- We should massive improve our home-school connections. Aim for 2-way conversations with 95% of families every week.
This sounds great to me as a parent! How feasible is this from the teacher side? If a teacher has 24 students and has a 5-minute interaction (which seems really short to me) with each family every week, that’s two hours extra a week – do teachers have two extra hours a week to spend on that?
It means you prioritize this over other things. The communication may be with a full-time community organizer, who spends 5 minutes talking with 200 families each week; or it might be in lieu of other duties.
I also don’t know if it’s 5 minutes per family each week; it might mean a quick phone call home.
That might be the script (with a few variations) for 75% of the calls in one week.
TBH I’m not entirely sure how community schools make it happen, but I do know it’s one of their very high priorities.
That sounds amazing. Thanks for clarifying that for me!
And why aren’t the parents already doing this on their own? That’s my point- engaged parents don’t have to be called- they’re already aware of most of this stuff already through the normal channels and are following up on the things they’re not sure of.
Nobody has to call me specifically to check in on my kid’s field trip permission slip, puppets, and so forth, because I’m already engaged.
That call is an effort to engage the parents, who IMO should be responsible enough to not have to be called and reminded like that.
Not all kids are lucky enough to have good parents. But those kids matter too.
You’re right, but without their families and communities backing them, it’s going to be the rare kid who manages to break out of whatever situation their community is in.
Similarly, there are quite a few white middle/upper class kids who aren’t terribly motivated or even smart, who end up going to college and successful because that’s what their community expects and supports. I mean, when you grow up and everyone talks about going to college, asks what colleges you’re thinking of, talks about college, and talks about the expectation that you will go to college, you end up going to college.
I just feel like a monster chunk of what the educational system does in general is basically compensating for various parenting failures, whether they’re personal, community-derived, or national issues. And it’s frustrating- a lot of these things shouldn’t be the school districts’ problem in the first place- it should be the parents or the local/state government.
I’ve long maintained that the first rung on the socioeconomic ladder in the US is both covered in grease and festooned with broken glass.
And many people – myself included – support lifting up those who live at or near the bottom.
[ie, fighting against Social Darwinism]
Because I believe you’re right: there’s very little upward mobility – particularly where the privation is the most significant – in this country.
It’s just a facile myth.
It’s all of society’s problem. It is to our benefit to ensure every kid has a chance to succeed. We can’t just write off kids that were unlucky enough to be born into a situation without home support. Those kids will grow up to be adults. What kind of adults will affect us all.
Post 37.
I’ve spoken with many educators at levels from grade school, to HS and community college. The general consensus is that kids are approximately 1 year behind - at all levels. And, more than just being behind in school subjects, they are greatly lacking in maturity.
I’m curious about how/when a HS graduate is going to make up that missing year/maturity as they attend college? Or what it means to a prospective employer, who is accustomed to believing that a HS or college degree means a certain level of achievement?
Sure, but why is it incumbent on the school to make that happen? It’s the parent-teacher organization/association. The parents can set up whatever they want, however it works for them- it’s not the school’s problem to bend over backwards - they should meet in the middle.
If your question is who’s morally obligated to do it, the community schools model isn’t going to be something you’re interested in. If your question is how to get it done, that’s when the model starts looking good.
I had never heard of the “community schools” model. Although it seems to make sense, it also seems the stakeholders to make it happen widely might remain to be convinced.
This includes the parents, government and tax payers. If education is already underfunded, adding more services will be difficult. If the parents cannot manage basic documents, they may not have the education, will or wherewithal to support the model. If government agreed in the idea on a political and philosophical level, they still have to fund it, which may require increased taxes or reallocating funds.
Or am I wrong? What are the main obstacles? In your experience, how do parents and hovernments feel about the model? How do you get it done?
Again, I can only speak to experience with college students who are fortunate enough to have (on average) relatively generous amounts of support available to them for academic recovery.
If I’m not just completely inventing this anecdotal subjective impression of their recovery process, ISTM that it’s had a lot to do with more proactive (or paternalistic or helicoptery, depending on your perspective) attention from administrators to individual student performance. Workshops, failure alerts, schedule and testing accommodations, etc. etc. “Community-school”-type approaches, in fact!
Another thing to consider is that some of this lack of outreach on the part of parents, especially parents of disadvantaged students, isn’t about laziness or indifference or cluelessness, but rather about hesitation and uncertainty about what they’re entitled to.
A lot of parents are aware that teachers are overworked and underpaid, and they personally may know what it’s like to be overworked and underpaid, so they are hesitant to demand extra attention from their child’s teacher. A lot of parents (especially those not so fluent in English, and especially with undocumented immigration status) are scared of trying to engage with the system and maybe just cause more problems for themselves and their children.
Often it’s the families that need support and communication the most from their educational systems that are most reluctant to seek it out. And that’s by no means always because they just don’t give a rat’s ass or are too dysfunctional to keep track of when little Jake has a field trip scheduled.
It’s very easy for those of us who were brought up by middle-class confident “Karens” and “tiger moms” and “baleboostehs” etc. to take it for granted that throwing your weight around in the school system is something that all halfway decent parents (and mothers in particular) are automatically prepared to do. But there are lots of loving and caring parents who just don’t think that way, and need an outstretched hand from the system to encourage them to be more assertive.
Teachers in Canada are perceived as being well paid. I think this is good - you want teachers to be qualified and motivated, and this is reflected in things like Canada’s testing scores. Their union is also powerful, at least in big provinces. This is a mixed bag - newer teachers might not get hired, have any say, or get (as much) work. When there are political winds wishing to cut class sizes etc., teachers often “work to rule”, arguing they have few alternatives to apply pressure, meaning they threaten that they might not publish final reports, coach teams, mentor clubs, tutor, or stay after class.
So even in Canada, which is in a better place than many US states, I doubt 100% of teachers are on board with a “community services” model described above.
So my question, what percentage of US teachers strongly advocate, advocate or would go along with such a model?
I am just learning about it. It does cost more, so it requires significant community buy-in. I learned about it via my union president (got to sit next to the national president!) as a model that they’re seeing really good results with in communities that get behind it. But I’m far from an expert on it at this point.
I do agree with the OP’s article that any solution is going to take resources, i.e., money. You can’t solve the problem by throwing money at it, but you also can’t solve it without careful, judicious, and significant expenditures.
IANA educator in any sense of the word. My nearby niece/daughter-in-law is an elementary teacher in a fancy-pants suburb. She’s a young, professional, enthusiastic, and idealistic kid-centric teacher. IOW, part of the solution, not part of the problem.
In the 2 previous school years she taught Kindergarten in a well-endowed public school. Online, and half in person / half online. Which was an unholy mess. When half of what you’re teaching in the first 5 months is simply how to attend school, sit still, hold a pencil, and behave in a group, well, … that’s damn hard over Zoom.
The current school year she’s teaching first grade at a fatcat Christian but non-Catholic parochial school in the same city, but some miles distant from her old school. So her current charges are the output of last year’s kindergarten when she was teaching that grade. Not the same kids, but kids from the same SES, scholastic, & COVID environment
Her anecodotal report is the first 3 months of first grade are basically redoing what didn’t happen in kindergarten because the total curriculum & testing demands on progress to be made simply were unobtainable versus the COVID-driven obstacles.
So now at the end of first grade the kids are less behind than they were at the start of first grade, but still well behind where they “belong” at the end of first grade. Setting aside the kids who get discouraged and spiral in, she figures by 4th grade we might have caught the typical kids up to pre-COVID normality. If nothing else goes wrong in the next 3 years.
FWIW, she also supports @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness’s contention that standardized tests, and the inevitable bureaucratic reaction to them (“teach the test; nothing else matters! (to our budget and management promotions).”) is more harmful than helpful.
I personally have no useful opinion, but I can share what I’ve been told by somebody whose expertise and POV I trust. It’s anecdote, but IMO it’s worthwhile anecdote.
If this is what happens when Dad’s a lawyer or exec & Mom is a SAHM with a Master’s degree, I have to imagine the situation is orders of magnitude worse where Dad drives a truck plus Uber & Mom works a cash register and waits tables.
So, is it better to add more time (year, shorter breaks) or increase future intensity (core curriculum, greater volume)?
At least some of the problems with teacher-parent interactions can, in fact, be solved by throwing money at them. Consider my current school, for example: The administration keeps telling us that we should be calling parents frequently, and I’d love to do so… except for the minor difficulty that we don’t have phones. Officially, we’re supposed to solve this problem by making calls using Google Meets… which would result in us showing up on caller IDs as being from Massachusetts. Nobody’s going to answer out-of-state calls from a number they don’t recognize, which means that those contacts consist, at best, of a voicemail message. And since the parents can’t call us back, either, the voicemail message is supposed to consist of us telling them to email us back suggesting a time we can call them again. At which point we might as well just email them in the first place.
The solution, of course, is to install phones in every classroom. But that, of course, is impossible, because it would cost money. Where’s that going to fit in in the budget? Why, if they did that, they might not even be able to afford to have four principals in a school of 300 students!