Parents, Not Bush, Are Leaving Children Behind
Posted by Joshua White on 03.21.2007
Once again No Child Left Behind is being criticized for the achievement gap between whites and minorities has spread even further. Don't blame the act, blame the parents.
Recently my toddler and I were at a playground at a local mall. As my child was crawling through a rope tunnel an older child, for reasons unbeknownst to me, decided to walk up under the tunnel and hit my baby through the rope. Fortunately, I saw this and very quickly pointed to the kid with force and said sternly, "Hey! No! Don't do that!" The child, seeing a large man yell at him, cowered behind another part of the playground and shook his head up in down saying, through motion, "Yes sir. I'm sorry." I went to check on my girl (she was fine). When I turned around I saw the other kid's grandparents asking him what he did. I explained that their grandson had hit my child. The grandmother said, "Did you hit that little girl?" In a very passive, and kind of cute way, he denied that he hit her. I reassured them both that he did hit my babes. As I walked away I heard both the grandparents reprimanding their grandchild.
Contrast that story with the following:
A few months ago I was at a local Barnes and Noble where they had a Thomas the Tank Engine toy train setup. If you don't have kids, let me assure you that they the little ones go crazy for this little setup. And when I say crazy, I literally mean crazy. They were aggressive and apparently it was physically impossible for them to share with one another. The two older kids would grab between 5 and 8 and hold on to them as hard as they could. One of these boys was getting increasingly agitated with the other. He would scream occasionally and came close to using force to acquire one of the train engines from the other. While I wasn't watching it seems that my kid took a train that the aggressive kid wanted or had. What was his response? He put my 19 month old child into some sort of choke hold. As soon as I saw this I instantly responded with a "HEY!" I then looked to the mother who also yelled to her son to stop. But the kid continued. As the mother wasn't moving quickly enough, and my child had arms around her neck I acted. I grabbed the kid's arm and held it over his head, immobilizing him painlessly. The son was shocked, but not hurt. Reprimanded, but not emotionally scarred. The mother, seeing this, rushed to the scene. Now, did she scold her son for becoming physical with a smaller, weaker child? Did she tell her son not to choke people? Did she apologize for her son's behavior? No, she stormed up to me, looked me in the eye, and sternly said, "Please don't touch my child." I was astonished. She didn't even care what happened to mine. I looked back at her calmly and replied, "Please don't let your child choke mine." (The kid was then whisked away. He started crying. She comforted him with no discussion of what he just did.)
Parenting has changed since the time that I was a child. The old school parents, exemplified here by the first story, saw an adult admonishing their child and they knew that the adult was right. This is the mentality of yesteryear. If a neighbor saw a child misbehaving, they could punish that kid. The new way of thinking is that the child is to be the friend of the parent. You don't want to punish the child because then the child might get mad at you. This could, in the end, lead to the child not loving the parent any more. This is every parent's nightmare.
There have always been bad parents in the world, but this modern approach to parenting is forcing the public consciousness to accept what would have been bad parenting as "normal parenting." It is normal to want to be your child's friend now. It is normal to not want your child to fail, to not want to scold or punish them. To not push your child to do well, to allow them to fail if they so want, is also allowed. You can't be upset if your child does poorly in school. That would hurt their feelings. This is the new normal. And it is affecting our children.
Since its inception in 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has been plagued with criticism. Recently that criticism continued when it was revealed that minorities are faring worse than their white counterparts. Apparently, "the achievement gap between white and minority students has stayed the same and may even be widening." So, one of two scenarios is currently existing. Either as whites get better so do the minorities, but with a wide margin of abilities keeping them apart, or as the whites get better at reading and math, they are doing so at a pace that is seperating them even further from their minority classmates.
I can think of four possible reasons that the minorities of this country are doing less well than their white counterparts. These four options are: stupid students, bad teachers, bad schools, bad parents.
Now, you may have noticed that for the first choice I used the word "stupid" while with the others I used "bad." There is a reason for this and the word selection will become clear soon.
The first possible explanation for the separation in testing scores is the minority children (at least those taking part in the study) are just not as smart as the white students. That is to say that on average kids who are not white are just as not bright as those who are. This would lead to the white children doing better in school as they have this genetic advantage. (For those of you who are immediately appalled at the mere suggestion of this possibility I remind you that there is some evidence that this may be true.) I'm not, without some serious research, willing to accept this yet. I don't see any reason to deny that, on average, children of different races are equally smart. One option down, three to go.
The second possibility is that the teachers are incompetent. To believe this you'd have to also believe either that many of our colleges of eduction are not educating the teachers well enough to teach, or that after gaining certification to teach they just care so little that they don't do a good job. I think that this is unlikely as well. I have several friends who have become teachers (and one who has all the qualifications, but not the job). In NY, for example, a teacher has to get a B.A. and then a Masters to teach in a public school. No matter how dumb the teacher is, if s/he got a Masters, they have some amount of intelligence. And to think that anyone would spend six years of their life and then just stop caring about their job is to know very little about human nature. I just don't think that it would happen in the widespread manner that would be necessary for the results that the NCLB has allowed.
Similar to the above problem is the possibility of bad schools. I won't deny that there are better and worse schools. I know that many rich, suburban schools have plenty of facilities and programs that those in the inner-city do not. But these poor schools offer everything that is needed for these minorities to get the grades on the standardized tests. The schools give the information. So I can't say that the schools are mostly at fault.
That leaves the parents. I realize that it is ultimately up to the kids to do well in school. But if they aren't succeeding at a certain level, then it is up to the parents to "persuade" them to do better. They need to take control of this child and be a parent. These kids are not only failing, but they are being failed. The parents of these children, by not punishing them for their bad marks, are allowing them to continue to fail.
Most kids don't really want to go to school. They want to have fun. I would say that even the best teachers aren't going to make school fun enough to make kids want to come every day and do good work. (Even if they are that good, the next year the kids will have different teachers who aren't.) If kids hate school, no amount of prompting from a teacher is really going to get them to want to do the work. These kids wouldn't want to do their math homework even if Lebron James himself was teaching the class. ("Kids, if I make 22 lay-ups in one game, how many points did I score that night?"*)
It is the parents who get more involved when the kids aren't doing well in school. Assuming there isn't some other issue, like A.D.D, depression, retardation, etc., then the child really doesn't have a reason to not be able to get at least a C. If they aren't, it is likely due to lack of initiative, work, or desire to succeed. Well, this is when the parent should step and through the use of punishment make the kid get better grades. Obviously, this doesn't work every time. But then the parent is to remain diligent. Keep up the punishment. Don't forget what the child did.
I know that being a minority parent is hard. You have to work. Take care of the house, cook dinner, put up with the injustice that comes with being a minority. Many times (especially in the black communities) you are the only parent. To these children your most important role is parent. Without the parent, the child has much less of a likelihood of succeeding in life. If you can't raise this kid to do minimally well (which is what I would consider graduating high school to be), then perhaps you should allow someone else to raise your child, or you shouldn't have children.
NCLB has good intentions. But I think that not enough focus is being put on the parents. It is they who have the most influence over the children of this nation. Again, while it is the final decision of the child how to study, take tests, do school work, it is the parents who can do the most good when it comes to pushing them to do their best.
So, I don't think that this new study on NCLB should be seen necessarily as a negative for the act. Maybe it should be considered a sign of bad parenting. Yes, technically this means that it is the minority parents that need to shape up, but perhaps that is a consequence that one should be willing to accept. If in general you can judge a parent by the child (or at least we do it anyway), then if minority children are not doing something as well as white children, maybe that is saying something about the minority parents. I will not spend any time here addressing why, if it is true, minority parents are not doing as well as they should. I'm just suggesting one possible reason for the findings that I mentioned above.
Am I right? Am I horribly wrong? I want to hear what you think about this topic.
As this column is nearing double-lenght, there will be no advertising this week. If you must read more, I always suggest rereading all of my past columns.
Until next time…study more and believe nothing unless you read it here.
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