Reply to Your daily reminder that expecting parents to teach their kids at home is super inequitable

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Reply to "Your daily reminder that expecting parents to teach their kids at home is super inequitable"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How is this even a complaint? You think asking for a parent's help in an assignment from a teacher is inequitable?

If it's graded on whether a parent helped, then maybe. If an adult, any adult, can't help your child with their homework, that's really awful.

The government is not responsible for everything for your child except for food and a place to sleep. Really re-think how much your believe you are entitled to. [/quote]

Again, some of you either can’t read, or argue for the sake of arguing. Go back and re-read the OP. I said it’s wrong for schools to expect parents to research gaps in curriculum and fill them in. Parents are welcome to do what they wish, but they shouldn’t have to make up for a school’s failing.[/quote]

But failing how? Failing because they don't teach an entire subject matter? That's not a failing when clearly the curriculum is based on state curriculum. What needs to be taught is being taught, even if your child doesn't grasp it.
The rest of the things parents add to their children's education is by choice. If I want my child to learn cursive, I teach him/her cursive. I'm not going to demand the school system adds that to their list of subjects taught because I want it and maybe you don't have time to teach your child too?

That's odd rationale.  There are so many things we teach our children every day that the school is not responsible for. Public school has limitations. Find a private school which fits all the things that you deem important that will make your child competitive with others. If you can't afford private school, lobby for changes to the public curriculum. It's a matter of resources and opinion.[/quote]

This all makes sense. There are tons of things that schools can and should do better. But the "customer service" model of public education just isn't realistic. With almost any other service, the customer isn't expected to contribute anything apart from payment. But with public education, the degree to which the education sticks/takes is highly (if not predominantly) dependent on what the "customer" brings to the table in terms of prior vocab, background knowledge, pre-reading, numeracy skills, etc.  Of course, schools should work to develop all of the aforementioned, but the more a student brings to the table, the more cognitively engaged the student will be with whatever lesson is being conveyed. The "Matthew Effect" is real. It's not so much that one student has necessarily already mastered a skill or an area of knowledge, but that they come in with mental receptors primed to absorb the material in ways other kids do not.  This doesn't mean that all parents are to blame, so much as the (unfair and inequitable) demands of modern economic life.

See the article linked below with money quotes in bold.

[url]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/25/does-it-pay-to-obsess-on-where-your-kid-goes-to-college/
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[b]Parents also determine the degree to which their children enter school each day prepared to build new knowledge.  Remember, schools don’t fill student skulls like gas tanks.  If they did, the quality of the fuel would be of primary concern.  Instead, schools are learning environments in which children participate at different levels of cognitive engagement.  Rather than gas tanks, then, imagine sponges.  Children with active and education-conscious parents come to school ready to learn—entering Kindergarten with pre-reading skills, huge capacities for language, and early mathematical reasoning abilities.  Whatever the particular nature of the learning environment, such students are well-prepared to soak up new knowledge.[/b]

Finally, children spend far more time at home than in school—roughly twice as many waking hours.  This is important for two reasons.  First, it means that the home environment matters greatly in a child’s educational development.  Going to the library, for instance, does far more for a kid than plopping her down in front of the television.  Second, it means that some children are far more prepared to get something out of their school experiences.  Most students, after all, wring only a fraction of school’s value from it.  Some parents, however, help their children get more out of school by talking with them, cultivating good study habits, setting up quiet spaces for homework, and encouraging their children to read.[/b]
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