Enfant terrible edublogger Alexander Russo strikes a measured and reasonable tone, rewarding us with a terrific piece at scholastic.com arguing against efforts to introduce a range of health and human services into schools (think “Broader, Bolder“). Such efforts “may stretch schools’ abilities to make a real difference,” he cautions, “and may take you and your team’s eyes off quality classroom instruction and academic improvement.”
There’s no doubt that students’ home lives play an important role in their school success. The question is whether schools are really the best vehicle through which to address deeper social issues such as poverty, lack of childcare or health insurance, inadequate access to transportation, and adult illiteracy. My view is that they’re not. Let schools try and do what they are supposed to do. If more is needed—few argue that it isn’t—let’s address those problems separately and head-on, rather than making them something schools have to do.
“Schools can’t fix poverty,” he concludes. “And that’s OK.”
Even if you like the Broader, Bolder approach, it’s going to be tough to make the case that schools are well-positioned to do more as long as questions exist about how well they execute their primary function. And accountability hawks across the political spectrum question whether such an approach is really a way to deflect a focus on results.
Parents’ failure to impose moral values in the home has left many children out of control, with teachers now expected to effectively raise young people themselves. So says the head of Voice, Britain’s teachers’ union. Philip Parkin says the standard of parenting skills in the UK had suffered from a downward spiral in the last 15 years as generations of poor parents succeed each other. In a speech to the union’s annual conference, Parkin said long working hours and the decline in old-fashioned family structures has contributed to the problem.
“Schools are being required to take on more and more of the responsibilities that rightly belong to parents; and to provide more of the stability in children’s lives which should be provided by families. There is also the perception that, in general, the skills of parents are declining as one generation succeeds another.”
“In my last 10 or 15 years in school I saw a significant decline in parenting standards.” Parkin added. ”The shortening of many relationships, the creation of more step-families, the emphasis on parents going out to work and the consequent perception of the reduced worth of the full-time parent have all changed the way we behave and the character of childhood.”
I could be very wrong, but it’s hard to imagine such a naked critique of “parenting standards” issuing from a responsible U.S. union leader. For all the sturm und drang in the U.S. about accountability and overcoming societal ills, it says something about the overarching consensus on what schools ought to be able to do that these comments sound so, well, foreign.
Poor Mexican children who participate in a government program with extensive family services are further ahead in kindergarten than the average Canadian kid, according to new research.
Mexican authorities in 1990 implemented a system of programs called CENDI (the Spanish acronym for Centres for Early Childhood Development) in Monterrey, an industrial city roughly the size of Greater Toronto, that provides community supports to low-income households from the time of pregnancy through to preschool. The programs are similar to what Canadian early childhood researcher Dr. Fraser Mustard has long been advocating in Canada, the Toronto Star reports.
“You can’t dump the whole responsibility (for childhood development) on families,” says Mustard, who advocates creating community “hubs” – ideally in local schools – where they can obtain nutrition and health advice from professionals, take part in parenting programs and involve their tots in programs. “Mustard says that way, parents get the support they need to do a better job, and problems can be caught and treated early on,” notes the paper.
The research will undoubtedly be used to bolster the argument of those who favor a broader social services role for schools. It’s hard to imagine broad comments about dumping the whole responsibility for raising children on families, however, playing well in the U.S.
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