Geeze, why are you people so facile about charging parents with not valuing education? Ignorance of the power of parental involvement in a child’s education does not necessarily mean they don’t value education. You know it’s important, but that connection is not self-evident. In fact, it seems to conflict with the value of self-reliance. I’m quicker to assume that parents with a hands-off approach to their kids’ schooling think they’re doing their kids a favor by forcing them to sink or swim on their own, and that behavior such as helping them with their homework, and checking up on their schooling is glorified “coddling” and “hand-holding”. See how not assuming that people have the worst intentions allows you you respect them more? Maybe if these teachers who unanimously agree with such “coddling” and “hand-holding” took the time to understand these parents’ point-of-view, and then correct them, they could do a bit more than throwing their arms up and huffing “they don’t value education!”.
Because my mother and several of my friends are teachers and they’ve seen it first hand during conferences. Parents will react to the news that their child is failing with what amounts to a shrug.
Uh huh.
Sorry, but that hasn’t been the experience of the people I know in the teaching field. Generally, the people who don’t get involved in their child’s education tend to be uneducated themselves (of course, most of my friends teach in inner cities - Watts, SE DC - so it’s sort of self-selecting) and have the attitude that they don’t know that and don’t see why their child should have to, either. Heck, many of them have expressed that exact sentiment when informed that their child is failing. To be fair, there are also lots of parents who have to spend a lot of time working just to make ends meet and don’t necessarily have the time to spend getting as involved in their child’s education as they should. But these aren’t the ones I’m talking about because generally these parents are eager to try and work with the teacher to monitor their child’s education as best they can given the circumstances.
Maybe you aren’t there and have no clue what you’re talking about.
There is no doubt that parental involvement is the key to educational performance. There’s also no doubt that it’s woefully lacking.
I’m on the board of directors of a day care that’s based out of our school. Every year we have a meeting that every parent who has a kid in daycare must show up to. We tell them this. At the meeting, we’ll be lucky if five parents show out of 30. We then ask for volunteers to sit on the board, and if we’re lucky we might get one or two of those five volunteering. The total workload is to attend one board meeting a month. One or two parents out of 30 will do it. There are time when we don’t have enough members for quorum.
The parent-teacher association has the same problem.
There’s a little boy in my daughter’s class who is spiralling down, and it’s sad to watch. This is an ‘advanced’ program, and two years ago he made it in and was very bright. But there are family troubles at home. Mom is divorced and apathetic. So the kid has been developing bad habits, and mom can’t be bothered to correct them. He’s becoming a bully, talking back in class, sneering at his homework, etc. He gets a trip to the Principal’s office almost daily. But her hands are pretty much tied. They can’t expel the kid, they can’t give him serious detention because mom has to pick him up on schedule, etc. So it’s up to the parent to correct the problem, and she just can’t be bothered. So not only is this kid heading for huge wasted potential, but he’s disrupting the learning of the other kids.
And this is a good school. Now multiply that by whatever factor you need to consider how big problems like this are in the poor schools in neighborhoods with full of broken families and behavioural problems at home.
Possibly, but if they aren’t going to be professors in colleges, and most aren’t, many will take the assured paycheck of becoming a teacher (if that paycheck were substantially increased. You have to compensate these guys to give up that impossible dream of professorship) rather than continue on the postdoc treadmill. You have to realize that most are going to take an “alternative” career, an odd term for something that over 90% will do. Why not make teaching a more attractive alternative?
I’m telling you that I would have taken it, and I know a lot of my peers in graduate school who realized that their career prospects were dismal, would have as well.
There was an article in the NY Times in the past two weeks (I’ll see if I can find it) which cited studies showing that what you are calling “coddling” is by far the most effective way to instill education into students and raise successful students.
Found it. Excerpted from: Both Sides of Inequality
By DAVID BROOKS (NYT) 745 words
Published: March 9, 2006
“Looking at upper-middle-class homes, Lareau describes a parenting style that many of us ridicule but do not renounce. This involves enrolling kids in large numbers of adult-supervised activities and driving them from place to place. Parents are deeply involved in all aspects of their children’s lives. They make concerted efforts to provide learning experiences.”
“Working-class child-rearing is different, Lareau writes. In these homes, there tends to be a much starker boundary between the adult world and the children’s world. Parents think that the cares of adulthood will come soon enough and that children should be left alone to organize their own playtime. When a girl asks her mother to help her build a dollhouse out of boxes, the mother says no, ‘‘casually and without guilt,’’ because playtime is deemed to be inconsequential – a child’s sphere, not an adult’s.”
The study basically found that the former kids were better prepared to enter the real world than than the latter. The working class families were not bad families, they just weren’t preparing the kids for the real world as well.
The “coddling” POV isn’t actually pizzabrat’s and I’m pretty sure he disagrees with it. It’s his interpretation of some parents’ attitude. He’s saying that teachers need to correct that. Of course, that’s difficult to do if the parent won’t even bother to show up to a meeting with the teacher.
I’m there, and I would say that while there are parents like this, there are as many or more who simply don’t know they can function as an advocate for their child or lack the sophistication to be effective advocates. To illustrate: I recently had two of my sweetest, brisghtest, normally-well-behaved kids kicked out of school because of a really bizzare zero tolerance policy. I probably put 100 hours in on this situation over six weeks, and it went all the way to the school board. The parents of both those young man loved their kids and absolutely wanted to do right by them–but I will say without qualification that at every turn they made the situation worse. They alienated everyone involved that might have had any power to mitigate the situation or offer constructive advice. They were anataonistic from the git-go. They made wild accusations against everyone and everybody to everyone else, which had no bearing on anything, as there was never any doubt that thier sons had, in fact, done the dumb thing they did. They absolutely were working from passionate love for their kids and concern for their well-being.
This is an extreme case, but I’ve known hundreds of times where terrible things occured in an ESL classroom (like movies for two weeks straight) because everyone knows that their parents won’t complain, when in the honors classes you’d have folks in the office in a red-hot minute that their child’s education was being compromised. And it’s not that immigrants don’t love thier kids–in many cases, they have given up their entire lives and any hope of ever feeling at home again for those kids to have that education–it’s that they just don’t think to go raise hell. They don’t know who to raise hell too.
But I haven’t a clue how to educate people to do these things effectively.
Well they don’t need to - I’m not saying it’s expected, but yes, that’s what I meant. And it looks like Fiveyearlurker’s cite coincides with what I said, and upon preview, Manda JO’s experience, so maybe I do have a clue what I’m talking about.
[QUOTE=Manda JO]
And it’s not that immigrants don’t love thier kids–in many cases, they have given up their entire lives and any hope of ever feeling at home again for those kids to have that education–it’s that they just don’t think to go raise hell. They don’t know who to raise hell too.
[QUOTE]
Yes, these things do happen, but these aren’t the parents I’m talking about. These types of parents are willing to be guided and to work with the teacher. They just don’t have the information/confidence necessary to take the initiative. Would you say that these people don’t get involved in education because they fear “coddling” the child?
Actually, I don’t think MandaJO’s experience coincides with what you said whatsoever. She mentioned nothing about these parents not getting involved because they were afraid of “coddling” their child. And I don’t see much in Merijeek’s cite that confirms what you say, either. There are plenty of blue collar parents who won’t get involved in the child’s play, but will absolutely make sure that child isn’t causing problems at school. In fact, Merijeek’s cite would actually lean more towards supporting me than you if it turned out to apply to education. That would mean that they felt a good education was “a child’s sphere” and not worth an adult’s time. In other words, they don’t value education as having value in the “adult world.”
Not at all. They don’t get involved because they don’t know how to, they don’t know it can be effective, or because they have no frame of reference so they don’t know when something is terribly wrong. And when they do get involved they are ineffective because they don’t know whom to talk to, they don’t know what to say, and they don’t knowwhat sources of information to trust.
But they are often NOT willing to be guided, and it’s not like you can just put together a pamplet that says “how to be an effective advocate for your child” that will do the trick.
One of the biggest problems I have in my AP classes is parents who pull their kids out because they are making Cs. College-educated parents rarely do this. They understand that getting the college-prep work of an AP class is critical to doing well in college. They have the frame of reference to look at the work we do in my class, and the work done in the regular clasess, and to understand that success in college demands certain skills be learned now–no matter how painful. Parents who are not familiar with college-level work often don’t get this, and I am not always successful in explaining it (and I have literally begged many times that a bright kid with weak skills be left in my class.) Parents with little formal education are so scared that their kid won’t get that diploma that they aren’t willing to let them risk failure.
That said, I really can’t comment on pizzabrat’s observations because I don’t really have traditional American blue-collar kids, white or black, which I believe is the culture she is talking about. I am in a large urban district and we have lots of immigrant kids (from all over the world), lots of truly poverty-stricken kids, a decent-size middle-class second generation Hispanic population, and Serious Old Money. It’s a weird school.
:rolleyes: “Coddling” wasn’t my point! My point was that “hands-off” doesn’t mean “doesn’t value education”. I used that as an example of a hands-off mindset. Fiveyearlurker’s cite had another. Manda JO talked about parents who don’t know the power they have at school. I mentioned that earlier in this thread!
Also, what I keep reiterating, is that ignorance of what makes a good education shouldn’t be mistaken for not valuing education.
So, not to put words into your mouth, but I think your point (which I would agree with), is that there are a lot of families that value education, but take a hands off approach to it (or are themselves not well educated, and are not able to take a more hands on approach). These families can have all the best intentions in the world, but their kids are still going to be at a disadvantage.
Exactly, assuming that they don’t value education is a pretty damning accusation to make lightly. It tempts those the know, who are savvy enough to navigate the educational world correctly, to resent those who aren’t. It’s easier to care about those who just don’t know that helping kids with there homework helps them in the long run than it is to care about people we think just don’t care.
I never said anything different. However, will you actually agree with me that there are many families that don’t value education as much they should? Not just value education but employ a hands off approach, but families that just don’t care?
I wouldn’t be able to say that since I don’t know any personally, and like I said before, I wouldn’t even know how that can be gauged. But if you personally have witnessed parents almost literally express that they don’t think their child’s education was important like you said earlier, who am I to disbelieve you?
pizzabrat, I have witnessed many, many parents give lip-service and false assurances to me about valuing their children’s education – only to learn much later their actions and unguarded remarks revealed a hostility or indifference about education/teachers/middle class norms and expectaions and an annoyance/frustration/anger/guilt about their own needed involvement in their child’s ongoing schooling I would not have believed had I not witnessed it.
The biggest factors in children’s success in school are high parental expectations, high teacher expectations, consistent performance and genuine pride and self-esteem. Money is important for things like classroom materials, good facilities, unique educational experiences and attracting and retaining good educators. But I would be the first to admit that just throwing more money at the problem with no parent, educator and students accountability is dumb.
I’m willing to concede that I may be naive about what it takes to maximize my child’s potential for education, but I’m really not seeing how the skill to “navigate the educational world correctly” is as critical as you make it. I’m not even sure exactly what that entails. Perhaps I’m misunderstading. Like most people, a lot of the rules for raising children came from my parents (for good or ill), and when I hear the phrase “value education,” I automatically revert to my cultural experience and picture someone like the grandmother who raised me. To me, she is the iconic symbol of valuing education.
She was the stereotypical Okie: Raising children during the dust bowl, lost two of the children to disease, barely enough to eat, yadda, yadda, yadda. She expressed her value of education by buying me all the books she could afford, explicitly telling me that I was going to college, attending the dorky functions like PTA and school plays, slapping curfews on school nights, believing the teacher about my behavior rather than me, and raising unadulterated holy hell with me when I got what she considered subpar grades. We had a lot of fights and I still disagree with some of her methods, but I never questioned that she valued education highly. This is how I define the term.
To me, this was an important part of raising me, and had a great deal to do with my academic success. It’s what I think of when I hear “valuing education.” I never saw any evidence of her skill in “navigating the educational world correctly”. But I realize that this is purely anecdotal and that it’s based purely only on my own experience. I’m sincerely willing to be educated about how I’m misunderstanding how my experience wouldn’t apply to other economically disadvantaged children in danger of slipping through the educational system.
I meant that as short hand for everything stated so far as being a contributer to a good education - i.e. working closely with the school and the child throughout her educational career.