For the Shorties

   I am looking at what small things that we can do as educators and as a community to help promote education and create a stronger group of students. Yesterday I talked about my epiphany. The world seemed to be a little more ordered, but a kid has a lot of influences that extend outside of the realm of school. Poverty and parent involvement are the two that come to my mind. School districts have been struggling with both of those for a while. It is a known fact that people that come from poor neighborhoods typically do worse in school. One of the reasons is parent and community involvement.

  My parents were involved. They were great in supporting me, and in pushing me harder and farther. My dad was especially trying at times. He taught me in pushing me that I was capable of more than I thought. Their education level has a lot to do with that, and their comfort level with the material. Most parents are comfortable with the alphabet, or even simple math, but throw in calculus or physics and they shut down. There is not a magical solution to a parent not being able to provide the support at home for harder level classes. Not everyone has the ability to aid in their child's studies when they reach a certain point. Most schools are utilizing funds for tutorials to increase student scores in standardized testing. We are going to need to go beyond that in order for children to be successful, so the answer may lie with mentor programs. A mentor program takes a child and puts them with an adult in the school setting. This is a person that can talk to them and be supportive of their education efforts. Even if they cannot help them with the material they can find someone that can. It is these programs that are going to be instrumental in crafting a better student.

 Mentor programs are great, but they still leave the parent's out. At my school parents spend a lot of their time at work. Teachers that have had success motivating their students and getting parent involvement often throw together a parent night. Every school has an open house, but often these are sparsely attended affairs with only the motivated students that show up with their parents in tow. Programs that are really successful go beyond this and push for parent nights on weekends where kids, parents, and teachers can get together to talk about what is being done in class.  In the Movie "Waiting for Superman" several programs that target inner city children have been successful with a community outreach program, even going so far as to offer programs that help further the education of the parents. This outreach is a needed program in any district. Schools have to go beyond the usual open house and offer a way for parents to be involved in their child's education. This involvement will breed a better student. My school has put forth a mentor program, and through programs like AVID are trying to get parent's night on the way. We have to extend further out though. It is not the AP or the Pre-AP kids that need the support and the outreach, it is the academic middle and lower rungs that need our help.

Tomorrow, we are going to go back to the future with a talk about a report that came out in 1983 called the Nation at Risk report. This report is probably the antitheses of No Child Left Behind. It lays down some radical thinking, but does a good job in making recomendations that are within the scope of our current system.

Until Tomorrow,

"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn."
-- John Cotton Dana