Charter School Update

I've been meaning to post about this for a while. A couple of months ago I posted about the possibility of a charter school in Elko. My biggest question at the time was, if the public school system knows how to make better schools, why don't they make all their schools like that, instead of just offering them to a handful of students?

I talked to my sister-in-law that weekend who has a friend whose kids go to a charter school in Southern Utah, and I had my question answered. Apparently the biggest difference between charter schools (at least the one she knows about) and regular public schools is parental involvement. There is a large amount of parental involvement required for those who attend charter school. And that makes a big difference.

Ta da! What have I been saying all along? That it's not the school system we need to fix, it's parental involvement. This just affirms that idea for me. Whether your child is homeschooled, goes to the worst public school in the state, or goes to a fancy charter school or private school, he (or she) will have a better education the more involved you are in his life and schooling.

Yet, it is apparently becoming more common to consider school little more than a babysitting service, where you drop your kids off all day so that you don't have to worry about them. I was recently talking to my mother-in-law, who teaches high school, and she told me of one incident where a parent yelled at her for calling to let her know that her daughter had not been doing her homework. The parent was upset at being bothered about those kind of trivialities when it was the teacher's problem, not hers, whether or not her daughter did homework.

This, to me, speaks of the same attitude we saw here. We have the right to get certain things free of cost; we want someone else to fix our problems; we want someone else to take care of our children. When are we going to start taking responsibility for ourselves, our families and our problems?

To those who aleady are taking responsibilty: thank you. It's too bad government regulation (think "No Child Left Behind") often means you have to do twice as much work so that the people mentioned above can have their free ride. And the more we let it happen, the more people think that that's the way it should be.

Here's one more example of how this system perpetuates itself. These students see their parents' attitide and think that's the way things are, so they exhibit the same attitude in the classroom. They expect the teacher to give them a decent grade in return for very little effort. Do I feel sorry for these kids? Yes, of course. But whose job is it to fix the problem, and how are they supposed to do it? If there's just one or two students, a teacher might have the opportunity to try and work with them. But it's not just one or two anymore. Where my mother-in-law teaches, this is a pervasive attitude. More and more students expect the teachers to give away grades and make the classes easy, because it is the right of the students. The result is the teachers are forced to teach down to that level, because if they make to much "trouble" with the parents or give out too many bad grades, they must be a bad teacher. This leaves the students who actually come to class expecting to work and learn sitting around waiting. They are the ones who suffer the most.

I am even seeing this more and more at the college level. Students attend college, without expecting to do college-level work, and teachers are having to teach down to them. A few years ago I took a political science class. You would expect that to be a hard subject, but it was one of the easiest classes I have taken. The teacher outlined the class according to questions on the test. That's right. He told us exactly what the questions would be, then what the answers were. If you took halfway decent notes and wrote down something on the test that sounded vaguely similar to what he said in class, you could get an 'A'. Yet, there were still people failing his class. Now that I look back, I see what probably had happened. He was probably forced to teach that way, forced down to a lower level than what he would have liked to be teaching on. There were so many students that expected to be spoonfed information, then spit it back out like a robot, that if he made the class too challenging, he would have to give low grades to too many students, which would make him look like a bad teacher. He also had an accent, so it would be easy for a student with bad grades to go to the review board and say things like, "He barely speaks English, and it was so hard to understand him, and I don't think that's fair..." If he didn't make he class easy, his job was on the line. Does that sound a little backwards to anyone else?

I am probably beating a dead horse by this point, but I want to say again, having freedom of choice means there are consequences to each of the choices we make. Those consequences affect the people around us as well, especially our children. Our society seems to be trying to eliminate consequences and responsibility from our choices, and we are passing on that mindset to our children. If we want to fix our schools, and our country, we need to change ourselves.

You can lay the responsibility for these things on someone else, the government, the institution, but in the end, that is going to mean giving up your freedom to choose. In the end you're going to have to take what you can get, no matter what you do. Look at history. Look at political science. Read Johne Locke. Read Karl Marx. Read the Bible. It's all there.