Meet the Parents
How much responsibility do parents have for their children's achievement in school? A great deal, contends PJM's Aaron Hanscom, a former elementary school teacher in Los Angeles. Find out what Open House Night at his school taught him, in this first installment of a two-part series on parenting in America.
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I developed a unique skill during my brief career as an elementary school teacher in inner city Los Angeles: Within moments of entering a new classroom, I was able to glean which students had two parents living at home.
It was really no great feat. The boys whose pants were falling down to their ankles and the girls wearing short skirts were almost always from single-parent homes. I could tell immediately after reprimanding them that they weren’t accustomed to hearing a male authoritarian voice. The girls would usually respond to me by rolling their eyes, while the boys would either kick the wall or march out of class.
Even when they remained in class, these students didn’t learn much. After all, they weren’t in school to learn. As Diane Ravitch recently wrote in the New York Sun, much of what can be done for these students is almost entirely out of teachers’ hands:
“Get the students to study instead of watching television or playing on their computers or hanging out with their friends. Get them to sleep at a reasonable hour. Get them to comprehend the connection between what they accomplish in school and their chance to have a decent income and life after school. Get them to see the value of visiting museums and libraries. Get them to spend free time improving themselves instead of sleeping late, partying, or going to the movies.”
I can’t tell you how many of my students would regularly fall asleep in class. They’d tell me that they went to sleep after midnight the previous night because they were playing video games. Indeed, all I ever saw these kids reading by choice were game hint books. One first grade teacher at my school kept toothbrushes in her classroom for the students who regularly came to school unwashed and in dirty clothes.
There’s one story from my substitute teaching days that really reveals what teachers are up against. I was in a kindergarten classroom, and one boy was disrupting the class with his frequent outbursts and inability to remain in his seat. This in and of itself was nothing remarkable; I’m sure even Bill Gates had his share of timeouts in the corner. What shocked me was overhearing the boy refer to a girl in the class as a “bitch.” It turned out that this 5-year-old child was reciting gangsta rap lyrics as if they were nursery rhymes.
What can you do with students who don’t care because their parents don’t care? Even the best teachers can only do so much. When there aren’t any consequences at home, you can expect bad behavior in the classroom. Unfortunately, this hurts even the students who are trying to learn. Edward Lazear of the Hoover Institution found that, “If, on average, each student disrupts the class 1 percent of the time, the time available for learning drops to 99 percent for a one-student class . . . and to just 74 percent for a class size of 30.”
The percentage was even lower for my first year 5th grade class of 35 students. I shudder whenever I think about how much time I wasted that year trying to restore order in the classroom. (My use of the word “restore” incorrectly implies that there was any order to begin with.) While it’s true I was a first year teacher with no experience, students who come to class ready to learn (not an unreasonable expectation) can get a good education from an inexperienced but passionate and knowledgeable instructor. As radio talk show host Larry Elder wrote in his book “The Ten Things You Can’t Say in America“: “It ain’t about money. It’s about values. It’s about discipline and application. It’s about character, working hard when you don’t want to. And these values are instilled in the home.”
Elder knows of what he speaks. He grew up in the South Central section of Los Angeles, the poor neighborhood where I used to teach. Unlike so many of my students, Elder was raised by two loving parents who instilled in him the virtues of hard work and personal responsibility. He eventually graduated from Brown University and earned a law degree at the University of Michigan.
If more parents were like Elder’s parents, we wouldn’t have to wait for reforms like school vouchers and merit pay to be implemented before witnessing dramatic improvements in school achievement. That is not meant to be an apologia for failing public schools that are resistant to change. But it is important to remember these words from Thomas Sowell: “In some of the most successful schools, especially of the past, the parents’ role has been that of giving moral support to the school by letting their children know that they are expected to learn and to behave themselves.”
Broken homes are unfortunately most common in inner cities. The late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, speaking about inner-city blacks, wrote in 1965 that “a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken homes, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectation about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos.” At the time, about one-quarter of black children were born out of wedlock. Today’s rate is near 70 percent. (This is not only a problem in the African-American community: The Hispanic illegitimacy rate is over 40 percent, while the rate for whites is quickly approaching 25 percent.) This trend bodes ill for America’s inner cities: 71 percent of all high school dropouts, 85 percent of youths in jail and 85 percent of all children who exhibit behavioral problems come from fatherless homes. Children from single-parent homes have also been found to have higher incidences of truancy, suspensions, tardiness, and absenteeism.
When contemplating the future of the next generation, consider my first year classroom’s Open House Night. Out of a class of 35 students, only three parents showed up.
Aaron Hanscom is a Los Angeles-based editor for Pajamas Media; his own blog is Scribblings.
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12 Comments
Jim:This article is absolutely correct. I served on our local board of education for eighteen years and learned that partent have more to do with quaility education than teachers. I have two daughters in our school system. On is an Asst. Prinicipal at a large High School and one who is an elementrary teacher. Both say that they can identify problem children also by the parents or lack there of.
Aug 9, 2007 - 2:07 am TEPLOST:“Get the students to study instead of watching television or playing on their computers or hanging out with their friends. Get them to sleep at a reasonable hour. Get them to comprehend the connection between what they accomplish in school and their chance to have a decent income and life after school. Get them to see the value of visiting museums and libraries. Get them to spend free time improving themselves instead of sleeping late, partying, or going to the movies.”
This paragraph struck me as describing some children I know who live in traditional 2-parent homes, but whose parents, for whatever reason, choose not to exercise any authority over their children. Often these parents value education and do try to instill an understanding of the link between what they do in school today and what their future options may be, and are desperate at the choices their children are making. However, I notice that they never enforce the rules or impose any consequences on unacceptable behavior.
Aug 9, 2007 - 8:13 am JHoward:A 2-parent home in which parents will not risk the ire of their children by enforcing the rules is just as destructive as a single parent home where there are no rules.
How much responsibility do parents have for their children’s achievement in school? What an extraordinary question. Of course, the real question, one for years run under the wheels of comfortable assumption, is what the hell right does government have being in the education business? Actually, what right does it have destroying the education sector and completely changing the complexion of American society forever?
The dysfunctional single-family home illustrated in this piece is as much the result of nanny statism as it is the cause of poor academic performance.
Government schooling is the root cause of a great amount of the dysfunction seen in American society. Can we finally answer the question, what right does it have there? What right does government have more or less instilling childhood values and philosophies when and where the separation clause is to hallowed?
I’ll lead off: It’s not even remotely because everybody “deserves” an education. Government schools cost twice what the private sector offers and that’s including the private sector never having the opportunity to compete head to head in the mass market. And it’s clearly not because such an “education” is in any way a quality product.
Government schools destroy values, performance, normal social development, and with them, lives. So other than myth, why is this allowed when our form of government had no such authority whatsoever at it’s inception?
Aug 9, 2007 - 8:24 am Delphine:Count me among the people growing up in a lack of learning ambience. I grew up in Astoria, Queens, an immigrant neighborhood with many first generation Americans.
My father is Brazilian, my mother French so I didn’t fit in with any particular group. Latino’s thought Brazilians spoke some type of “messed up Spanish”. Greeks and Italians kept to their own little clicks, funny thing is all the boys liked me and I grew fond of many of them.
While attending IS 126 I witnessed many horrors along with my best friend (are you out there Tricia?) on both “sides” teachers and students.
I witnessed a boy throw a chair at a teacher and nearly hit her, I saw her throw him out and slam the door causing the AP system to fall on the back of another boy who was disrupting the class. He was hurt but I don’t think anyone ever told… There was so much more, this article has inspired me to document everything my class and I went through there (I’ll do this on my own blog soon).
One thing that French teacher said has always come to mind when I think of parent/student disconnect. On one occassion someone was disrupting the class, she said, “if you act like that what are you going to tell your parents at the dinner table tonight?” Everyone exploded in laughter, even me, did she really think these kids were eating dinner at a table??? Did she think this was the 50’s instead of the 80’s?
Now my own son will start 1st grade this fall and an entire different landscape of education. The school we are zoned for is dominated by a nearby trailer park. Unfortunately, I’ve already experienced some ignorance and observed that MANY of the children are ill prepared to study for various reasons.
My question to you is, what can I do as a parent to help not only my son, but the entire class? I feel I have a responsibility and will try to volunteer when possible but the reality is I have 2 little girls, will one parents involvement with some of the others ensure that they all go off to college together some day? become my sons networking contacts in the future? I have a vested interest in my sons friends and the kids he’s around but feel powerless to help them/him. I’ve already started buying homeschool supples and books in case I need to pull him out quick…
Aug 9, 2007 - 8:57 am Deborah:“The school we are zoned for is dominated by a nearby trailer park.”
What?
Aug 9, 2007 - 9:10 am TEPLOST:Delphine,
Good luck to you. It is certainly scary to send one’s little one to school. From everything you have written, I think he will do very well indeed, because you will be there to support him all the way.
I can tell you what I discovered in sending my child through a multi-ethnic public school system with children from a variety of economic backgrounds. My son always picked friends whose parents had the same parenting style that we applied. He was used to a home in which parents were very much involved in all aspects of his life and in which there was love as well as rules and expectations. His circle of friends encompassed a variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds, but they all shared a common experience of strong parental involvement. That is very likely what your son will also do, because that is the environment in which he feels safe and comfortable.
Aug 9, 2007 - 9:11 am BMOON:Let’s get really politically incorrect. What the massive degeneration in our society comes down to is one thing - the lack of true manhood. On a purely rational basis, when considering the incalculable damage that has been done to the present generation, I think you would have to conclude that the massive attack on true manhood -the feminization of culture, the flood of propaganda pushing ‘alternative lifestyles’, the ridiculization of men and manhood - their has to be a sinsiter force behind it.
Politicians and secularist true believers will never mention this, because it takes the problem out of their realm. But it is more obvious than the darkness that comes at the end of the day.
Aug 9, 2007 - 9:59 am Smokey:Agree with every post above.
The central reason for the total failure of government schools, and of society in general, can be named in one word: Liberalism. And everything that goes along with that ugly mindset: multiculturalism, blaming everyone else for your own self-inflicted faults, hatred for the traditions of America, etc.
My wife has a Master’s degree from a public college, and she been a middle school Principal for the past 16 years. I have a midwestern Catholic high school education [entirely paid for by my parents, who made certain that they were going to get their money’s worth]. I can read and spell better than my Principal wife, or any of her staff [as she readily admits]. I am much better educated in geography, history and science than any of her college-degreed teachers.
The reason is simple:
When parents must pay for school out of their own pocket, they will demand of their children that they learn. But when the government pays, most parents view school as a baby sitter, and they put 100% of the blame on the teachers and school when their child fails or gets into trouble.
But the unions and their pets, politicians, are too strong. America’s zenith was between the WWII generation and the generation that landed a man on the moon. Those days are gone, and America’s greatness is lost.
The only thing that keeps our country from external destruction is the fact that we are not as bad as most other countries. You don’t have to outrun the bear; you only have to outrun the other guy.
Aug 9, 2007 - 10:44 am Judge Crater:There actually is an instruction series that can markedly improve academic skills in low SES (Social Economic Status) students: Direct Instruction.
The Low Performers Manual is (as the name implies) a step-by-step to teaching low performing students.
http://www.zigsite.com/PDFs/LowPerfManual.pdf
Some background links:
http://www.zigsite.com/
http://www.behavior.org/education/index.cfm?page=http%3A//www.behavior.org/education/education_direct_instruction_home.cfm
http://www.mackinac.org/print.aspx?ID=4454
Aug 9, 2007 - 12:33 pm Wacky Hermit:The fact that the parents have so much to do with the effectiveness of schooling doesn’t seem to stop schools for claiming full credit for the education that takes place, or from blaming parents for their own failures. They refuse to acknowledge parental contributions, but then turn around and send us letters reminding us of our obligations.
Aug 9, 2007 - 5:03 pm Chris B.:My wife and I live in a small suburban town with an excellent elementary school. While I appreciate the quality of the teachers and administration, I look at the seats - packed with mothers and fathers - and know they are the real reason the school is so good.
We recently upgraded to a house from our townhouse - we paid a higher price to stay in the town.
Aug 10, 2007 - 9:04 am BobH:My home was “broken” and “disfunctional” before my divorce, but I fixed that.
The education of MY children has always been exclusively MY responsibility. Overall, the schools have helped greatly. I appreciate the work of the many dedicated teachers, but I am responsible for my children and their education. It is hard work and not easy, but the reward is great.
Aug 10, 2007 - 10:35 am