What creates good students and good schools?
This was published today (September 6, 2004) in the Washington Post by William Raspberry
Show me a home where education and learning are central values, and where the parents are reasonably competent at the business of child-rearing, and I'll show you the home of a good student.
Further, the clearest identifying characteristic of what we call a good school is a critical mass of children from good homes.
If this is so, why do our public policies pay so little attention? Listen to our school leaders and you'd think the difference between school success and school failure lies in the quality of the superintendent, the size of the school budgets, or the academic backgrounds and skill levels of the teachers.
My point is not to let the schools off the hook but to offer an explanation of why a torrent of school reforms over the past few decades has brought the merest trickle of improvement. We haven't paid enough attention to improving the homes our children come from.
Maybe one reason is that we have confused good homes with affluent homes. It's true that the educational values I'm talking about are more likely to reside in the homes of economically successful adults.
But the values that place a premium on education don't exist only in rich homes. Good homes in the sense I'm talking about are homes where parents understand and stress the importance of knowledge, quite apart from its economic utility.
Raspberry continues to describe the program he calls “Baby Steps” that he has initiated in his Mississippi hometown to encourage and train parents to create an educationally good home for their children.
This is the first sensible thing I have seen published about childhood education in years.
This also seems to me to imply certain public policy efforts to support families raising children. Such policies include a fair and livable minimum wage, decent affordable housing, and universal access to health care. While affluence may not be necessary to create good homes, a minimum of financial and medical security certainly is.
But Raspberry’s “Baby Steps” program or something similar is critical. With or without those public policy items, parents need groups who encourage them towards proper parenting and teach what is necessary for parenting.
As social beings we do those things the groups of people we belong to encourage, and we generally don't do those things that people don't encourage.
posted by Richard at 9:01 AM
