Did Your Mom Eat Your Homework? Schools Shift the Blame for Academic Failure to Parents.
1995; Hoover Institution; Issue: 72 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0146-5945
Autores Tópico(s)School Choice and Performance
ResumoParents and politicians tend to blame the establishment for the sorry state of learning in American public schools. The educrats are not taking this lying down. They've found their own scapegoat: parents. Public-school boosters have decided that lax involvement is the reason children fail. And so some have begun turning the schools into Big Mother. The newest trend in reform is the inclusion of parental-education programs and curricula that require involvement in student activities. President Clinton's Goals 2000, enacted last year, includes an entire section on parental assistance, also called parent training. Some schools even require parents to sign a pledge that they will perform assigned, pseudo-educational tasks, which could include playing Simon Says or rolling cookie dough with their third-grader. Of course parents should be involved in their children's education. And, of course, problems at home--messy divorces, absent fathers--can cause problems for children at school. But the parent education movement seeks to blame all parents for academic failure, not just parents who are neglecting their kids or destroying their own families. The movement does not seek to parents more demanding of their children, nor, no surprise, of the schools. To the contrary, new curricula urge parents to be nurturing and uncritical--sort of the way public-school officials would like parents to treat them. This philosophy is becoming institutionalized in California. Consider the math curriculum rated most highly--a perfect 100 percent--by a state panel that chooses which textbooks should qualify for state subsidies. Investigations in Numbers, Data and Space, from the Dale Seymour Publications Series, appealed to the panel because it included home assignments that require involvement. NEW NEW MATH Under this curriculum--call it New New Math--which eschews rigorous memorization of multiplication tables, teachers send home periodic Dear Family missives to third-grade parents with the following advice: * Don't worry if your doesn't use a ruler accurately yet--it's a skill that will develop over time, with more and more opportunities to measure. * Children have very interesting ways to figure out these problems. You can help by asking your to tell you how he or she got an answer. are many ways to do these problems--and no single 'right' way. What's important for your to know is how his or her own way works. * When your has an assignment to do at home--such as collecting data about the ages of pets and oldest relatives--offer your help, and ask your about what he or she is doing in class. * There is one thing we ask you not to do. We won't be using some of the step-by-step methods of addition and subtraction in this unit that may be familiar to you--nor will we be teaching borrowing or carrying. All too often, we have found that children this age memorize these step-by-step procedures and do not learn how to apply the processes of addition and subtraction. This year we will support students in developing several strategies for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, and we prefer that they do not memorize a single set of procedures. EDUCATIONAL RELATIVISM This New New Math adds up to a new way of letting schools off the hook for not teaching children. It's not enough that we have moral relativism in English and Social Studies. Now we have it in math, too. The Dale Seymour third-grade program instructs parents to make roll-out cookies with your child to explore shapes, include children in family math decisions (such as how many floor tiles to buy) and explore fair shares, which is politically-correct educratese for sharing food. Clearly the intent of these instructions is to force parents to spend quality time--at least as defined by educrats. …
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