When schools are in their dumbing
down mode, they will be simultaneously shifting the blame for the results to
someone or something else. We were
hearing an awful lot about dysfunctional families and at-risk children back
when all the Outcome Based changes in the schools were coming down. These unidentified, horrible families were
blamed for everything from why students never had homework to why kids with
head lice weren’t sent home. Students
were supposedly not learning to read because the dysfunctional parents weren’t
reading to them every night. The kids
were flunking their math tests because the dysfunctional parents weren’t
helping them with their homework – this would be the same “homework” that - at
that time - few of them were getting. It
became such a pervasive theme that I finally asked a school shrink neighbor of
mine for her definition of parents most likely to have at-risk students. Without a moment’s hesitation, she said,
“Two-income families.”
And here I was expecting the answer
to be “Heroin addicts” or something.
Many different family structures,
however, will have difficulty when schools stop teaching. Two-income families have two parents getting
home around 6 pm and squeezing meals, housework, laundry, activities, and
sometimes more work, etc. into the 2-3 hours before their children’s bed
time. It is very hard for these families
to also manage to teach their children how to read and how to perform even
simple math problems plus basic grammar, as well as sentence, paragraph and
essay writing in, at best, one or two hours a night. If it’s hard for families with two parents
present, you can imagine how hard it is for the single parent. Plus this is assuming that all parents know
how to teach even the earliest basic skills.
I spoke with many, many frustrated and desperate parents who had no idea
how to teach and couldn’t understand how this could be expected of them. Many of those who attended college protested
that they didn’t study teaching. (When I
told them that a lot of us who got Education degrees didn’t study teaching
either, they would give me funny looks.)
I also met many parents who were embarrassed to tell me that they themselves
could not read. They very much wanted
their children to have a better chance.
I still meet illiterate adults – all the time – high school graduates
plus - many of them are members of the middle class.
Interestingly, two-income families
did not make it to Pasco County’s list of the family factors that would put
children at risk of failure during the district’s latest paradigm shift. See Below (pgs. 6-7):
I cannot stress this enough: The
problem we have with our public school system is generational. Because of especially harsh periods over the
course of the last several decades, we’ve had large percentages of two or three
generations deliberately dumbed down through the withholding of Phonics
instruction, through the uselessness of New Math, through the total absence of
grammar instruction, through the neglect of History and Science instruction - the
list goes on and on. These periods last
around 10 – 15 years. There are families
who have older children able to read but younger children who can’t read, or
vice versa, all because the schools chose to switch away from, or back to, effective
reading instruction. There are far too
many families who haven’t had a well-educated generation in ages, simply
because the timing of their children has coincided with their area schools’
dumbing down periods.
In between these especially awful
seizures which hit all children no matter what their family’s status, we’ve had
outright discrimination against minorities, the recently immigrated and the
poor of all colors. All it takes is
ineffective teachers using counterproductive teaching methods and weak
materials. I believe that the widening
gap between the Haves and the Have-Not’s is caused essentially by the wide differences
in educational quality available to America’s children in their public school
system. This inequality has been enabled
by the lack of options given to the vast majority of parents.
The list above reflected the
Educators’ confident expectation that it would be mostly poorly educated
parents who would be providing the system with the subjects for their latest
drop-out program research. The
uneducated are primarily clustered in poor, low-income families, many with a
history of school drop-outs and dysfunction.
There is a great deal of stress
in single parent and/or low-income households, and limited monitoring of
student activities can occur when the adults are working two jobs or can’t
afford daycare or any number of other circumstances. The poorly educated also
will have low expectations for their children’s academic success because they
never had any school success themselves and have no idea how to attain such a
thing. We have to understand that most people who do poorly in school believe
the fault lies within themselves, that there is something wrong with them, and
that this wrong thing is genetic. That’s
what they’ve been told all their lives. “I’m dyslexic”, they’ll say, “And it
runs in the family.” People who can’t read aren’t going to have books,
magazines or newspapers in their houses, let alone “study aids”. The lack of explicit instruction in the
sound/spelling connections and the standard rules of grammar of the English language proves especially devastating to the
progress of ESL children. There was
strong protest during the OBE days against fraudulent ESL classes that claimed
to boost pride in the children’s diverse cultures, but proved much better at
withholding the language skills that would help them succeed in their new American culture.
By improving no further than low-grade mediocrity, which looks so much better when compared to the sheer horror of what went before, the Educators continuously produce
a steady supply of poorly educated children who will become the barely
functional parents of tomorrow. In fact,
the E’s are just beginning to start the whole process all over again with new
mandates and new goals and all kinds of promises – just as the victims of OBE
have reached parenthood age. This
continuous loop of mediocrity - and worse - is not going to be corrected by
shifting toward and mandating online instruction. It wasn’t the lack of computers that led to
our academic decline. Nor is it going to
improve the state of America’s public schools to have the E’s write yet another
set of learning goals – we had goals galore during OBE/Blueprint 2000. The only thing that is going to get Americans
out of this cycle of educational abuse is universal parental choice. The parents should choose whether or not
their children take online courses at all, especially since reading text on a
computer is already proving to be less effective than reading from print. They also should be able to choose which online
courses their children take since some of these courses are already getting
iffy reviews. I’ve heard of some
students taking online gym classes – the fact that this would even be offered
as a way for students to fulfill their online class mandate should disqualify
educators from making these decisions.
Lots of decisions the schools have made over the course of the last 100
years or so should disqualify them from ever making choices for other people’s
children ever again. Universal parental
choice – until we have that, we’ll continue to sink.
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