Issues in Education: Parents
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Quality
Time Seems Stacked In Favor of Firstborns
Article by Donna St. George, Washington
Post, March 22, 2008
When her eldest child was in kindergarten, Laura Haggerty-Lacalle sat down with her every day to review reading or math, intent on providing that most precious commodity of all: parent time. "Oh my God, it's the most important thing you can do," she said.
But when her second child hit the same age, life was more hectic. Now, with a third child, Haggerty-Lacalle, 37, feels good when she gets five minutes to stack blocks or build Legos in her Oak Hill home. "When you have three kids," she says, "you're just trying to survive."
Within this familiar progression of family life, new research has confirmed what some parents recognize and others quietly fear: Their firstborn children get more of their time than others in the family -- on average, 3,000 extra "quality" hours from ages 4 to 13, when sisters and brothers are in the picture.
That's 25 extra minutes a day with mothers on average and 20 extra minutes a day with fathers across a nine-year span of childhood, according to a study by economist Joseph Price of Brigham Young University.
Some parents find themselves surprised by
the lopsided time log, but the big question, experts say, is whether this
difference helps explain findings that show firstborn children get better test
scores, more education and higher-paying jobs.
Instituting school reform
Article by Edward Kenney, delawareonline.com, posted July 23, 2007
Sally Pitts-Rakes of Wilmington started out on a one-mom crusade several years ago to change what she perceived to be an educational injustice.
Her son, Christopher, was labeled an eighth-grader at A.I. du Pont High School in Greenville during his freshman year because he failed the state reading and math tests the year before -- even though he has been an honors student since fourth grade. He was diagnosed in the second grade with a cognitive disability, his mom said, and he simply does not do well on tests.
Pitts-Rakes, a postal supervisor and single mom, has since broadened her scope to rally on behalf of all students who enter high school designated as eighth-graders and are required to take remedial courses. Now, she tries to help these students academically, rather than trying to remove the stigma of being labeled with a lower grade designation, as she did with her son.
But, most important, she is no longer alone in her efforts to better students' school experience.
Pitts-Rakes was one of the first graduates of the Delaware Parent Leadership Institute, a statewide program started almost two years ago to train and support moms and dads who want to help improve schools.
"We've forgotten to teach social skills, and
our children are stagnating"
Article by Jenni Russell,
The Guardian (United Kingdom), November 8, 2006
Last year a bright 15-year-old, who comes from a home without books but goes to a highly rated grammar school, came to stay with us for a week over Christmas. At first he said little. It was clear that he wasn't accustomed to laying tables for dinner or making conversation with adults. Then, as he listened to other people's noisy discussions, he began to ask tentative questions. What is a government minister? What is the EU? Who's Mozart? Did Japan fight in the second world war? What does Palestine mean, and what does it have to do with Israel? His curiosity and his intelligence were obvious. His inarticulacy and lack of a general or social education, despite his apparently desirable schooling, were heartbreaking...
"Lighting A Fire:
Motivating Boys To Succeed"
Commentary by Kathy Stevens,
Duke Gifted Letter, September 2006, http:www.dukegiftedletter.com
"You’ve got a bright child on your hands! As a preschooler he loved books, drawing, and creating with blocks. He was excited by the things around him and was a bundle of energy, wanting to explore, handle, and figure out his world.
"When he started school he was enthusiastic and looked forward to the wonderful adventures you told him were in store. In elementary school you started getting notes from his teacher indicating that he was “having some problems.” The list included comments like: doesn’t stay on task, fails to turn in homework, doesn’t complete projects on time, can’t seem to stop fidgeting and sit still. In middle school your bright, gifted son is getting by with mediocre grades and an attitude that you find disheartening. He just doesn’t seem motivated to succeed in school the way you and his teachers know he could.
"What happened when he entered the
classroom?"
"I Said, 'Not While You Study!'
"Science Suggests Kids Can't Study and Groove at the Same Time"
Article by Jeffrey Ghassemi,
Washington Post, Sept. 5, 2006
Memo to: Frustrated parents
From: Health section staff
Subject: Your kids' study habits
There's some impressive new scientific research on your side when you tell your kids they can't possibly do their homework with the TV blaring, instant messenger crawling or MP3 player pumping. Unfortunately, explaining it will require you to get them unplugged from their iPods.
Tell them this: A recent study shows that the ruckus of such multi-tasking may make them learn less, and to use the wrong parts of their brains to store information.
"Why Thinking 'Outside the Box" Is Not So Easy"
(And Why Present Reform Efforts Will Fail)
Commentary by Marion Brady,
Education Week, August 30, 2006
"Of all the education-related unexamined assumptions, none is more deeply embedded than the belief that the main business of schooling is to teach the “core curriculum”—math, science, social studies, and language arts. Supporting that belief is another assumption: that these four fields of study are the only, or at least the optimum, organizers of general knowledge.
"That last assumption is so powerful it shapes education worldwide. At all levels, from middle through graduate school, the four areas of study are the main institutional organizers. So taken for granted is it that they are the fundamental building blocks of education, that reform movements don’t question their centrality. Separate sets of “standards” reinforce them. “Measures of accountability” are keyed to them. Even those who know that knowledge is seamless, who know that the walls between fields of study are artificial and arbitrary, tend to assume that the four are the ultimate organizers of knowledge....
School, finally, isn’t about disciplines and subjects, but about what they were originally meant to do—help the young make more sense of life, more sense of experience, more sense of an unknowable future. And in that sense-making effort, math, science, social studies, and language arts simply aren’t up to the challenge. They’ve given us a curriculum so deeply flawed it’s an affront to the young and a recipe for societal disaster."
For discussion of this
issue, please visit this Education Week webpage: http://www.edweek.org/tb/2006/08/29/939.html
"Parents warned over computer use"
BBC online article, July 17,
2006
The children's charity NCH said there was "an alarming gap" in technological knowledge between generations.
Even when parents had put controls on what youngsters could access, almost half the 1,003 children aged 11 to 16 surveyed said they could disable them.
"The Problem with Boys..."
Article by Tom Chiarella, Esquire, July, 2006
...is actually a problem with men. We've ignored all the evidence of male achievement and ambition deficits and stood aside as our sons have notched a growing record of failure and disengagement. It's time we did something about it. A call to action."
"Children are less able than they used to be"
John Crace in The Guardian,
January 24, 2006
It has become an annual rite of summer. Out come the Sats/GCSE/A -level results - take your pick - and up pops a government minister to say that grades are higher than ever, teachers and schools have done a fantastic job, but there's still room for improvement. Not everyone takes this at face value and there are a few grumbles about exams becoming easier. But even if there are suspicions that standards have dropped, no one has ever seriously suggested that children's cognitive abilities have deteriorated. Until now.
New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and conducted by Michael Shayer, professor of applied psychology at King's College, University of London, concludes that 11- and 12-year-old children in year 7 are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development.
"It's a staggering result," admits Shayer, whose findings will be published next year in the British Journal of Educational Psychology.
"Worlds Collide"
Ronald Wolk, Teacher magazine, January
1, 2006
In
preparation for a recent meeting, I had to read half a dozen documents. Among
them was a copy of Lauren Resnick’s brilliant presidential address to the
American Educational Research Association in 1987. Titled “Learning In School
and Out,” it focuses on what I view as perhaps the central issue in education:
the gap between the real world and the world of school.
Resnick, now a distinguished researcher and education reformer who heads the Learning
Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, offers a
clear premise in her opening sentence. “Popular wisdom,” she writes,
“holds that common sense outweighs school learning for getting along in the
world—that there exists a practical intelligence, different from school
intelligence, that matters more in real life.”
A
Nation of Wimps
Parents are going to ludicrous
lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children.
However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile;
that may be why they're breaking down in record numbers.
Article by Hara Estroff Marano,
Psychology Today, November/December, 2004
....Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. "Kids need to feel badly sometimes," says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. "We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope."
Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.
"Life is planned out for us," says Elise Kramer, a Cornell University junior. "But we don't know what to want." As Elkind puts it, "Parents and schools are no longer geared toward child development, they're geared to academic achievement."
No one doubts that there are significant economic forces pushing parents to invest so heavily in their children's outcome from an early age. But taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided by just about 180 degrees. With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they're robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we're on our way to creating a nation of wimps....