We do spend alot more than we used to. Kids are also much smarter than they used to be.


Both extremes in this debate have trouble admitting these basic facts.

If the kids are smarter about how to pirate music or play farmville than they ever used to be, are our education dollars being well spent?

 

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One would certainly think so. Although there is not much you can really do to force a kid to learn to read who doesn't want to learn.


I mean I agree if you are graduating kids who literally can't read at all that's the fault of the school. But that almost never happens. When people say kids can't read they don't mean it literally. They mean they still read at a 3rd grade level in middle or high school. In almost all cases that is because they have no interest in learning to read better and never read on their own. Schools should do a better job at pushing these kids to learn even though they don't want to, but there are pretty big limits to what you can do.

Parental involvement goes beyond helping with homework. In some cases, I think classes are expecting a little too much in that regard.

Did your parents take the responsibility to make sure you understood how to read, write, perform basic math skills and tie your shoes during your early school years? If so, your parents were involved more than quite a few parents are today.

Later on, were there consequences if you came home with Ds and Fs on your report card? If so, same as above.

 

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My parents never spent a single minute in my whole K-12 career helping me with academics. That doesn't mean I lived in a family environment that didn't value success in school. It just means my parents were so successful at fostering that environment that they never needed to help me in the first place.


There are some disturbing truths about how kids learn. One of them is that there is a greater correlation between having books in your house and your kid's academic success than there is between actually reading to your kid and your kid's academic success. The truth being that the sort of people who have books in the house are the sort of people who have kids interested in succeeding, whereas people who just read to their kids out of duty - but don't read themselves or have books in the house - don't create that environment.


It is less about actually helping the kid as it is about the environment you create.

Understood and agreed.





Yep, they sure did, but reading and math for me were different than for some. For me, when I was very young, I loved it when people read me stories and it always frustrated me when my parents grew tired of it because then the stories were over. When I learned to read, quite literally a light bulb went off in my head "HOLY CRAP!!! I CAN READ ALL THE STORIES I WANT TO READ ALL THE TIME NOW!" but yeah, I realize not everyone is like that... one of the problems with parents not enforcing these things is that many parents are barely literate themselves.





Absolutely there were, and again, I understand that there are some breakdowns here in this regard too.

The thing I take issue with though is the fact that many schools are sending home 1 to 2 hours of homework every night for kids, with the expectation that parents are helping the kids do this homework, spending about half that time themselves with them - and this is 5th and 6th grade - to say nothing of high school where the trend continues. That's bullsiht! There's too much home work, not enough class learning going on from what I've seen.

 

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I will agree with you about this. The current manifestation of it though comes out in the form of "sign off that you spent 90 minutes helping your kid do 3 hours of home work each night" crap.

In our house the majority of the "help" I needed from my parents beyond getting me art supplies and helping me use things like scissors and paints and crap was in getting me to actually sit and do the projects. We had encyclopedias and when I'd have a report to do, I'd go to the encyclopedia with the intent of learning about whatever topic my project was on, and wind up 3 or 4 hours later, reading about 15 other tangents not related to my project and my parents would have to give me a boot in the ass to get me back on task lol.

In fact, I just connected with one of my old grade school teachers on Facebook and we were discussing this concept recently. She was laughing about it. Apparently she remembered stuff about me that I had even forgotten. She's been teaching now for 40 years and still remembers me and about 80% of her other students not only by name but lots and lots of details about each one. I wonder how many teachers of this caliber are still around given the current state of public education.

 

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Which is why your parents never had to actually help you.


Schools can and should do their best to educate everyone. But it's also stupid to discredit how much the environment the kid is in influences his or her learning habits.


Kids who come from families that value learning almost always will do well no matter who their teachers are.


On the other hand, kids who come from families that despise learning will almost always do badly regardless of the teacher.


In the squishy middle is where teachers can make a difference. One of the defining features of American education in the last 30 years is that the squishy middle has been getting smaller while the two ends of the spectrum have been accounting for a larger and larger % of students. The result is that teachers matter less than they used to.

While I agree with you mostly, that's a social issue, not an educational issue. It will not be solved by making parents sign a paper that says they sat with their kid while the kid did 3 times as much homework as I ever had each night...

Why is so much work coming home? Why is that not being accomplished in the classroom?

 

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I think we're pretty much in agreement on the parental involvement issue, then. And yes, some curricula have begun relying too much on parental involvement.

Some years ago, high schools started really looking at the dropout problem - why couldn't they teach the kids they were getting? Well, eventually they determined that the #1 factor was that the students were coming to them without the proper skills being taught at the middle schools. So the middle schools did the same search and, you guessed it, they looked back to the elementaries. So where are the elementaries going to go? Of course they have nowhere else to point the finger, so some of them started making more and more work for their students to reinforce the skills they're supposed to have when they leave. Of course it was all a ridiculous proposition, since there was never a standard in place (most of the time) to determine if this new curriculum was an improvement over the old. Now more and more districts are getting to the point where they can, in fact, dial in on a specific curriculum or program taught 10 - 12 years prior and being able to see if it had any long-term benefit, but it's going to take several more years before there's enough schools with enough data to start really making a paradigm shift here. In the meantime, there's still a lot of finger-pointing going on. because in truth nobody really knows why it is what it is. But (though it isn't common knowledge) we are starting to get to a point where dropout rates are decreasing and test scores are at least stable (if not increasing) in most regions, so I think the data are starting to influence the curricula in the correct ways.

 

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