Education, part 5: Parents’ Role in Education.

Do you know which part of the debate over public education annoys me the most? Not the fact that most non-educators believe teachers work a half-day for half a year. Nor that teachers are overpaid and receive free medical insurance. Nor the fact that teachers’ pensions are bankrupting the state of New Jersey. All these unjustified complaints are totally wrong, and I will address them eventually, but first I need to address the single most important reason why public education in this country will never be as good as it is in other countries around the world, and it is a reason which is hardly ever considered in the debate over public education:

Public education can never be better than the support it receives in the community where it is located.

What does that mean precisely? It means that no matter how good a teacher might be, or how supportive a school system might be, it is the attitude of the parents which ultimately determines the success or failure of a school’s students.

This is not a totally unsupported claim. For 31 years I taught in a township which actually contains two slightly-overlapping communities: 30-40% of the families in the township are immigrant families, about 75% of them from Asian countries. I taught honors and advanced placement classes in which over 90% of my students’ families came from those immigrant communities. The vast majority of my students themselves, or my students’ parents, were born in countries other than the United States (primarily, but not exclusively, from India, China or Taiwan). The remaining 5-10% of my students were second-generation Americans or longer, but those were the overlapping minorities whose families supported education as totally as the immigrant families did.

My reputation was of being the hardest teacher in the entire school, and I think that was a deserved reputation. My goal was to push my students as hard as possible, to make them the best students they could possibly be, and prepare them fully for the competitive colleges they all wanted to attend. In all the years I was teaching honors and advanced placement classes I can hardly recall any parent complaining that I was too difficult, insist that a student’s failures was my fault, or refuse to take my advice about a student’s need to spend more time working with me outside the classroom. The parents of my sub-community truly believe two important facts: (1) education was the first priority in their family, and (2) the teachers were not only qualified, but truly had the students’ best interests at heart.

However, that sub-community is not representative of the entire township, and certainly not of American families in general. There is little doubt that America is an anti-education country. Most people care primarily about making money and having a high level of comfort. To most Americans public schools are places to keep their children out of trouble while the parents are working, coordinators of sports teams where their little darlings can achieve success and thus be bragged about, and occasionally a road into prestigious colleges (whether they actually earn their way into those colleges generally being irrelevant). The teachers in my school who teach average or below-average classes invariably have students who are discipline problems. And when they contact the parents about those problems, they encounter one of three equal reactions: (1) support; (2) incompetent parents who cannot control their children; (3) attack, since it must be the teachers’ fault since their enabled-little darlings cannot possibly be wrong.

And when those teachers contact the parents about their children’s failures in the classroom, they generally encountered the same three reactions.

So what does this mean for public education? It means several things:
• most American parents do not believe in the importance of education;
• most American parents do not instill an attitude in their children that fosters hard work and determination in the classroom;
• most American parents denigrate public education in front of their children, using complaints such as I mentioned in the first paragraph above, which lowers the respect students give to their teachers;
• most parents are a large part of the problem with public education rather than being part of the solution.

For 31 years, I was fortunate in having students whose parents learned their attitudes towards education in India, China, Europe, anyplace but the United States. And the students I had whose families were not immigrants were minorities in another sense: they also gave strong support to education. But the majority of Americans refuse to face the fact that they are a large part of the problem. Instead they flood schools with technology(which is often useless if its only intent is to entertain students with bad attitudes), complain about the tenure system (which, if eliminated, would lead to the firing of many more good teachers than it would get rid of a few bad teachers), try to cut teachers’ salaries and benefits (and drive many of the better ones into industry where the salaries are much higher), but never look in the mirror to see the leading problem with education in this country.