Whenever there is a discussion about education reform in California the focus is often on the teacher's union, the lack of adequate funding from our legislature and teacher/student ratios. These are perfectly legitimate, very serious concerns and each one must be addressed in order to insure our ability to properly educate our children.
However, there is a major component to the public school education process that is rarely discussed; it's the elephant in the room. No matter what happens with teacher tenure, incentives or pay increases; no matter how much more funding our public schools receive, without more parental participation large numbers of our children will continue to underachieve and dropout of school.
Parents play a critical role in the education of children. Parental guidance, encouragement and support are essential in establishing education as a priority in the lives of children. While public schools have a mandate to educate every child, they are ill equipped to do so. Bill Gates, Former CEO at Microsoft said, "we are attempting to educate in the 21st Century with a 1954 model." Increasing enrollment, ethnic and cultural diversity, increasing numbers of students with learning and developmental disabilities, outdated teaching methodologies and a lack of resources are all challenges that can devastate and overwhelm public school systems. The one major, untapped resource left to our communities are parents.
The fact is our schools offer educational materials and guidance but parents can't drop off their kids and say, "teach Johnny to read" and expect they have no responsibility to assist in the process. As an advocate that works for families, I often meet parents who are two income household. Recently, I met with a couple who were having trouble with their school speech therapist. Their complaint was the "total" lack of progress shown by their son during the past school year. Their son receives 1.5 hours of speech each week. Of that time, .5 hours is one to one and 1.0 hours is shared. The child that shares the hour of speech therapy with their son has shown great progress and their son had not.
Every child is different however we decided to meet with the parents of the other child to see if they could provide us with any insight. What was immediately clear is the other parents had a strategy in place to support their child's learning experience. Once every two weeks, one of the parents would talk with the therapist and get tips on techniques and exercises they could do in between the speech therapy sessions. In essence, they were providing as much "therapy" as they could in support of the therapist. This dual, supportive approach was critical to the progress of their son.
My clients felt their situation was different. Both parents work long hours and have little time to spend on "activities" after coming home. In their mind, the school is supposed to teach their child to speak and they were doing a terrible job. I suggested that we try and get more speech therapy hours provided by the school. I also suggested that the family look at other ways to supplement the efforts and services that they are currently receiving. If you can't take time off to assist with the development and education of your child, ask a family member, hire a tutor, down size, re-assess your priorities. The point is parents need to be more responsible for the education of their children.
According to the California Department of Education, the high school graduation rate for this state in 2007-2008 was 68%. State wide, the high school drop out rate is 20.3%. If you think about the fact that we are in the 21st Century, the age of technology and only 68% of students in our state are meeting the minimum standards to exit high school it's pretty astonishing. This problem can't be left up to our schools alone, parents must be part of the solution.
Yes, we need to reform our education system. We need reform within the teachers union and with our legislative priorities. But reform begins at home.
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