someone to be involved, there needs to be something they can be involved in! Not mindlessly complying with, which is in effect what they really mean, but actually having a hand and say in decisions and actions, and that can only be done, when the decisions over content and administration are handled locally, by those who see that they can become involved in the education and care of their children.
The puzzle piece isn't missing, it's been misshapen by ever more centralized control, which forces parents and community out of being involvement in the school system. Until the forces are removed which are responsible for deforming the missing piece, the hole will remain.
You can't increase parent involvement by bussing kids out of the community. In fact, bussing kids out of the community pretty much destroys the local schools and the community.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, money talks.... that is why Bill Gates is now the self proclaimed king of education even though by his own admission he knows nothing about teaching.
If schools want parental involvement then they need to spend time inviting and listening to the concerns of parents.... it seems that schools want public money but they don't want any common sense input... the latest fad carries much more weight...
BobDean said "You can't increase parent involvement by bussing kids out of the community. In fact, bussing kids out of the community pretty much destroys the local schools and the community."
ReplyDeleteYep.
"If schools want parental involvement then they need to spend time inviting and listening to the concerns of parents.... it seems that schools want public money but they don't want any common sense input... the latest fad carries much more weight..."
Except that the schools, in their administrative DNA, don't want that input, only compliance. I just made a longish post going into some of the history behind how modern schools came to be as they are, and the short of it is that the idea behind them is that experts are to decide how things will be done, in order to make the schools and society more efficient, and the concerns and involvement of teachers, let alone the parents, are of little or no concern to them. They will force the issues, and what they consider to be important, as far as we will allow them to do so.
Not because they're power hungry (though certainly some may be), but because they think it's what they should be doing - they know best, they are the experts, that is how it should be.
One quote about an early designer of what we’ve got to deal with today, Elwood P. Cubberly, summed it up (admiringly) as his having,
“... advocated autonomy for school administrators. Although school boards might set policy, they lacked expertise to run school systems and Cubberley believed they should give way to the administrator's expertise in day-to-day operations.”,
and as Cubberley himself cheerfully noted,
"...There are many signs of an increasing centralization of management which will ultimately lead to greater efficiency. Many options which communities have to-day will in time be changed into obligations. The state oversight of private and parochial education is likely to increase slowly, especially along the lines of uniformity in statistics and records, sanitary inspection, common standards of work, and the enforcement of the attendance laws. In particular, the attitude toward the control of the child is likely to change. Each year the child is coming to belong more and more to the state, and less and less to the parent...."
Gates believes that his technologizing of the schools will be just another step, he probably imagines it will be the master stroke, in making the 'educational process' more efficient, finally enabling them to access all the data necessary (and you know that just trips Gate's trigger) to better manufacture happy little efficient workers as a 'good' school should.
He was taught it. He believes it.
Sadly, a large number of parents do also.
But facts are stubborn things... and if we are just as stubborn, we may yet school them on it. It's worth it to try anyway.
See my comments about Gates on the Washington Policy Website here: http://www.washingtonpolicy.org/blog/post/bill-gates-provides-guideposts-nations-governors-education-effective-teachers-larger-class
ReplyDelete