You are here: Home / Archives for Parenting

Pulling the parent trigger

May 13, 2013 by 3 Comments

More than a half-dozen states now have parent trigger laws that let a majority of parents seize control of a low-performing school, notes Education Next.

Empowered Families Can Transform the System, argues Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution, which has led the parent trigger drives.

Parents enduring a parent trigger campaign are transformed. Some, like the parents at Desert Trails, are forced to endure lengthy legal battles, a process most of them have never experienced. Others, including the parents of 24th Street Elementary School and also Haddon Avenue Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), find a responsive school district that wants to collaborate with them in changing their school.

. . . Many of these parents, for the first time in their lives, feel real power, not only over their child’s destiny but over their own as well. These parents, and parents like them, are the key to the future of public education in America.

“Parents don’t care if a public school is a traditional district school or a charter school,” writes Austin. “They just want it to be a good school.”

There’s a Better Way to Unlock Parent Power, responds Michael J. Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation. While “it’s worth experimenting with the parent trigger,” it’s not likely to turn around many schools or force significant reform.

First, the parent trigger mechanism itself will continue to get bogged down in lawsuits and other blocking tactics, as has been the case to date. Second, if and when the trigger gets pulled, the resulting school turnarounds won’t generally amount to much. And third, empowering parents via the parent trigger (creating a “bargaining chip”) won’t be enough to force larger changes in dysfunctional districts—because nothing will force such change.

Petrilli favors expanding school choice with more charter schools, vouchers and digital learning. Even if choice doesn’t force districts to improve, it will give parents more options for their children, he argues.

Try the trigger, writes Checker Finn, also of Fordham. Since “most bad districts are going to stay bad,” serious reformers need to “give kids every possible exit” into something better. “Helping an entire school to extricate itself from the dysfunctional system is surely one such strategy. Instead of pooh-poohing it, how about we put it on the list of possibilities, wish it well, and do our damnedest to help it succeed as often as possible?”

Filed Under: Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How motherhood is changing

May 12, 2013 by 4 Comments

Motherhood Is Changing, notes The Atlantic.  Mothers are more educated, but less likely to be married. Children of educated mothers do better in school; children of single parents do worse.

SDT-2013-05-fertility-education-01.png

Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: , ,

Uncommon curriculum

May 10, 2013 by 9 Comments

Closing the vocabulary gap would help close the opportunity gap, argues Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, a guest on the Bridging Differences blog. Children from low-income families start kindergarten with an enormous vocabulary deficit, he writes. Preschools and elementary schools can build children’s vocabulary by teaching them history, science, art, music, literature and geography.

Yes, to little kids. (You know, the ones who are curious about EVERYTHING. Who can learn a TON just by listening to a good read-aloud story.)

E.D. Hirsch has argued for 30 years that the key to building students’ vocabularies, and thus their ability to read and learn, is content knowledge. Once a child learns to decode, her “comprehension” ability mainly comes down to the store of knowledge she’s got in her head. If she can sound out words but can’t read a passage about dinosaurs, it’s not because she hasn’t been taught “comprehension skills”—it’s probably because she’s never been taught anything about dinosaurs.

Yet our preschools and elementary schools systematically reject this obvious approach because they deem it not “developmentally appropriate.” Furthermore, they say, why teach all those “facts” when kids can just Google them?

High-poverty schools make it worse if they delay teaching social studies and science — usually untested — until fourth or fifth grade to spend more time teaching reading in the early grades. This is “nuts,” writes Petrilli. “Teaching content is teaching reading.”

Building vocabulary doesn’t require a common curriculum, responds Deborah Meier. She’s all for teaching “stuff.” But there are many ways to do that, she writes.

As with our first language we need to rely on building vocabulary by: (1) having a more diverse student body (racial and class integration); (2) having a lot of adults around to interact with and smaller class sizes (like good private schools do); (3) engaging in studies that require collaboration between students and students, and students and adults—including adult-written texts; (4) encouraging reading in settings that are designed to naturally arouse interest—motivate—or that answer questions youngsters really want to know; and (5) remembering that vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and spelling are most efficiently learned the same way we learn everything else that matters.

We learn to drive by driving and to cook by cooking, which means allowing 6- to 12-year-olds to read (and listen to) repetitive and engaging books which do not present too much of a “cognitive” or empathy challenge.

Progressive preschools don’t think knowing facts is “developmentally inappropriate,” Meier writes. But they believe direct instruction isn’t needed to ”

kick in this love of reading, of hobbies, of facts, of curiosity, of indefatigable and repetitive practice in subjects and skills” kids are fascinated by. “Our job is to extend” kids’ curiosity, she concludes. Too often, schools kill it.

Filed Under: Education, Parenting, Poverty, Testing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Carnival of Homeschooling

May 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

First Teacher Appreciation Day  is the theme of the May 7 Carnival Of Homeschooling. “Parents are children’s first teachers,” writes the host, Corn and Oil.

Filed Under: Education, Homeschooling, Parenting Tagged With: , , ,

School cafeteria goes all-vegetarian

May 4, 2013 by 12 Comments

A Queens public school is serving all-vegetarian menus for breakfast and lunch, reports Metro. PS 244, the Active Learning Elementary School, now serves “black beans, red roasted potatoes, falafel and brown rice for lunch.”

Principal Robert Groff said the school is trying to encourage healthy lifestyles. “It is about educating their mind, body and character all together.”

What about separation of idiots and state? asks Stephen Kruiser on PJ Tatler.

This isn’t about children’s health, it’s about indoctrination in a fringe lifestyle. There is nothing wrong with vegetarian options for children whose parents have chosen to raise them that way.

. . . This is a decision that is one for the parents to make, not for school administrators who seek to undermine the role of parents, which is what’s really going on here.

My nutritionist stepdaughter designs school lunches for a nonprofit. She says it’s hard to comply with very detailed federal guidelines, use affordable ingredients and produce a lunch kids will eat.

New York Mayor Bloomberg was refused a second slice of pizza at a New York City restaurant in a protest against  his ban on large sodas, reports the Daily Currant. It’s a satire site, but some readers thought it was for real. It’s hard to tell the difference these days.

Filed Under: Health, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , ,

The rich get richer — and smarter

May 3, 2013 by

Rich kids are widening the achievement gap, leaving middle class kids, not just the poor, farther behind, writes Sean Reardon, a Stanford education and sociology professor.

High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

Is it intensive parenting? asks Megan McArdle in The Daily Beast.  All the people who are really good at school are marrying the other people who are really good at school (and) having children who are really, really good at school.

The rich pulling away from the middle class is also exactly what we would see if test-taking ability has a substantial inherited component, and the American economy is increasingly selecting for people who are very, very good at taking tests.

A fan of the Little House on the Prairie books, McArdle recently reread Those Happy Golden Years in which Laura Ingalls meets and marries Almanzo Wilder. While Laura liked school and was good at it, ”

Almanzo hated it” and quit as soon as he could. “

There’s no evidence that he reads or otherwise occupies himself with intellectual pursuits in his spare time.”

Apparently, it was a very happy marriage. Today . . .

Laura Ingalls would quite likely have gone to an elite school, and probably graduate school, then moved to a coastal city, and eventually married another bookworm.  Almanzo Wilder would be married to someone like him, a hard worker who nonetheless found school tedious and left as quickly as possible.  And when their two sets of children showed up at school, their test scores would be very different.

The educational barrier to high-paying professions tie income even more tightly to educational proficiency, she writes.

Maybe the answer is not a quixotic attempt to somehow replicate the experience of being raised by two professionals with advanced degrees. Maybe it’s to question the great educational sorting, and the barriers it has erected.

. . . every additional year of schooling we require makes it harder and harder for those who don’t enjoy school to compete in the wider world.

More women than men are going to college and earning degrees. There will be more Lauras marrying Almanzos in the future.

Filed Under: Education, Intelligence, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Is 25 the new 15?

April 28, 2013 by

Twenty-five is becoming the new 15, argues Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old.

Young people who’ve grown up in a responsibility-free “bubble” don’t know how to find a job, manage money, cook or care for themselves, write Joseph and Claudia Allen. They’ve been socialized by their peers, not by adults.

We’ve done away with “competition (too masculine, I suppose) and real-world feedback (kids need high self-esteem!),” writes Dr. Helen, a psychologist.

Young people spend more time as college students, often taking five or six years to earn a degree. If it’s a non-technical degree — or they never actually complete it — they’re likely to be living at home at 25.

Filed Under: Books, College, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , ,

If parents fail, schools will too

April 23, 2013 by

In Raising the Curve: A Year Inside One of America’s 45,000 Failing Public Schools, Ron Berler takes readers inside Brookside Elementary in Norwalk, Connecticut, which is trying to raise chronically low test scores. About half the students come from Hispanic immigrant families; 41 percent qualify for a subsidized lunch.

The book follows two fifth-grade friends: Hydea does her work, but has only second-grade reading skills. Marbella is only a year behind in reading, but would rather obsess about her social life — and Justin Bieber — than do homework.

The literacy teacher works with teachers to improve their skills, but breaks away before the state exams to coach a small group of children who are close to passing. She has no time for those who are way behind or for children in untested grades. Some students have been passed along with subpar skills. Others have received tutoring or summer school help, but remain behind.

Berler, who volunteered as a mentor and teacher’s aide at the school, is sympathetic to teachers and the principal, but frustrated with uninvolved parents. Some don’t know how to help, he writes. Others are too busy working to supervise their children closely.

When fifth-grade teacher Keith Morey asks students about their responsibilities at home, a clear pattern emerges. The responsible students are expected to do chores; the kids who don’t do homework don’t work at home either.

Schools need to engage parents and teach them how to support their children’s learning, writes Berler in the Huffington Post.

Filed Under: Books, Education, Parenting, Testing Tagged With: , , ,

Making motherhood a career

April 21, 2013 by

Girls outperform boys in school; women are more likely to go to college and earn a degree. Men have been hit much harder by the recession and the changing economy. But a growing number of career women are choosing to make child-raising and home-making into a career, according to Emily Matchar’s Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity,

Disillusioned workers are “opting into a slower, more sustainable, and more self-sufficient lifestyle,”  writes Ann Friedman in a New Republic review.

The woman who leaves the public workplace is “the Brooklyn hipster who quit her PR job to sell hand-knitted scarves at craft fairs,” Matchar writes. “She’s the dreadlocked ‘radical homemaker’ who raises her own chickens to reduce her carbon footprint. She’s the thirty-one-year-old new mom who starts an artisan cupcake company from her home kitchen rather than return to her law firm. He’s the hard-driven Ivy Leaguer fleeing corporate life for a Vermont farm.”

Thanks to technology, the new homemaker can sell her crafts online and chronicle her quilting, baking and homeschooling projects online.

 “This lifestyle wouldn’t work if women were raising their perfect, happy, locavore children in the middle of the woods with no internet connection,” one professor tells Matchar.

From my point of view, the new homemakers are making their jobs a lot harder than they need to be. They grow their own vegetables, raise chickens and goats  (and slaughter their own meat!), weave, knit, quilt and sew and practice attachment parenting. Letting babies go diaperless is the latest fad. “Elimination communication” requires a a hyper-alert caregiver.

It’s hard to balance child-raising with a career in the U.S. But, women work less, earn less and are less likely to hold managerial and professional jobs in countries with family-friendly policies, writes Christina Hoff Sommers.

Sweden offers 16 months of paid parental leave, special protections for part-time workers, and state-subsidized preschools. Gender equality is government policy.

In a 2012 report, the World Economic Forum found that when it comes to closing the gender gap in “economic participation and opportunity,” the United States is ahead of not only Sweden but also Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. . . .  Though the United States has fewer women in the workforce (68 percent compared to Sweden’s 77 percent), American women who choose to be employed are far more likely to work full-time and to hold high-level jobs as managers or professionals. They also own more businesses, launch more start start-ups, and more often work in traditionally male fields. As for breaking the glass ceiling in business, American women are well in the lead . . .

Mothers are much more likely than fathers to take long parental leaves and work part-time, according to a study by Cornell economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn.

. . . most seem to enjoy the flex-time arrangement (once known as the “mommy track”) and never find their way back to full-time or high-level employment.

Employers prefer to hire man, knowing they are less likely to take a long leave and then work part-time, add Blau and Kahn.

Filed Under: Books, Careers, Children, Family, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Not all parents want to be PTA moms

April 20, 2013 by

Parents want to be involved in their children’s education, but in diffferent ways, according to Ready, Willing and Able?, a new Public Agenda survey of parents in the Kansas City, Missouri area.

While 52 percent say parent involvement at home will do the most to improve schools, 42 percent say parents should be more involved in running schools.

A successful family involvement program must appeal to three types of parents, Public Agenda recommended.

• Help seekers: Roughly 19 percent of parents are most concerned with finding out their own children’s academic progress and learning how they can help their students improve. . . . The majority say they don’t know how and don’t have time to do more than they already are doing to be involved in school.

• School helpers: This 27 percent of parents is the closest to the traditional picture of the “PTA mom and dad.” Nearly three out of four of them have already volunteered at the school in the past year, and they are most likely of all parents to trust the school officials. According to the study, these parents are open to “traditional” school involvement such as hall monitoring or fundraising, but less comfortable with contributing to school policies.

• Potential transformers: Finally, 31 percent of parents said they were interested in and ready to be more involved in shaping how the schools operate. They are more likely to be aware of how their own school and district stack up to others in terms of academic performance and teacher qualifications, and they are also more likely than other parents to know what classes and skills their children need to be prepared for college. However, only between a quarter and a third of these parents have actually been asked to get more involved.

Half of Kansas City parents said they could be more involved at their child’s school if they made an effort.

Filed Under: Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , ,
«Older Posts