Schools Vs. Parenting

I recently attended a Principals’ seminar where the keynote speaker stated that educators are not the problem with public education, parents are.   I often cringe when I hear this from those who advocate for public education.  It is an easy ploy that casts blame over acting to serve.   This position also demonstrates the social divide that now threatens the public schools brought on by institutional indifference.

I have 5 siblings of which I am the fifth.  I was born 5 years after the fourth child and 14 years after the oldest.   The four older siblings would often grumble that my little sister and I did not have the same parents.  My father had a very patriarchal perspective and the older four would often share experiences that showed my parents to be strict disciplinarians.  By the time the last of us came along, my Mom was in her late thirties and my Dad his forties.  By the time I began to explore in many of the inappropriate ways of a child, Mom and Dad had taken on the philosophy of “but for the grace of God.”  My siblings and I, all college graduates, have all led successful lives by American standards, but it took tremendous effort, worry and expense on the part of my parents to help us get there.   They had to adapt to each of us and find ways to help us see the value of character, perseverance and humility.  The end result was similar, but each journey has been different.

My Mom was among the wisest people I have had the pleasure to know.  She was a “war bride” and had her first child at the age of 20.  She deftly navigated through the energy and personality of all six of us without benefit of an owner’s manual.  She came from a strong family with great parents of her own, but her daily experience was her greatest teacher.  By the time I was in high school my Mom was very well known for her public school advocacy.  She would later brag that she had participated in PTAs for 28 years; a daunting accomplishment.   My little sister and I grew up in the South at the offset of busing for integration and my mother threw all of her energy into supporting the public schools.  My little sister was bused to an inner city school.  This had a profound impact on my mother who frequently volunteered to serve breakfast for the underprivileged children in this school.  She began to witness the difficulty of parenting on the impoverished and how unprepared young teenagers were to be mothers.  She understood that these families did not have the parenting legacy she had and how difficult that was on poor working class families. Mom, as regional president of the PTA, began to use her position to advocate for parenting classes to the local school board.   Perhaps Mom’s greatest trait, empathy, gave her insight into the impact parenting deficits had on cyclical poverty.  What alarmed her even more was the disdain the educational institutions demonstrated toward families.  Regretfully her advocacy fell on deaf ears. 

            Perhaps the two most humbling experiences I continue to have are that of the teacher and parent.   As a young teacher I learned that reaching children does not result from bending students to your will, but meeting them where they are.  This means that I had to fully embrace my role as a servant if I was to convince students that what I teach is important.  It took me about five years to internalize this practice.  I have learned through the years that this may be the single most important attribute of successful teachers.   The teachers most desired by parents understand the importance of the parent toward the success of the child.  This does not mean that these teachers cater to the whims of parents, but they successfully employ parents as partners.  I have seen both strict, structured, teachers and more sensitive teachers succeed because they embrace the humanity of the parent. 

My understanding of the family dynamic did not begin to form until I became a father.   As single teacher I often judged parents of my students prior to becoming a parent myself.  The parent model that raised me did not automatically instill empathy toward parents.  When I heard more experienced teachers lament the contemporary state of parenting I simply took this as the reality faced by schools.  Once I encountered the challenges of family life my perspective evolved. I began to better understand the challenges that influenced parental decisions.  As a principal, I see young teachers too quick to judge the impertinence of students as a product of poor parenting.  They don’t understand the stressors that homework or extra-curricular activities place on family continuity or routine.  

            It astounds me that educators come across as so judgmental toward parents.  When a child does not complete homework, or assignments, some believe it is  because there is not enough discipline in the home.  A child is frequently tardy to school, the parent obviously doesn’t value education.  The institutional response to these problems has been to enforce more restrictions and rules.  The public schools frequently take a “no tolerance” tack in an attempt to force better parental behaviors.  This institutional practice has not worked.

My own experience as a father has been the ongoing revelation that parenting is very difficult.  I quickly discovered that my rules were too often negotiable when that was not my intent.  I would sometimes fall into the trap that I never challenged my Dad’s authority, when in fact I constantly searched for ways to do just that.  By the time we had our third child, I learned that they were all quite different.  What worked with one, did not work with the other.  As I got older I became more tired and my will would often succumb to fatigue. 

            As a culture we have done a very poor job supporting parenting.  Too often we have treated parenting as instinct and not modeled practice.  The public schools come out of a bias for academic language and thought.  If educators were honest, we would see that less than half of the high school graduates leave with any sense of educational fulfillment.  They often get through school in spite of themselves or their families.   As we have progressed through the 21^st century, education policy makers have moved further away from the social and civic experience and more toward the academic.  We in public education develop layers of rules that can only be navigated by the most prepared and determined of families.  When the U.S. adopted an information economy the families with successful educational legacies were able to change.  The families that typically depended on skilled and unskilled labor, often those who barely made it through high school or dropped out, began to lose economic ground.  The public schools did nothing to help young adults navigate the challenges of parenting.  We simply blamed single parent families or “the entitlement class.”

            Public schools have always acted as a tool to separate the wheat from the chaff.  High school was actually established to weed out students who were not college material.  As a K-12 education became more important for the citizenry, this model for high school should have changed.  Too often it has not.  The advent of technology has made it even more difficult for families to infiltrate the bureaucratic morass that is the institutional model for public schools.  School institutions have too often moved to force digital compliance with no effort to develop the infrastructure and experience necessary for parents to support their children.  Not only have we done a poor job preparing parents to raise their children, but we have made it more difficult for parents to get their children to meaningful citizenship. 

            So, no, parents are not the reason our public schools struggle.  The institutional devaluation of community as a tool to raise children by governments and bureaucratic entities has made purposeful child rearing more difficult.  It’s time that we as educators learn to embrace parents and show that we understand parenting is difficult through initiatives that encourage shared experience and create a forum of diverse parental experiences.  Schools should start offering programs that support parenting and quit acting as if good parenting is a character trait.