Great Kids

This evening, my sister-in-law is making one of the biggest decisions of her life - where to attend college. To put it simply, she is a brilliant and truly good-hearted girl, with checkmarks in all the important categories for college admissions: perfect grades, several AP courses, annual church mission trips to Mexico, several varsity sports, touring symphonic choir, yearbook, honor society, and the list goes on. Anyway, the reason to discuss this issue is not (just) to brag about a young woman I'm proud to now be related to, but to remark upon the amazing status of the top notch students in this country - and how lucky they really are.

Education is another issue that I feel very strongly about, mainly that we are blatantly underserving a large amount of the population. While that's true, there are many public schools that are truly Doing it Right. These are the schools that are well-funded, have teachers with masters degrees and years of experience, and have high levels of parental involvement. These are the issues we should be pushing - how to get low income kids into good schools, and how to get parents more involved.

I believe that parents, like children, are easily discouraged - believing that in bad situations, their voices will not be heard. We need to provide good schools with good people and many opportunities for parents to step up and really see what's going on in the classroom. If parents are shown that their involvement makes a true difference in the education of their children, then they will get involved - whatever the cost.

It seems like an obvious statement from the point of view of upper-middle class people - of course parents want to help their kids, and obviously a few phone calls to the teacher showing concern will bump the kid's grades up a bit. What irks me is the often not so subtle belief that lower income parents do not want to help, don't have the time, and just don't care. I can't emphasize how false I think that is. Speak to these parents, listen to what they have to say.

In my community, a segment of the lower-income, mostly African American population has been pushing to get a charter school for its underserved boys. I don't think that anyone can dispute that these students are not getting the best that the system can offer, but what people do believe is that the parents are out of line in the way they try to handle the situation and therefore do not deserve our consideration. The curse and cry at meetings, leading such a bad example for their children. My question is, do those voices sound like those of people who do not care? They care. They are so removed from any possible action that they cry in frustration for the well being of their children. They cry out, begging to be heard, pleading for a way to get their children a step up in life. And what do we, those in power, do? We tsk tsk at their suggestions, look down upon their passion, and smugly state that the proposal wasn't thought through. Heck no, we won't actually *help* the parent make a reasonable proposal - but we'll just feel content that we put that crazy woman in her place.

In order to improve our schools, we need to listen to these parents, we need to help them, and we need to show them that they are being heard. Otherwise, they'll speak loudly - and then learn to give up, at which point we point and say "Look, those parents are not involved. Of course their kids aren't doing well."

So I look at my sister-in-law's public high school, where all of her friends are headed off to top tier universities, and I wonder. I wonder...not only how to make sure my kids go to that same high school...but how to make those opportunities available for everyone. This is an issue definitely worth exploring further.