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FUF: Educated Perspective
Friday, May 09, 2008
We follow up on a segment earlier this week about the role of middle-income parents in helping their local public schools. Eva Moskowitz, a former City Council member, founder of the Harlem Success Academy, and mother of public-school kids, gives us her take.
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Middle-class parents (regardless of race) tend to be more involved in the schools. Also, it doesn't hurt any school to have a pool of parents who can raise some funds quickly for some ad hoc, extracuricular purpose.
When I lived in Chicago, I heard that the reason the New Trier school system was so exceptional was that the parents got together and said, "Let's not send our kids to private schools; let's commit to public education."
I have always wished that some respected rich parents would rally others to-- as a group-- decide to commit their money and their resources to public schools.
SO glad you came back to this. I was very disturbed by your previous guest's flippant attitude towards school segregation, underfunding, and similar problems. I'm a white guy from a well-off family, who went to public schools in Chicago with low-income kids of color. I'd like to believe they benefited from my presence, but I never saw any evidence of that. Instead, I got a better education than my peers, because my parents had the resources to supplement the classroom.
Kozol's most important message is that it's not okay for well-off people to accept the horrible conditions in public schools simply because it's someone's else's kids. We need to decide, as a society, that we have a common interest in making public schools work.
I know several teachers (from the teaching fellows program)- they mostly complain of discipline problems within these lower soc. ec. schools. These problems are perpetuated by these children's parents. It has a lot to do soc. ec. status. I would never send my children (don't have any now) to a school where they could get injured or are not learning becuase the kids there need to be babysat, not taught.
Learning depends on the involvement of parents, and middle class parents in my opinion are simply more involved and engaged in their kids' education than poorer parents for a host of reasons. Just check the attendance at parent-teacher and compare by neighborhoods.
Brian,
There's nothing parents could do about class size. PS 234 in Tribeca has big PTA fund but 34 kids in the class.
I think your guest is being disingenuous. She is leaving out two very important issues that determine the success of a school. One is the behaviors of and what the child bring to the schools. If a school is in a neighborhood where education isn't nurtured, a neighborhood where children may not have parents that can help them with their work; a neighborhood where getting a meal for the day is more important than learning something, then it's much harder for the Scholl to flourish. Also, If most of the teacher's time is spent correcting/disciplining a child or two, then the whole class looses. The other issue is funding and since schools tend to be financed by what local taxpayers can support, poorer areas will have less money for schools and wealthier areas will have more to spend. That how publicly funded education works in this country.
#2: New Trier surely benefits from active parents, but also from those parents' large salaries (the school draws on property taxes from the wealthy suburbs it serves).
#4: I'm not going to deny that many public schools with large numbers of poor kids have violence problems. But you can't pretend you've shielded your children from harm by sending them to private school.
* I encourage people to read the original article.
* In Tsing-Lo's experience, it was the parents of the middle class students who advocated for their public school and who read to and pushed their children to advance. The other parents for the most part didn't speak English and were reluctant to challenge or even approach school management.
* Equitable funding can only do so much when parents are content to have their children watch TV and work the Playstation.
I think that the issue of school vouchers also plays into this. We encourage people to flee from public schools. The only way to improve them is to get more people from across the spectrum into public schools and then get them the right funding.
Hey.
We need to GLOBALLY rethink education.
We lost about 20 years worth of kids.
Start at the very beginning.
use the head-start model... and start them early
Federally paid day care for ALL starting at 6 months.
Then we can start to re-educate the kids AND the families in HOW to provide for the kids.
It's not only for the kid, but for the families too!!!
The discussion makes it sound like these middle class students are going to be bused in like exotic medicinal exports. What is being proposed is that the whole community benefits when people who share a neighborhood send their kids to school together and become friends. The "poor" kids are not the only ones who benefit from this
How presumptuous that black and latino schools aspire to being more like white middle class ones!
I am uncertain Sandra Tsing Loh had the right perspective on why middle class white families would be the influential factor on improving the public school system. Her ideals may be valid to a perfect society as one entity, but she herself is not in any position to state so, being able to choseplacing her own children in a selective sector within the public school system that provides an advantageous position to that of the corner school system. Perhaps if she lived what she described as the failing system, she may well take on a different view.
# 8 in response- I don't have any kids, I went to public schools on the Wash DC border (in the 80'S!- when it was the murder capital of the world) My friends that went to private schools were safer.
Also, they didn't have their teacher spend half the day dealing with kids that didn't want to learn or their parents who supported their kids almost criminal behaviour in a FREE classroom. The only escape anyone had was the TAG program that segregated the kids who wanted to learn from the ones who didn't-
Charter schools are a scam. They drain resources from public schools and encourage the continuing class division of our society. They have no responsibility to provide education to children with special needs or family problems which just further weakens the neighborhood school.
Its more of the get mine mentality that will destroy us.
I highly recommend that anyone who is wondering about why public schools are broken read The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
I highly recommend that anyone who is wondering about why public schools are broken read The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
I highly recommend that anyone who is wondering about why public schools are broken read The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Liz
"get mine mentality" that's america today!
bridges fall we do nothing, energy & food prices go up people still drive their SUV alone. our education and healthcare devolve to 3rd world status no one cares.
the ship is sinking no one cares.
It's nearly 40 years since the UFT, the teacher's union, went on strike to defeat an attempt by NYC and NY's communities of color to reform the system.
How many generations of students do we have to sacrifice to this dogma about "supporting the public schools" and that somehow charter schools are undermining them??.
It's been nearly 40 years since the UFT, the teacher's union, went on strike to defeat an attempt by NYC and NY's communities of color to reform the system.
How many generations of students do we have to sacrifice to this dogma about "supporting the public schools" and that somehow charter schools are undermining them??.
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