Introduction: The Big Picture Long gone are the days of the one-room schoolhouse in which a teacher had virtually autonomous control over curriculum. Over the last 200 years, the education of American children has changed drastically. The national school system has ballooned into a bureaucratic structure of gigantic proportions, entangling millions of kids in a web of often opposing interests, from teachers' unions to governmental agencies to parents who just want to ensure their children receive the highest-quality education available.
During his first term in office, President George W. Bush and his cabinet urged Congress to pass the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a sweeping educational plan with the goal that no child -- regardless of ethnicity, gender, or family income -- be disadvantaged in life due to the lack of a proper education. The program relies on strengthening public elementary and secondary schools across the nation by periodically assessing all students through standardized testing, and has been somewhat successful in developing better quality schools in neighborhoods with high concentrations of struggling, disabled, poor, and minority students. However, NCLB has yet to be adequately funded and primarily focuses on salvaging the students languishing at the very bottom. There are virtually no innovative strategies included in the act for improving the educational experience of the majority: kids who are just slightly behind where they should be, average kids, and exceptional kids.
Increasingly, teachers are turning to cookie-cutter curriculums in an effort to teach to the standardized tests that form the benchmark of NCLB reforms. All too often, this pressure means dropping fun and interactive activities because they prove too time-consuming to fit into an already packed day. Instead of raising children who love to learn and solve problems creatively, we are raising a generation of terrific test takers. The end result is bored children who are dispassionate about school and trained to believe that the most important reason to learn is to receive the highest marks on a standardized test or a report card. Discouraged teachers long for the ability to be creative and embellish their curriculum to meet the unique interests and needs of their classrooms, and frustrated parents find themselves dealing with stressed-out kids and overextended educators.
We are raising kids in an era filled with debate, but not much agreement, about what it takes to ensure they succeed in school. A critical part of the formula is the vital role of parents -- often the missing component in sweeping educational reform plans.
In an era of school budget cuts, overcrowded classrooms, constant testing, and highly competitive admissions processes to private schools and colleges, parents need to be hands-on intermediaries and strategic problem solvers for their children when issues arise. To be an effective advocate for your child, you need to take a proactive and sophisticated approach in communicating with your child's teachers, specialists, and principal. You also need to be aware of how peer relationships impact your child's school performance, from bullies to cliques to problematic classroom behavior. It all boils down to a single concern: How can you make sure your child succeeds at school without becoming an overly involved parent?
At points during your child's educational experience, you will find yourself wondering what it will take to vault him out of a current educational snag and prevent a downward spiral for the rest of the academic year. How can you ensure that you serve as a coach instead of a homework partner, an enabler rather than a controller, a facilitator over a meddler? It's easy to feel discouraged and baffled when your child suddenly brings home nosediving grades, disconnects from a teacher, or starts acting out. I've listened to innumerable parents ruminate about how best to cultivate their children's academic gifts and help them find a niche in which they flourish. In the midst of this frenzy, like many parents, I have felt the tremendous burden of helping my children make thoughtful, strategic choices to prepare them for a future of academic success.
Recent studies show that effectively engaging parents in their children's education creates more change than any educational reform. Children with parents who are actively involved in their education achieve higher grades and standardized test scores, behave better in class, have more self-confidence, and tend to enjoy continuing success throughout their lives. Moreover, involved parents are better able to recognize subtle signs of problems and intervene before they become critical. This has been found to be true for all ages and ability ranges. Indeed, the extent to which parents are involved in their children's education is the single most important factor in each child's level of achievement; school quality, family income, race, and parents' education level are all of secondary importance.
The Mom Book Goes to School serves as a guide for parents who know they need to roll up their sleeves and help their children succeed in school, but are unsure about how to approach this most effectively. Hard pressed to determine what our exact roles should be vis-a-vis school, we find it difficult to strike the fine balance of advocating for our children in an informed, strategic manner without micromanaging details to the point where our children lack the confidence to tackle problems independently. The answer lies somewhere between building our children's science projects for them and throwing our hands up in frustration vowing to never, ever help them with homework again!
A poignant example of the issues parents face surfaced in my own life when a good friend called with a school-success crisis of her own. Her ninth-grade daughter, usually a brilliant student, came to her with a midterm summary from her math teacher, indicating she had received C's on the past three quizzes. My friend suddenly learned that her child, who had formerly earned all A's and breezed through her classes, had become disheartened in math as the result of a teacher who had disparaged her math skills and refused to place her in the highest math track that spring, lumping her instead with the average class. This frustration turned into rebellion, and she let her math grades slide without telling her parents. My friend felt shocked, dismayed, and angry. How could she not have known her daughter was struggling academically? Why didn't her daughter seek help? How should she respond as a parent?
This incident captures the tough dilemmas all parents invariably face at some point during a child's school years and reinforces our need for vigilance in watching for surfacing problems. Because of the overwhelming number of students in many classrooms, we often need to fight for schools to meet the individual needs of our children -- whether they are learning disabled, gifted, struggling with reading, or acting out in class. With the emergence of competing resources inside and outside of school, we face myriad decisions when our children encounter problems: should we test for learning disorders inside or outside of school, hire a tutor or try to finagle extra teacher attention for academic issues, send our children to in-school specialists or outside learning centers, or opt for private school over public school?
In my friend's case, she had a heartfelt discussion with her disillusioned daughter about the underlying reasons for her slide in academic performance, her neglect of the problem, and her parents' dismay at not having been informed. My friend arranged a meeting to talk directly with the teacher and created an achievement plan to facilitate her daughter's goal of getting into the accelerated math class. She challenged her daughter to prove herself to the teacher by raising her grade to a B by the semester's end or else taking a summer math class and engaging the help of a math tutor come fall. Back in synergy, mom and daughter formed a team focused on the same goals: getting past the hurdle of a recalcitrant teacher and rekindling her passion for math.
Also embedded in this story is how, in our society, average has become a pejorative. We ultimately want our children to be better than run-of-the-mill students, and secretly hope for them to emerge as A+ students with glowing recommendations from every teacher. We fear that otherwise they will be vulnerable, lacking skills essential to thrive in a highly educated, success-oriented culture. We don't want an average kid but an extraordinary one -- so much for the bell curve! But we are utterly unsure about to how to invest our energy. Should we spend 90% of it helping with homework? Scramble to find tutoring? Move to a private school? Set up frequent meetings with teachers in hopes of getting more individualized attention for our children?
Navigating the sometimes hostile and always complex school environment has become so nuanced that we need to get up to speed on how best to assume our varying roles, from sophisticated advocate to intermediary, from disciplinarian to homework editor. When school issues arise, it's crucial to be as informed as possible with insights and advice on what methods prove most effective when stepping into this complicated fray to help our children.
A huge parental fear lurking in the background is that our children will fall behind academically if we don't push and stay on top of the details. In our more anxious moments, we worry that our children's untapped potential will be lost forever and a tidal wave of mediocrity will sweep them into adulthood. If our children are not top students by second grade, we fear they have already fallen behind the students against whom they will eventually compete for college admissions. Ultimately, we spend so much time preparing our children for the challenges they will face in their academic future that we lose sight of raising children who love to learn.
In response to parental fears ...
