Thank you Mark and Tom for keeping the blog posts flowing throughout the summer! I’m making a somewhat slower transition from summer mode. But, thanks to the weather, the flip-flops and shorts have now been put away. My week of meetings and unpacking boxes in my new classroom have also helped me to return to teacher mode. I hit some back to school sales, did the summer reading my principal requested, and I’m poring over the new literacy and math frameworks my district wrote for the coming school year. I’m ready to jump back in there and resume my fulltime responsibilities as a fifth grade teacher.
Over the summer I came across this article, which made me wonder if all of us were ready to resume our responsibilities of educating today’s youth. The article describes three kids who decide to use babysitting money to buy airplane tickets and go to Dollywood in Tennessee. Their plan works out, at first. They take a taxi to the airport in Jacksonville, Florida, buy three tickets, and fly to Nashville, Tennessee. It falls apart when they realize Dollywood is closer to Knoxville. They’re still three and half hours away from their destination, and they only have $40 left. So, they call Mom and Dad.
I wasn’t prepared for the direction the article took next:
Nobody asked a question. Nobody asked for identification. Not the taxi driver. Not the ticket-counter agent. Not security officials or flight attendants or other passengers.
"I just wanted to fly," Bridget Brown, 15, told WJXX-TV in Jacksonville. "I had the money." Their parents are wondering how the trip was possible.
Let me just make sure I understand what it being suggested here. It should be the responsibility of taxi drivers, ticket-counter agents, security officials, flight attendants, and other airline passengers to question whether these kids have permission from their parents to go on this adventure? What are the parents’ responsibilities? What about the kids and their responsibilities? It would seem, according to this article, that there aren’t any, as they are never brought into question.
The article admits that no one was at fault – not the taxi service, airline, airport security, or, thank goodness, the other airline passengers. All were in compliance with rules and regulations.
Their parents are wondering how the trip was possible.
Shouldn’t their parents be wondering what led my child to make such an irresponsible, unsafe, and unwise decision? Shouldn’t they be wondering how am I going to teach my child to understand the difference between right and wrong and make better choices in the future?
If the journalists who covered the story thought so, they didn’t let on. Instead, First Coast News set up a sting operation to see if a 16-year-old girl could buy another airplane ticket, all on her own. She did. Is it so crazy to suggest that knowing what your child is doing is a parental responsibility? Shouldn’t this story shame and humiliate the families involved, rather than call into question the rules and regulations guiding air travel? How did it become so widely accepted to pass blame onto others?
I ask this as I see teachers accepting more responsibility, and with that, more blame for student test scores. Teachers are a very important piece in student success, but we can’t accept sole responsibility for student learning outcomes. When someone doesn’t fulfill their responsibilities, it forces others to pick up the weight. It’s absurd to expect taxi drivers and workers in airports to pick up parental slack, just as it is to expect those in education. I’m willing to do my part just as thousands of teachers across Washington are. Are my students? And their parents? Are my administrators, legislators, and policy makers? How about the community members? I hope so. Because, we’re going to need everyone.
This reminds me of an article Mark cited on an earlier post. It was from The Onion, a satire about how parents are now asking schools to “School-home” their children!
http://www.theonion.com/articles/increasing-number-of-parents-opting-to-have-childr,17159/
Kristen, you’re so right about the big elephant in the living room. How do we talk about parents who prevent academic success without coming up with Big Brother-inspired solutions? Geoffrey Canada started the Baby College in New York. Something like that could work. We need a social campaign or some kind of movement to remind parents they have a role in schools to play and teachers can’t do magic with their kids unless they play their part. I know that won’t solve the problem. But, you’re right. This should be discussed.
Mark, ha ha ha! I’ll join you in the finger pointing. Jim Joyce, the apologizing umpire, should be a hero to us all.
Tim-10-ber, I agree. I was seriously annoyed when I read that Southwest refunded the money. And I never feel that way about airlines.
Tim-tem-ber – yes! That’s what I’m talking about. Until we have the basics in place – confidence, pride, social skills, problem solving – we can’t begin to get kids to standard on academic subjects. In my building, the students most at risk don’t even show up for the state tests because they see it as a day off, and a test with no real consequence.
Some hurdles most public schools have, that any magnet school does not, are that kids attend magnet schools by choice. Wanting to go someplace automatically creates a student body with a set of shared values and buy-in. As well, magnet schools are given more freedom than most public schools to be creative with everything from curriculum to scheduling. My building, for example, wanted to change our schedule but because of the school bus schedule across the district, we can’t. we wanted to change our curriculum, but the district stepped in and handed us a grade-by-grade reading list. It’s frustrating.
I wonder how every school can start taking the reins and making decisions that best serve their students? How do we break away from district-mandated policy that fails to do what our students need?
What is SES?
Great questions…I don’t know why Southwest refunded the ticket money…the return fare should have been charged to the parents…
Kristin – I am reading “The Leader in Me” by Stephen Covey. Chapters 2 – 5 focus on A. B Combs Elementary in NC, a magnet school with a focus on leadership. They spend the first full week of school engaging the students on the leadership model. They also teach manners, hygiene, etc. There are no academic admission levels for this school. It is 40% SES. The model seems to work…it has been in place for 10 years…
As a parent I hope more parents and educators read the book and adopt the model…I think it would work wonder in public schools…in so many ways it brings the private school model into public schools in terms of how kids are treated and higher expectations…
Just my two cents worth…
As a culture, we perpetuate this external locus of control. I did it because you forced my hand…or because you didn’t stop me… It is rare when we see individuals take responsibility for their own actions, let alone parents taking responsibility for their children’s actions.
I blame Lindsay Lohan’s Lawyers.
This is an issue I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. There is a definable group of children who continue to fail state tests and who are at risk of failing to graduate. What these children have in common are families who expect schools to take complete responsibility to getting the kids to school, keep them there all day, keep them engaged, and educate them.
As a teacher and a parent, I feel like the only things the school should be responsible for are engaging my child, keeping her safe, and educating her. The other very necessary pieces to the puzzle are my job, as well as contributing to my daughter’s education in the hours she’s not in school.
The problem is that these parents who can’t contribute to their child’s education are never going to be able to. They don’t have the resources and they don’t know how to support their child’s education. We have to stop waiting for them to do it.
So, if we’re to have an educated society, and we’re going to create a generation that values education and can break the cycle, we have to pour unprecedented resources into schools, allow them to extend the day, continue year-round, teach nutrition, personal hygiene, supervise homework time, and all sorts of things the parents are not doing well enough to allow their children to become well educated.
The fact that there are parents who are actively – albeit unintentionally – preventing the education of their children is the big elephant in the living room. Until public schools are able (and by that I don’t mean threaten teachers with firing if they don’t raise test scores) to fill the gaps caused by negligent parenting we will never see the majority of these children succeed.