I certainly agree that when a parent gets involved in her child’s education, the child does better. However, consider that the average public school today gets about $8500 per student in school taxes. That is far more than the average Catholic or most other private schools get. It is far more than a parent would probably pay a special tutor to help her child read better.
When you as a consumer buy something for $8500 a year, wouldn’t you absolutely expect to get your money’s worth? Wouldn’t you expect a special tutor or $8500 a year private school to teach your child to read well, even if it takes individualized instruction?
Yet MILLIONS of public school children ‘graduate’ who are barely able to read their own diplomas. So what are the schools doing with our children for 12 years, at $8500 a year in tax money per student, with such incompetent results? Shouldn’t parents expect an educator or school getting $8500 a year in tax money to, at the least, make their child a good reader?
If public schools are supposed to be the education ‘experts’, as they always claim, why do they need the help of parents, parents attending ‘conferences’, etc. to do the basic task of teaching children to read? As John Stossel’s 20/20 TV program “Stupid in America” showed about one boy who was already in high school and could barely read at 5th grade level, when the parent took that boy to a private school, in short order that boy’s reading level dramatically improved.
So, while I agree that parents can certainly help with their children’s education, public school teachers should not try to pass the blame onto parents shoulders for students’ poor reading skills, when it is THEIR primary job to teach children to read in their classrooms, especially with the schools getting $8500 a year of parents tax money to pay for high-priced public schools that aren’t doing the job parents are paying them to do.
Also, I do not really blame public school teachers for this problem. I blame the system they have to work for that either does not teach public-school teachers how to teach children to read with phonics any longer, or because of the general incompetence of a government-controlled, bureaucratic school system that can strangle good teachers with senseless regulations, meaningless curriculum that wastes children’s time, or idiotic reading instruction methods like whole-language/balanced literacy that can literally cripple children’s ability to read.
The same teachers who now teach in public school, if they worked in a good private school that taught kids to read with phonics, and had the children spend much more time on the basics of reading and math, would be good teachers, because the system/school they worked for would be far more competent in educating children, and give parent’s their money’s worth. Joel Turtel
Today Tuesday, November 03, 2009 Larry Osborne III was able to convince both his teacher Ms. Chinn, and his principal Lu Shun Dewberry that he was supposed to walk home alone at the age of five. Larry has been taking a bus from the school everyday since day one to his aftercare center (The Kids Corner) about two miles away on Fischer Road. Larry was found walking down Brinkley Road on a portion with no sidewalk by a kind woman named Peggy who saw him and pulled over to assist. Peggy contacted the police, and had them contact his mother from the number inside his notebook. Once I spoke with Peggy she spoke of her fear that Larry had been hit by a car since she no longer saw him after a large truck passed him, but she said he jumped out of her site attempting to dodge the truck. Meanwhile, the aftercare center was calling Larry III’s father Larry Jr. to ask if he had picked up his son since he did not arrive on the bus from school. In shock my husband quickly said he did not have our son and began a frantic panic calling around to see who could have picked young Larry up. Fearing the worst, he then contacted me to inform me that someone must have posed as him and abducted our son from school. I quickly informed him that I was currently on the phone with the Peggy, the police, principal Dewberry, and I had spoken briefly to our son. Principal Dewberry offered to have an immediate meeting with us as I was already preparing to leave work to come and find out how this all could have come about, and my husband agreed to meet as well. To make a long story short, there were many apologies from principal Dewberry and the retired officer who was in attendance to say that they had never had any previous problems with the current bus riding system in which the students are not placed on the bus by an adult, only viewed going in the general direction of their buses. Now of course everyone wants to upgrade their procedures and rules, but for all of the emotions we experienced today no other parent should ever go through what we just went through. A call has also been placed to the Prince Georges County school superintendent office.