I’ve read your essay and your list and I agree with you. I teach in a low-income high school. We have a new principal who has real spine. He encourages teachers to remove students who refuse to work or are disruptive. If they leave school so be it.
Interesting thing regarding grammar. My school requires every teacher, regardless of subject, to start class with a reading and writing assignment. Apparently, there’s a problem with teaching language skills. I don’t know what the problem(s) is/are. (Classes too big would be my guess.) I now read that this is even a problem in colleges.
BTW, I’m proud to say that I do not blame parents. Nor have I heard a colleague blame a parent.
Appreciate your comment! Also glad to hear about your principal and colleagues. It's always nice to hear about the good ones, I know they're out there. Sadly, however, they are outliers I've found.
Grammar should be explicitly taught from third grade onward, but I strongly suspect the challenge is teachers don't know it/weren't taught how to teach it. That's the fault of the teacher Ed programs.
I would like to know if this is true and, if so, how we fix it. One concern of mine is that the students we actually have in school are somehow different than the students at whom our curriculum is targeted.
So true. I once had an IEP administrator tell us it didn’t matter if our fourth grader still struggled to count money because they don’t test on it after that grade. Telling time, nope. Grammar, never.
How long did you teach and how long ago was that? Follow up question: when was the last time you asked a teacher about their curriculum and they refused to share it with you?
I'm a private tutor now, so I work with families who struggle to get access to "the curriculum" just to help their own children, never mind to share information with me so I can help their kids.
I was in the classroom in the early 90s, and I left b/c I refused to teach look-say and "whole language" BS. I have been tutoring ever since. As a parent, I was ROUTINELY denied access to curriculum materials, or stonewalled and told something was curriculum that was just a day's lesson, if that. Once everything was on the Chrome book, it was nigh impossible to see what the teacher had planned for the WEEK, never mind the semester, and when I tried to ask for more info, they treated me like an invader.
As soon as Covid made it possible for me to homeschool my kids around the court order from my ex prohibiting me from doing it, I did, and they've never gone back.
One day I'll sit down and write the whole saga of what happened to my children, in both standard public and then public charter school...I've hesitated mostly b/c they've asked me not to go into too much detail here for their privacy, but someday....
Add to that the hundreds (literally) of parents I've spoken with or interviewed, the eyewitness testimonies and whistleblowers from all over the country who would back this up, and you have what I know about this issue.
One thing that parents can control is getting their child to school on time. The first 20 minutes of the day in most grade school classrooms I’ve subbed in is spent on “busywork” to allow the stragglers to mosey in. Same thing with parents who seem to consistently pull their child out of class early on Fridays.
Parents should also be sure to sign up for class newsletters (usually electronic) and attend Back-to-School nights and Parent-Teacher conferences. That’s the best way to take a look at the physical layout of the classroom, get some idea of the teacher’s personality and style (very important in middle & high school where there are multiple teachers), find out where your child is sitting, and see what the teacher has displayed on the walls and the bookshelves.
One thing schools can control is to encourage personal responsibility in the students. Parents are not responsible for ensuring their child’s computer is charged and in the backpack or that homework is completed correctly, although they should be monitoring it. The consequences of missing an assignment, forgetting your computer or a textbook is much less for a second grader than when one becomes an adult.
Agreed. I find schools are asking kids to be responsible at too-young ages for things they really ought not be, and are NOT demanding they be responsible for age-appropriate things. Getting to school on time goes along with absenteeism, as I would call a chronically late student chronically absent for the most important part of the day. The rest of the day is going to suffer if they are habitually late, and yes, this is within the parents' control.
There's just one thing in particular that I think parents can and should take blame for: Trusting the schools to begin with. When you rely on government-run facilities to function as daycare so you and your spouse can go out and work 120+ man-hours a week, do not be surprised at what fruit that particular tree bears.
If they trust them...There are people who literally have no choice but to send them, and I'm not talking about single parents, I'm talking about divorced parents. In a shared custody situation, the parent that wants public school or does not support homeschooling or refuses to chip in for private school wins by default family court prefers the state and always well unless you have some compelling reason for them not to. With roughly half of marriages ending in divorce, this is not an insignificant number of people.
Then you have states like New York where you must get permission from your school district to homeschool and they routinely say no. If you can't afford private school, what's your option? It's not feasible for everyone to pick up stakes and relocate to a different state.
I get that. But how did we get from there to here? Public schooling itself is a 20th century innovation, and if you measure intelligence by the simple ability to read, write, and do math, kids are arguably dumber now upon graduation from high school than they were at the age of 12 100+ years ago!
If parents really have no choice but to resort to schools as daycare, parents need to start thinking about their complicity in the rash of inner-city illiterates and thinking-impaired drones being pumped into the workforce today.
That's to say nothing of the number of documented cases of kids sending their fellow students to the hospital, the number of abusive teachers...it all just adds up to infuriate me. And the role parents have played over the decades in allowing it to get this bad can hardly be overemphasized. Government duplicity + parental complicity = educational modernity.
I'd prefer to just put my kid in a reliable daycare than have to deal with schools. Not working is not an option and I'd rather deal with an organization that is prepared to care for my child for 8 hours than a school. Unfortunately schooling is compulsory so I can't do that.
Again, how did we get from there to here? You seem to accept that school is compulsory, but should it be? Kids suffer abuse regularly from other kids as well as teachers, and there are a significant number of schools and districts from which kids emerge functionally illiterate. Just how badly do parents really want what's best for their kids? Words say one thing, actions another...
I don't think a lot of what schools currently provide is worthwhile, and I think a lot of school boards fail to make the right decisions to create value for their students. School is compulsory according to the law but the organizations around schools are illegitimate. The problem with a compulsory activity in a authoritarian society is that you either participate or you get fined. Or you opt our but then you have severely limited options for support.
My ideas are all about architecting the schools around the 8 hr workday so they compliment the needs of the family rather than working directly against family needs. This follows international trends where countries with high scholastic achievement generally have students at school for 6-8 hours a day. The American schooling model is dependant on some adult in a family unit being able to provide free labor to benefit the school. That is a failing model in a society that requires 2+ incomes per household. These long days shouldn't be all about drilling students with lessons but they should be providing an enriched environment for learning and self development. Also actual instruction should take place during times where students are developmentally able to learn, 9-10am and not before.
You might save yourself time (and the rest of us the tyranny) if you just emigrated to one of those countries. You had the children; it is YOUR responsibility to “architect” your life around that. It is not the job of “society” to orient itself around your choices. You’re obviously a socialist, and you will find nothing but hostility towards your ideas from me.
“Architecting?” Is that something they teach in public schools? How to turn a noun into an awkward verb?
And before I dig any deeper, do you listen to yourself? “…in a society that requires 2+ incomes…” Why is that? Why are we a society that now requires two incomes when my parents’ generation didn’t? What changed? Are you really so uncurious as to start with that two-income “requirement” as an assumption around which you are willing to build the rest of your life?
I give up. We’re talking past each other. And I’m sorry if my intent hasn’t been clear to you, but the one thing that’s obvious to me at this point is that my intent isn’t clear. And I just don’t know how to make it any clearer; that’s not something I learned in school.
Sorry, you're going to have to take the first parent responsibility off the list -- or at least split it between parents and schools. Most kids eat a school lunch, many eat a school breakfast, and not a small number get school snacks during after school activities. While in the past some schools at least cooked their own meals, I believe it is now almost universal for districts to buy processed and pre-packaged foods in bulk to warm and serve throughout the system. Then most elementary classrooms also provide snacks (often requiring or requesting that parents bring in snacks on their snack day for the whole class) which often, by policy, have to be wrapped and labeled (no apples, no cheese unless it's an individually wrapped cheese stick, etc.). Then there are the birthdays, reward parties, etc.; and the candy rewards individual teachers like to give out.
My favorite school food story is when my kids were in elementary and it was time for the standardized testing (which exists not to evaluate individual kids' learning but to see if the school is educating their population as a whole properly, so the pressure is on the school because money can be linked to results). The school sent home instructions about how the kids were supposed to get a good night's sleep and a protein breakfast. The minute the testing was over, they handed out candy to everyone.
Fair in terms of the schools that give kids sugar (grossly irresponsible btw. I believe you can complain about that), however parents aren't obligated to use the lunch program. It truly is a basic responsibility to feed one's own children. I stand by that. So it's still mostly up to parents, and what they eat at home contributes plenty. If they only eat lunch at school, there are two other opportunities to feed them healthy food at home.
I agree, but I’ll tell you that when our kids were in school we tried. First, schools will absolutely pressure you to sign up for free or reduced lunches because it subsidizes their school program. Second, almost no one rejects the school lunch and breakfast so there aren’t systems in place for carrying lunch, when my kid was in kindergarten she got sick because she ate leftover food from the day before because it was up to her to make sure she had thrown out yesterday’s lunch and eaten today’s. Third, the pressure of seeing all your friends eat sugar cereal and sugar yogurt for breakfast while you sit there having eat already is pretty harsh, and actually (forgive me if it sounds like I’m exaggerating) this can cause eating problems later in life. So maybe we can compromise on saying that its the parents’ responsibility to feed their kids well and the school’s responsibility to get out of the way of them doing that?
I don't support compulsory schooling to start with, so you won't get an argument from me on the "stay out of their way" part, but teaching our kids how to eat healthy foods and how to demand to keep eating them at school is our job. I never said it was easy, I said it was our responsibility. They'll face peer pressure to do worse than eat sugar, believe me. Easier to start with no to that than to send the message that it's ok to bend to pressure on your health.
I know I'm rambling too much, but I have to give you another example. Kids K and 3rd, same art teacher. He gave out candy every class. We told him that candy on its own had a poor effect on our kids' moods, they felt crummy, and they'd just put the candy in their pocket and eat it at home with a meal. He started singling them out and giving them stickers instead. So they got to be the weird ones in the classes that the teacher made a special point about.
Before long, we knew just to tell our kids to sneak the candy in their pocket, etc. We no longer informed the school when we needed our kids not to eat processed and artificial foods all day, we did it on the sly. But those were some really difficult years for them, having to be the weirdos with the parents your teacher rolled her eyes about. Later, in adolescence, as they ran into all the body issue and food messages in the wider world, this early shaming came back to bite them. It's just not as simple as giving your kid an apple, I'm afraid.
It's definitely a problem that schools don't allow parents feeding autonomy. I just wish more parents would fight that as hard as they fight the bad books.
It's not about being easy. I've done "not easy". It's about the hard reality of having to choose between bad options.
If you push healthy eating during the school day, you will be fighting everyone. Everyone. From the lunch lady to the kindergarten teacher to the principal to the counselor. You will be called an almond mom, and it will push you to become neurotic in your eating and feeding habits because you will feel like you have to be more extreme to keep things balanced.
Your kids will be punished by the adults. You have the choice to conform to the idea that fruit snacks are fruit and generic Fruit Loops is breakfast or to have your kids constantly get the message that your family has unreliable and suspect judgment. It's good to learn how to not conform, but if you spend 13 years of your life with one set of adults you are supposed to rely on telling you that the other set of adults you are supposed to rely on are abusive, mentally ill, controlling -- and if all of this centers on food and eating -- that's a recipe for an eating disorder as an adult.
So, yes, my responsibility. But one I found I could not exercise well within the school system. Your schools may vary. But I didn't find any that weren't inclined to feed the children poorly and then become aggressive when anyone questioned that, even gently -- in my opinion, because they knew very well that this was unhealthy but they had all caved and they resented being reminded of that.
When one of my kids was 6 I asked the teachers not to give her candy when she felt sick, to call me instead (kids who said they didn't feel good were sent to the office and given a peppermint). At a teacher's conference, her kindergarten teacher was nearly in tears when we talked about it. She was terribly upset, because once she used to be able to do things like make cookies with the kids in class, but now with all the kids with food allergies and Celiac she couldn't do that any more. We were supposed to feel sorry for her. It's really messed up.
Excellent list! Particularly on the transparency. I pulled daughter from school after my inquiry about sex ed to principal was answered with "you're the first parent to complain", and then I fortuitously found another parent who had indeed complained before me
Also regarding homeschoolers: we should be lauded by society for refusing tax funds. Government schools should not be free daycare for children of double income couples. They should be means tested and treated like soup kitchens for those who really need it. That would really lower taxes.
In all fairness, it's hard for me to figure out which list is more important. But I don't have anything to do with the school system anymore, so that's okay.
My point wasn't that parents are blameless, it's that schools are blaming them for things beyond their control, and the list of what parents control is shorter, and getting still shorter by the day.
They spend the majority of their waking hours at school. My kids were up and out by 6:30 to get to school on time, and didn't get home until close to 5:00. They were in bed by 9. That's four hours at home awake, some of which is doing homework, the rest eating and/or bathing. They were inside the school from 8 AM - 4 PM. That's more hours.
If the school year is 180 days, it's still more consecutive days than parents have b/c parents can't just take the summer off, so kids have to be in the care of someone else when school is out, with the exception of a week of vacation together, maybe. Many students attend before and after care, and/or summer camps through their districts as well.
It's most definitely NOT the "opposite" of reality. Maybe wasn't YOUR reality, but it is the reality for most parents.
High School 7:15 - 2:15 - 7 hours - homework = 2-3 hours making the teacher in charge 10 hours
Our reality is not your reality, clearly. Oh PS? The homework is usually bullshit busy work. The kids aren't learning during all that time, the stats make that clear, and they're in physical and emotional danger the WHOLE TIME.
I don't know what your point was in posting this. Feel free to write articles about Australia, but I know my subject.
I don't watch television at all. You're a bit all over the place here but you seem to be getting your history a bit mixed up. What you're describing to me sounds more like industrial revolution era working conditions, less like post-war. During the post-war era we saw things like a push to unionize, the reduction of the work days to 8hr/5day a week, and progressive taxation of the wealthy.
Economic conditions like this were what made it possible for the baby boom generation to buy property and accumulate so much collective wealth.
Successful education requires three components sustaining their contributions:
School system
Parents
Students
If any one part is lacking the structure will fail.
What you have nailed is that abdicating one’s responsibilities is problematic, no matter what component you’re in.
I’ve read your essay and your list and I agree with you. I teach in a low-income high school. We have a new principal who has real spine. He encourages teachers to remove students who refuse to work or are disruptive. If they leave school so be it.
Interesting thing regarding grammar. My school requires every teacher, regardless of subject, to start class with a reading and writing assignment. Apparently, there’s a problem with teaching language skills. I don’t know what the problem(s) is/are. (Classes too big would be my guess.) I now read that this is even a problem in colleges.
BTW, I’m proud to say that I do not blame parents. Nor have I heard a colleague blame a parent.
Appreciate your comment! Also glad to hear about your principal and colleagues. It's always nice to hear about the good ones, I know they're out there. Sadly, however, they are outliers I've found.
Grammar should be explicitly taught from third grade onward, but I strongly suspect the challenge is teachers don't know it/weren't taught how to teach it. That's the fault of the teacher Ed programs.
I would like to know if this is true and, if so, how we fix it. One concern of mine is that the students we actually have in school are somehow different than the students at whom our curriculum is targeted.
So true. I once had an IEP administrator tell us it didn’t matter if our fourth grader still struggled to count money because they don’t test on it after that grade. Telling time, nope. Grammar, never.
They need scapegoats so they can continue stealing tax money.
This is brilliant, thank you
How long did you teach and how long ago was that? Follow up question: when was the last time you asked a teacher about their curriculum and they refused to share it with you?
I'm a private tutor now, so I work with families who struggle to get access to "the curriculum" just to help their own children, never mind to share information with me so I can help their kids.
I was in the classroom in the early 90s, and I left b/c I refused to teach look-say and "whole language" BS. I have been tutoring ever since. As a parent, I was ROUTINELY denied access to curriculum materials, or stonewalled and told something was curriculum that was just a day's lesson, if that. Once everything was on the Chrome book, it was nigh impossible to see what the teacher had planned for the WEEK, never mind the semester, and when I tried to ask for more info, they treated me like an invader.
As soon as Covid made it possible for me to homeschool my kids around the court order from my ex prohibiting me from doing it, I did, and they've never gone back.
One day I'll sit down and write the whole saga of what happened to my children, in both standard public and then public charter school...I've hesitated mostly b/c they've asked me not to go into too much detail here for their privacy, but someday....
Add to that the hundreds (literally) of parents I've spoken with or interviewed, the eyewitness testimonies and whistleblowers from all over the country who would back this up, and you have what I know about this issue.
One thing that parents can control is getting their child to school on time. The first 20 minutes of the day in most grade school classrooms I’ve subbed in is spent on “busywork” to allow the stragglers to mosey in. Same thing with parents who seem to consistently pull their child out of class early on Fridays.
Parents should also be sure to sign up for class newsletters (usually electronic) and attend Back-to-School nights and Parent-Teacher conferences. That’s the best way to take a look at the physical layout of the classroom, get some idea of the teacher’s personality and style (very important in middle & high school where there are multiple teachers), find out where your child is sitting, and see what the teacher has displayed on the walls and the bookshelves.
One thing schools can control is to encourage personal responsibility in the students. Parents are not responsible for ensuring their child’s computer is charged and in the backpack or that homework is completed correctly, although they should be monitoring it. The consequences of missing an assignment, forgetting your computer or a textbook is much less for a second grader than when one becomes an adult.
Agreed. I find schools are asking kids to be responsible at too-young ages for things they really ought not be, and are NOT demanding they be responsible for age-appropriate things. Getting to school on time goes along with absenteeism, as I would call a chronically late student chronically absent for the most important part of the day. The rest of the day is going to suffer if they are habitually late, and yes, this is within the parents' control.
There's just one thing in particular that I think parents can and should take blame for: Trusting the schools to begin with. When you rely on government-run facilities to function as daycare so you and your spouse can go out and work 120+ man-hours a week, do not be surprised at what fruit that particular tree bears.
If they trust them...There are people who literally have no choice but to send them, and I'm not talking about single parents, I'm talking about divorced parents. In a shared custody situation, the parent that wants public school or does not support homeschooling or refuses to chip in for private school wins by default family court prefers the state and always well unless you have some compelling reason for them not to. With roughly half of marriages ending in divorce, this is not an insignificant number of people.
Then you have states like New York where you must get permission from your school district to homeschool and they routinely say no. If you can't afford private school, what's your option? It's not feasible for everyone to pick up stakes and relocate to a different state.
I get that. But how did we get from there to here? Public schooling itself is a 20th century innovation, and if you measure intelligence by the simple ability to read, write, and do math, kids are arguably dumber now upon graduation from high school than they were at the age of 12 100+ years ago!
If parents really have no choice but to resort to schools as daycare, parents need to start thinking about their complicity in the rash of inner-city illiterates and thinking-impaired drones being pumped into the workforce today.
That's to say nothing of the number of documented cases of kids sending their fellow students to the hospital, the number of abusive teachers...it all just adds up to infuriate me. And the role parents have played over the decades in allowing it to get this bad can hardly be overemphasized. Government duplicity + parental complicity = educational modernity.
I'd prefer to just put my kid in a reliable daycare than have to deal with schools. Not working is not an option and I'd rather deal with an organization that is prepared to care for my child for 8 hours than a school. Unfortunately schooling is compulsory so I can't do that.
Again, how did we get from there to here? You seem to accept that school is compulsory, but should it be? Kids suffer abuse regularly from other kids as well as teachers, and there are a significant number of schools and districts from which kids emerge functionally illiterate. Just how badly do parents really want what's best for their kids? Words say one thing, actions another...
I don't think a lot of what schools currently provide is worthwhile, and I think a lot of school boards fail to make the right decisions to create value for their students. School is compulsory according to the law but the organizations around schools are illegitimate. The problem with a compulsory activity in a authoritarian society is that you either participate or you get fined. Or you opt our but then you have severely limited options for support.
All true, as far as it goes. What do you believe we should do about it? I have my own ideas, but I’d like to hear yours.
My ideas are all about architecting the schools around the 8 hr workday so they compliment the needs of the family rather than working directly against family needs. This follows international trends where countries with high scholastic achievement generally have students at school for 6-8 hours a day. The American schooling model is dependant on some adult in a family unit being able to provide free labor to benefit the school. That is a failing model in a society that requires 2+ incomes per household. These long days shouldn't be all about drilling students with lessons but they should be providing an enriched environment for learning and self development. Also actual instruction should take place during times where students are developmentally able to learn, 9-10am and not before.
You might save yourself time (and the rest of us the tyranny) if you just emigrated to one of those countries. You had the children; it is YOUR responsibility to “architect” your life around that. It is not the job of “society” to orient itself around your choices. You’re obviously a socialist, and you will find nothing but hostility towards your ideas from me.
“Architecting?” Is that something they teach in public schools? How to turn a noun into an awkward verb?
And before I dig any deeper, do you listen to yourself? “…in a society that requires 2+ incomes…” Why is that? Why are we a society that now requires two incomes when my parents’ generation didn’t? What changed? Are you really so uncurious as to start with that two-income “requirement” as an assumption around which you are willing to build the rest of your life?
I give up. We’re talking past each other. And I’m sorry if my intent hasn’t been clear to you, but the one thing that’s obvious to me at this point is that my intent isn’t clear. And I just don’t know how to make it any clearer; that’s not something I learned in school.
Sorry, you're going to have to take the first parent responsibility off the list -- or at least split it between parents and schools. Most kids eat a school lunch, many eat a school breakfast, and not a small number get school snacks during after school activities. While in the past some schools at least cooked their own meals, I believe it is now almost universal for districts to buy processed and pre-packaged foods in bulk to warm and serve throughout the system. Then most elementary classrooms also provide snacks (often requiring or requesting that parents bring in snacks on their snack day for the whole class) which often, by policy, have to be wrapped and labeled (no apples, no cheese unless it's an individually wrapped cheese stick, etc.). Then there are the birthdays, reward parties, etc.; and the candy rewards individual teachers like to give out.
My favorite school food story is when my kids were in elementary and it was time for the standardized testing (which exists not to evaluate individual kids' learning but to see if the school is educating their population as a whole properly, so the pressure is on the school because money can be linked to results). The school sent home instructions about how the kids were supposed to get a good night's sleep and a protein breakfast. The minute the testing was over, they handed out candy to everyone.
Fair in terms of the schools that give kids sugar (grossly irresponsible btw. I believe you can complain about that), however parents aren't obligated to use the lunch program. It truly is a basic responsibility to feed one's own children. I stand by that. So it's still mostly up to parents, and what they eat at home contributes plenty. If they only eat lunch at school, there are two other opportunities to feed them healthy food at home.
I agree, but I’ll tell you that when our kids were in school we tried. First, schools will absolutely pressure you to sign up for free or reduced lunches because it subsidizes their school program. Second, almost no one rejects the school lunch and breakfast so there aren’t systems in place for carrying lunch, when my kid was in kindergarten she got sick because she ate leftover food from the day before because it was up to her to make sure she had thrown out yesterday’s lunch and eaten today’s. Third, the pressure of seeing all your friends eat sugar cereal and sugar yogurt for breakfast while you sit there having eat already is pretty harsh, and actually (forgive me if it sounds like I’m exaggerating) this can cause eating problems later in life. So maybe we can compromise on saying that its the parents’ responsibility to feed their kids well and the school’s responsibility to get out of the way of them doing that?
I don't support compulsory schooling to start with, so you won't get an argument from me on the "stay out of their way" part, but teaching our kids how to eat healthy foods and how to demand to keep eating them at school is our job. I never said it was easy, I said it was our responsibility. They'll face peer pressure to do worse than eat sugar, believe me. Easier to start with no to that than to send the message that it's ok to bend to pressure on your health.
I know I'm rambling too much, but I have to give you another example. Kids K and 3rd, same art teacher. He gave out candy every class. We told him that candy on its own had a poor effect on our kids' moods, they felt crummy, and they'd just put the candy in their pocket and eat it at home with a meal. He started singling them out and giving them stickers instead. So they got to be the weird ones in the classes that the teacher made a special point about.
Before long, we knew just to tell our kids to sneak the candy in their pocket, etc. We no longer informed the school when we needed our kids not to eat processed and artificial foods all day, we did it on the sly. But those were some really difficult years for them, having to be the weirdos with the parents your teacher rolled her eyes about. Later, in adolescence, as they ran into all the body issue and food messages in the wider world, this early shaming came back to bite them. It's just not as simple as giving your kid an apple, I'm afraid.
It's definitely a problem that schools don't allow parents feeding autonomy. I just wish more parents would fight that as hard as they fight the bad books.
It's not about being easy. I've done "not easy". It's about the hard reality of having to choose between bad options.
If you push healthy eating during the school day, you will be fighting everyone. Everyone. From the lunch lady to the kindergarten teacher to the principal to the counselor. You will be called an almond mom, and it will push you to become neurotic in your eating and feeding habits because you will feel like you have to be more extreme to keep things balanced.
Your kids will be punished by the adults. You have the choice to conform to the idea that fruit snacks are fruit and generic Fruit Loops is breakfast or to have your kids constantly get the message that your family has unreliable and suspect judgment. It's good to learn how to not conform, but if you spend 13 years of your life with one set of adults you are supposed to rely on telling you that the other set of adults you are supposed to rely on are abusive, mentally ill, controlling -- and if all of this centers on food and eating -- that's a recipe for an eating disorder as an adult.
So, yes, my responsibility. But one I found I could not exercise well within the school system. Your schools may vary. But I didn't find any that weren't inclined to feed the children poorly and then become aggressive when anyone questioned that, even gently -- in my opinion, because they knew very well that this was unhealthy but they had all caved and they resented being reminded of that.
When one of my kids was 6 I asked the teachers not to give her candy when she felt sick, to call me instead (kids who said they didn't feel good were sent to the office and given a peppermint). At a teacher's conference, her kindergarten teacher was nearly in tears when we talked about it. She was terribly upset, because once she used to be able to do things like make cookies with the kids in class, but now with all the kids with food allergies and Celiac she couldn't do that any more. We were supposed to feel sorry for her. It's really messed up.
Excellent list! Particularly on the transparency. I pulled daughter from school after my inquiry about sex ed to principal was answered with "you're the first parent to complain", and then I fortuitously found another parent who had indeed complained before me
Also regarding homeschoolers: we should be lauded by society for refusing tax funds. Government schools should not be free daycare for children of double income couples. They should be means tested and treated like soup kitchens for those who really need it. That would really lower taxes.
Dear Parents,
Get your kids out of government schools.
In all fairness, it's hard for me to figure out which list is more important. But I don't have anything to do with the school system anymore, so that's okay.
My point wasn't that parents are blameless, it's that schools are blaming them for things beyond their control, and the list of what parents control is shorter, and getting still shorter by the day.
"schools have children for a much larger percentage of the day and year than parents do"
This is the opposite of reality...
They spend the majority of their waking hours at school. My kids were up and out by 6:30 to get to school on time, and didn't get home until close to 5:00. They were in bed by 9. That's four hours at home awake, some of which is doing homework, the rest eating and/or bathing. They were inside the school from 8 AM - 4 PM. That's more hours.
If the school year is 180 days, it's still more consecutive days than parents have b/c parents can't just take the summer off, so kids have to be in the care of someone else when school is out, with the exception of a week of vacation together, maybe. Many students attend before and after care, and/or summer camps through their districts as well.
It's most definitely NOT the "opposite" of reality. Maybe wasn't YOUR reality, but it is the reality for most parents.
180 days is 49.3% of the year.
Slightly different scenario in Australia, as there are closer to 190 days, but are 9 to 3.
Even at 8 hours a day, it is still only a third of 49.3% of the year...
Attending other things besides school doesn't go on the school's ledger of time with students.
In my state, the school boards have adopted a school year of 215 days. 58.9% of the year.
Times of day:
Elementary school hours: 8:00 - 4:00 = 8 hours - homework = 1 hour - teacher gets 9 hours
Middle school hours: 9:00 - 4:00 = 7 hours - homework = 2 hours - teacher gets 9 hours
High School 7:15 - 2:15 - 7 hours - homework = 2-3 hours making the teacher in charge 10 hours
Our reality is not your reality, clearly. Oh PS? The homework is usually bullshit busy work. The kids aren't learning during all that time, the stats make that clear, and they're in physical and emotional danger the WHOLE TIME.
I don't know what your point was in posting this. Feel free to write articles about Australia, but I know my subject.
Uhhhhh, what percentage of parents do you think actually follow the five points you outlined as "parent responsibility" ???
I'd also add to the parent list "reading at home."
It's irrelevant. They’re the only things parents can control, so teachers blaming parents for things NOT on that list are out of line.
I don't watch television at all. You're a bit all over the place here but you seem to be getting your history a bit mixed up. What you're describing to me sounds more like industrial revolution era working conditions, less like post-war. During the post-war era we saw things like a push to unionize, the reduction of the work days to 8hr/5day a week, and progressive taxation of the wealthy.
Economic conditions like this were what made it possible for the baby boom generation to buy property and accumulate so much collective wealth.