A gathering spot for warriors fighting for their special-needs children

If you're one of the many who have come to the realization that your public school system is out to get away with doing the absolute minimum for your special-needs child and is not actually interested in helping or educating your child, join the crowd. Bring some passion and some factual evidence and step into the fray.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Failing Schools: Our Own "127 Hours"


Schools fail in areas where parents aren't involved. Throwing more resources at those schools won't make the parents more involved, and since social engineering is frowned upon (see Naziism, et al), we're trapped.

"Progressives" won't acknowledge this; they're stuck in their own vicious cycle of complaining about inadequate funding while earnestly pushing for some new idea--like Beverly Hall's now-infamous "data-driven best practices."

But we are well and truly trapped, and we ought to own up to it like James Franco's character in "127 Hours," and face the inevitable. In this case, the limb we'll have to sever is the idea that public schools will always be there for you, free and undemanding, and all you have to do to get your kid in the door is fill out the enrollment form.

When we don't ask anything of do-nothing parents, they do nothing. This may be because they're dirt poor or they work too many jobs or they grew up in a household where education was never prized, or because they don't want to assimilate (Hispanic parents who refuse to learn English). It's not our responsibility to fix these people, and I don't care about them. I do care about their kids, because I'm soft that way.

If you're going to squeeze any young person through a rigorous, 15-year-or-more program of drills and tests, you're going to need a vise. Schools and teachers comprise only one jaw in that vise, and vises need two jaws to work. The other jaw is parents.

To be effective, a parent must persuade or compel a child to work hard and do well (some parents lean more toward persuasion; I'm fine with a little Dragon-Momming now and again too).

You don't have to attend a single PTO or PTA meeting or bake fundraising brownies to do your part well. But you do have to set up your kid for success (purchase supplies, make sure the kid is properly rested and ready to go each morning, etc.) and you do have to set expectations for their performance in school and hold fast to those expectations.

Many parents don't do these things and never will. Our system demands nothing from these parents, and nothing is what we get.

So if you want to reform the system, start by making the parents sign a contract stipulating that students who miss homework, flunk tests, get into discipline troubles at school or otherwise screw up will be held back and parents will be liable for the cost of remedial education. (In other words, education is free until you screw up. After that, you pay for it). Parents who withdraw their children from school must use their public funding for homeschooling or private school and provide documentation. Homeschooling parents would have to be licensed and monitored.

This will create all kinds of new headaches, but it will also create many new kinds of schools: charters, co-ops, technical academies, etc. Some will fail to produce strong graduates. In that way, they will be exactly like the expensive failing schools we keep trying to resuscitate now. Parents will eventually figure out that their best and cheapest option is to hew to the rules for our new, sign-the-contract-or-you-don't-get-in public schools.

You can't make schools better until do-nothing parents are forced to put some skin into the game. Until they have incentives to participate (or, rather, strong disincentives for non-participation), they won't change. When they change, the schools will change. But trying to change the schools without addressing the parents is a fool's game.

If he had kept trying to pull his hand out from behind that boulder, Aron Ralston (the guy whose true story is the basis of 127 Hours) would be dead now, instead of a worldwide celebrity.

You need guts to cut off your arm with a dull multi-tool, I guess, but what you mostly need is desperation. Well, we certainly have that here.