As a parent of two school-aged children, I couldn't agree more.
At the same time, as a single parent, I have to say that it's hard to ignore the effect that ubiquitous divorce and single-parenting is having on children's schooling.
In a single day I have to drag my kids out of bed, make them breakfast, make them lunch, get them to school (all the while they're complaining and dawdling), get to work myself, work a full 8 hour day, get to the daycare and pick up my kids, get home, and make dinner for us. And then do everything else that needs my attention, like bills. And then hound my kids to do their homework, help them with it, and then cajole them to do extra studying in math or writing.
It's exhausting and demoralizing having to do this all on your own. And I make a lot more money than is the average where I live, so I can only imagine what it must be like doing all of this with money pressures.
Are you a parent yourself? (I am, of four children, two now adults.) Have you ever been a parent in more than one country? (I have both here in the United States and in Taiwan.) Do you regularly communicate with other parents about how well school programs are working for their children? (I participate in a national online network of parents of gifted children every day.)
Parent involvement of a certain kind is necessary, but it is not sufficient (unless it takes the form of homeschooling, which is something I did for the primary education of all four of my children). With equally involved and caring parents, pupils and students do better or worse depending especially on curriculum design, and depending also on teacher training and school administration. Studies of school districts that had forced changes of administrators of schools under the now-expired No Child Left Behind law showed that changing administrators in a school can improve learning outcomes for the same group of children brought up by the same group of parents. Moreover, teachers often increased their job satisfaction after such administrative changes.[1]
Almost every thread about education on Hacker News has a top comment saying, "Parental involvement is the most important thing." I could agree with that statement (I largely do, as a homeschooling parent) without thinking that statement is any more than a middle-brow dismissal[2] of the submitted article's detailed text unless we have something to discuss here about a) what brings about more parental involvement and b) what else can be done at the margin to improve schools for parents who are already well involved. Let's discuss those issues here rather than be dismissive.
AFTER EDIT: I have my own top-level in this thread with substantive response to what the original article author said, but it is pushed far down below the fold by the long subthread development here.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/27/443110755/no-child...
I am originally from Denmark but moved to the US with my family.
My wife is part of the PTA group.
My oldest is in Success Academy a charter school.
I am not saying it's sufficient not sure how you got that idea. I am saying it's what makes the difference for the children getting education is that their parents are involved.
You can't always decide what teachers your kids are getting or what school they go to, who they hang out with and so on. But you can decide if you are going to be involved in your kids education.
You were the one who wrote, in the higher-level comment you made,
The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple.
Now that we have agreement here expressed by each of us that parent involvement is important, but not the whole story of what's important in education, how about let's discuss the specific content of the article submitted for discussion? How could an involved parent, for example, CHECK whether or not a teacher in the friendly local public school has learned enough about reading instruction to know how to distinguish phonemes from graphemes?
I'd be happy to see other readers's comments on my own top-level comment in this thread (it is "below the fold, I think), in which I give examples of differing practice in the other country I have lived in, Taiwan. The schools there did an amazing job when Taiwan was still a developing country of providing good instruction with very limited resources. One big aspect of that was better teacher training.
The article claims that it's not bad teachers but bad teacher education.
I am following that line of singular reason and saying what I believe comes before that.
I made that comment in the context of discussions about childrens education which always focus on a bunch of other things than parents. (Better equipment, better teachers, better methods etc.) because I believe thats one of the most if not the most important reasons to get good education to the extent that something has to be chosen.
I am not buying the premise that education somehow becomes better if teachers becomes better or children gets better scores. Because I am not buying the premise that education in itself is the goal. It's only part of a much bigger perspective far beyond the reach of the educational system and later in life far beyond parents control.
So I stand by my claim that involved parents will itself make up for a lot of the things that are considered problems with education.
Not really: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak.... It's a common myth, though.
That the education system can be optimized is obvious but that does not change any of what I am saying.
We have three elementary schools within one mile of each other. The schools have similar profiles with a fairly high number kids on free/reduced-price lunch. The teachers from the different schools train with one another. They come from the same education programs. Yet, my daughter's school significantly outperforms the other schools.
One difference comes from the parents and the culture/education opportunities they can provide outside the school. Parents regularly take their kids to plays, musicals, museums, historical sites, etc. They also read with their kids nightly.
Another important difference is the PTA. Ours is very active. We developed an after school program that offers introductory theater, music, visual arts, sports, marine biology, etc. Thanks to a state legislative grant, we can offer these classes for free to kids whose families can't afford them . Our parents knew enough to look for grants when they started the program. Last year we developed a full theater program for kids who wanted more involved productions.
If you're looking at economic classifications, the other two schools' communities can be described as working and lower middle class. Our community is working, lower and upper middle class.
Again, the stat on free/reduced-price lunches is similar. The schools' budgets are roughly the same accounting for number of students and age of the buildings. We have kids classified as homeless in our school, as I'm sure the other schools have as well. Yet, our school performs significantly better. The difference is the learning that's happening outside the school.
Last year I attended a talk by the president of the principals' association in my state. He cited a study that estimated 48% of a child's education comes from outside the school. There is certainly room for improvement for some teachers. There is also room for modernization in teaching methodology. But, we won't improve education for students as long as we're only looking along one axis for improvement.
(Btw, I'm not an educator. I'm a software engineer who happens to be very involved in the PTA for my daughter's school.)
I don't buy it. Parental involvement has some value in early education (learning to read and write, for example). But beyond that, I suspect "involved parents" is a proxy for wealth.
Meaning, what? Wealthy kids with uninvolved parents do fine? Why?
For one, the school and teachers your kid gets is determined by whether you're rich enough to buy or rent property on the correct street (at least, here in Toronto).
(source: The Smartest Kids In The World http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0061NT61Y)
This is being too harsh on parents. My parents were very much involved with my own brother's education. They tutored him, got him extra help, set up incentives, etc, etc. But he still did far worse than me. Meanwhile they had to pull me away from the books. I never got help with math homework because I never had any trouble with it. School just came naturally to me. I was just born much smarter than my brother. My parents never had to pressure me to learn programming, I picked it up because it was fun and I was good at it. Heck, I taught myself calculus because I found the problem solving fun.
And I see this observation over and over again. If a person is naturally good at cognitive work, sooner or later they will go whole hog on learning some economically useful cognitive skills. If a person is just naturally a bit slower, it will always be an uphill battle.
These personal observations are corroborated by adoption studies and twin studies. Twins raised separately end up closer together than non-twins raised together. Adopted children end up closer to their biological parents than their adopted parents. Etc. (sources; http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023048987045774784... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/genes-dont-just-influ... )
You're looking on the wrong end of the spectrum. The thought is that kids with uninvolved parents tend to have external distractions, behavioral problems, an unwillingness to do homework, underage pregnancies, etc.
Of course there are kids who just learn naturally but they aren't a part of the problem the article is discussing and there are parents who aren't involved in their childrens education.
He learned in after school classes, at home, etc.
The problem was that public schools are focussed on underperforming kids and my son was above grade level so they did not bother to teach him. He did have a fun time at recess. Lots of time for reading fiction during class.
This is glib and easy to say, but I don't buy it.
When parents try to intervene in their child's education, schools are increasingly hostile. They are beginning to treat school children in a manner similar to how the TSA treats travelers.
Here's an example: my parents have a young daughter in middle school in the Midwest. She is active in a school choir, but also wants to do the science fair and many other activities. My parents are lucky because here is a kid who actually wants to do these things.
Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at 5:15 am (!) on a Saturday in order to travel 45 minute to a nearby school to do a choir competition at 7:30 am. Further, even though my sister's performance is over at 7:45 am, she has to stay with the school until well after 11:00 am and be bused home. The parents are not allowed to pick up the children early or give them a ride a home at all. This is for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.
At the same time, my sister is expected to do work on her upcoming science fair project (which must adhere to an egregiously onerous template provided on the school's website) and also do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right).
When my parents spoke up about the unreasonableness of the school making middle schoolers travel to a competition at 5:15 on a weekend morning, and also disallowing their parents from even picking them up early or anything, the school was borderline militant in their reply. They chewed out my parents, said they had no business questioning the choir director's choice of which competitions to attend or what the scheduling was, and basically said that the choice was either to put up or shut up. The school was not willing to compromise or even discuss any of their points about how unhealthy and overly burdensome the whole set of affairs was.
In smaller ways, this extends to classroom homework (which is at levels way higher than when I was a child, and yet the kids themselves say (and test scores seem to indicate) that they are retaining less and less of it). If a parent writes in to say the homework is too much, that it is stressing out their 6th grade kid who is staying up until 10:30 pm, crying and self-doubting the whole time, just to keep up with a single day's homework, you don't get any degree of reasonableness whatsoever.
I feel that schools and teachers have way too much authority over how children are treated and evaluated, what they are required to do, and so forth. They argue that they have to make it this way to comply with state and federal standards, and that's a big part of the problem. But regardless, it doesn't matter if you are a proactive and supportive parent if your attempts to provide a healthy and nurturing learning atmosphere are constantly and aggressively thwarted by the very teachers and school officials you want to try to work with.
This could just as well be "the unreasonableness of signing on for an activity then not wanting to do what's required to participate", and/or "the unreasonableness of signing up for more activities than one is (apparently) able to find time for". I thought she wants to participate in choir. I'd certainly get up early on the occasional weekend for something I wanted to do, and it wouldn't even occur to me to complain, ya know?
As for letting her leave early, 1) they probably don't want to safely coordinate a bunch of individual pick-ups in an unfamiliar place _while trying to keep everyone else on schedule_, and 2) they may consider sticking around for the rest of the event to be important. It's really, really easy to imagine a world in which their refusal isn't primarily due to their being assholes.
Maybe you're right about all this being an example of a hostile school, but your description of events makes it seem more like a case of whiney, entitled kids/parents. Again, maybe that's wrong, but that is definitely the impression I get from this tale, as written. I mean, this: "Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at 5:15 am (!) on a Saturday". I actually LOL'ed at the parenthetical exclamation point. Or: "and also do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right)." I mean—yeah, of course. What's weird about that? Quit signing up for extra crap if you're having trouble meeting basic obligations. You cannot have/do everything.
No, it cannot. Asking young minds to wake up for a performance (that the school is not required to participate in) is not reasonable. It doesn't matter how busy the student is; it doesn't matter that you voluntarily signed up. None of that matters. The point is that it's too early. It's an unreasonable burden to place on any child.
Your attitude also strikes me as needlessly aggressive about it. Why should the child pay the penalty of being disallowed to participate, grow, and learn (and incur the future costs of what scholarship committees and colleges will think of someone who didn't do those things) just because they think 5:15 am on a weekend morning for children who can't yet drive is too burdensome? What is the point of the school choir if not to provide culturally enriching experiences to the very students who wish to join it? You're acting as if the platonic idea of "the choir" exists totally independently of the bang-simple basic life constraints of its participants.
If the choir said you have to show up at 5:15 am for a concert, and you will not be allowed to use the bathroom or eat food for 6 hours then of course we'd have a problem with it. Kids need to use the bathroom. Kids need to eat. Voluntarily opting-in to participate in the choir doesn't give the choir director the permission to disallow eating or using a bathroom.
But if we just slightly move the needle out to significantly disrupting the regular sleeping habits of a middle school kid, now all of the sudden parents are "whiny" to expect their kid gets to be healthy. Your position is preposterous.
In other words, you're placing a deeply unrealistic expectation of accommodation onto a very young kid, meanwhile not holding grown adults to any degree of reasonableness or compromise.
Later on, their prospects for college and scholarships may not be as good, depending on what else they do. But at least in the short term, having disinterested parents sort of just means you get to have a comfortable childhood.
It's really quite sad that there is such fierce downward pressure to begin the processes of employment competition and mate selection at younger and younger ages that we end up bottomlessly compromising away our children's ability to stop and enjoy life for a few years. If the downward pressure led to more well-adjusted, gainfully employed adults who benefited from the early crucibles, then I might be somewhat OK with it. But while parents are busy with the downward pressure, society is also busy making sure the kids can only get a job in some shitty start-up where they'll be lucky to have adequate health insurance, let alone ever having enough money to afford a standard of living that we collectively view as acceptable.
Conditioned upon the inevitable shit-world that executives and political elites thrust upon us, if we really loved our kids we should probably teach them to value foosball tables and extroverted work spaces above all else. Then we'd at least prepare them for the real world.
The point is not about parents intervening it's about parent being interested in their kids education. That it matters what they learn, that you see their test scores, have adequate responsens and ways to deal with both good results and bad results.
On a school trip, the school is legally responsible for the kids. Trying to keep up with everyone - who came on the bus but is leaving early with their parents, who came with their parents but is riding back on the bus - especially with a large group. And it's even worse today, since most of the kids have cell phones and will be begging their parents for an early pick up, so whatever the kid originally said they were going to do will change mid trip.
As far as the homework, what would you have them do? They already have do much material to cover for standardized tests that they can't thoroughly cover any topics they way they need to. They know it and they don't have a choice. They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
Teachers in the US are in a terrible place right now. On one side you have parents, both bad parents who aren't involved and overly demanding ultra involved parents, and on the other side state and federal officials breathing down their necks about testing. Teachers are literally the meat in the middle of the vice. My mom is a retired teacher, and keeps in touch with a group of friends, almost all of whom she mentored. These are all very good teachers, and all of them are veterans with 10+ years experience. They're all demoralized and every single one of them is counting the days until hit 20 years, so they qualify for retirement and can get out.
It may be difficult to keep track of kids, but even so, the answer to that difficulty is not to do things that make the kids' lives overly burdensome just because that makes the teachers' lives a little better. You can find a way to compromise. If you have enough resources to take a group of kids to a choir competition in the first place, then you have enough resources to figure out some way that the kids are not stranded at the competition with no way to productively use that time until some mandated school transportation takes them home.
The point is that simply mandating a solution like "no one can leave early" is lazy and represents a failure to empathize with the kids or their parents. I agree with you it will have to be some type of compromise -- you can't give every single child or every single parent some customized, preferential treatment. But what the schools do is not at all like a compromise. It's much more of a mandated policy, and they threaten and coerce parents into scared obedience by subtly threatening to take it out on your child via grades, political favors (like who gets which role in a school musical) and so forth. So if you raise an issue and say that some policy is simply going too far (like forcing kids to be at the school by 5:15 am) you're actually putting your own kid at risk even just by making waves.
> As far as the homework, what would you have them do? They already have do much material to cover for standardized tests that they can't thoroughly cover any topics they way they need to. They know it and they don't have a choice. They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
This part really frustrates me. For one thing, the volume of homework and the speed with which you cover material are not at all the same thing. You can cover a lot of material without giving hardly any homework, or you can cover very few different topics while laying the homework on heavily. Measuring progress as "amount of homework completed" is a horrible idea. It's essentially like utterly giving up the idea of teaching people and admitting you're just going to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.
Also, there are at least a few studies out there which suggest that kids get up to three times as much homework as the state guidelines tend to recommend. High volume of homework is not really a symptom of guidelines. Covering crappy topical subjects, or expecting too many subjects to be covered in a year, those can be the fault of the guidelines. Evaluating students on nonsensical rubrics can be a problem with guidelines.
But making sure kids learn effectively with a reasonable amount of homework is perhaps the primary job of the teacher, regardless of the guidelines. What I mean is: conditional on some set of topics given from guidelines on high, the teacher's job is to then clamp the homework level at or below a reasonable amount and then evoke learning. Levering up the amount of homework doesn't somehow magically evoke learning, and often hinders it.
> They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
Yes they absolutely can, and many teachers do, and they absolutely should, even in the presence of state guidelines. If adding more homework volume only exacerbates a problem of not really understanding something, then it cannot be a solution. Keeping homework at the same level, or even speeding it up, would only make things worse. It's like throwing gas on the fire.
I agree with you that teaching is not effectively rewarded in US culture. Four of my aunts were school teachers and another relative is an inner city principal in Ohio. I've heard it all. I absolutely agree we should have a culture change that affords more pay, respect, and status to effective teachers at all levels.
But at the same time, there are a lot of underqualified teachers who resort to cramming more homework as a crutch tactic. The worst part about this is that they refuse to be reasonable or to compromise when proactive parents try to play a role in their child's education. It's usually contentious and aggressive, and school administrators are forced to back the teacher even when teacher policies are clearly destructive. The whole thing turns into a hugely contentious shit show, and instead of parents sitting back and just accepting some line about just dealing with it, it's perfectly reasonable for them to expect there will be compromise that is based on their own inputs and values.
That seems to be the case with asian parents/children and they usually get better GPA.
Is there any source that proves or disproves that?
However I think it's misleading to focus on their scores as a proof of good education, but that's a whole other discussion.
No amount of training or methods is going to change that simple but important fact. Involved parents means involved kids which means they will learn.
That isn't to say that the education system shouldn't be optimized (it should)
But there is no problem with education as such. There is a problem with how parents are involved with their kids education.
Edit: To clear up confusion. No I am not saying parents are a substitute for education I am not talking about parents intervening either.
I am saying that by being involved intellectually in their kids education they are providing their kids with the best kind of foundation possible and it will fix a lot of the issues that comes out of parents not being involved or outright harmful to their kids education.