Category Archive for ‘Parents’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Archive for the 'Parents' Category

Petrilli Schools Obama

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 7, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy and Parents. 0 Comments

Mike Petrilli over at Fordham’s Flypaper is offering free advice to presumptive nominee Barack Obama this morning on using education to tack to the center in the general election. Responding to Timesman David Brooks’ observation Obama supporters “look more and more like the McGovern-Dukakis constituency,” Professor Petrilli prescribes a little ed talk:

“He should surely continue to channel Bill Cosby and talk about the need for parents to take responsibility for their children. (Beyond being sensible, this appeals to social conservatives.) This is a standard theme he mentions when addressing predominantly African-American audiences (themselves quite socially conservative); he should use it all the time.

“As for suburban independents, his position on No Child Left Behind most likely appeals to them already, what with his talk about saving art and music and literature from the ravages of “teaching to the test.” But he could go one step further and also talk about high-performing students who are being forgotten by our current education system and the need to help them achieve their potential too. (What suburban independent doesn’t think that his or her own child is gifted?)”

Pay attention, Senator. This will be on the test.

Black Helicopter Parents

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 4, 2008 in Education Practice and Parents. 0 Comments

Helicopter parent? Why merely hover over your child when technology will let you be a black helicopter parent?

The New York Times looks at computer programs that provide daily, real-time data on kids’ in-school performance, from attendance to test scores. Programs like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool are “changing the nature of communication between parents and children, families and teachers,” reports the Times. “Citing studies showing that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance, educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents.”

What did you learn in school today? Forget it. Now you can know before your kid walks in the door.

On school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses. But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?

“Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say. When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment. “He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.

At best, the programs can help kids stay on top of things and act as an early warning system for trouble. At worst, it’s another lever for over-anxious parents to pull. “At an age when teenagers increasingly want to manage their own lives, many parents use these programs to tighten the grip,” notes the Times. “College admission is so devastatingly competitive, parents say, they feel compelled to check online grades frequently. Parents hope to transform even modest dips before a child’s record is irrevocably scarred.”

I Apologize

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 16, 2008 in Education Practice and Parents. 1 Comment

Quick! Call the Guinness Book of World Records and find out the record for the most people insulted in a single paragraph! Courtesy of the cartoonishly lefty Village Voice a reminder of why the rest of the U.S. hates New York City:

“Say ‘homeschooling’ and what tends to come to mind are the whitest people you know, holding Sunday school every day of the week in their basements, producing kids who can declaim against Charles Darwin for hours on end, but who are so screwed up socially that you can’t imagine them getting a date, except years later as part of a group outing to Christian Day at Disney World.”

I didn’t write that, but on behalf of my fellow Manhattanites allow me to apologize for this paragraph from a story about black families in New York City who are homeschooling their kids (The horror!). The late Spalding Gray once noted that he didn’t live in America, but an island off the coast of America called New York City. Only here would anyone find it odd that parents of any color who don’t have $30K a year to spend on private school might consider homeschooling over a violent, underperforming neighborhood school.

So I apologize. Please know that not everyone who lives here is a moron. But we do have a Village idiot.

[Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs]

Unchartered Waters

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 16, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Parents and School News. 0 Comments

“Supporters of a breakaway charter school in the high-achieving Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District have dropped the effort, at least for now,” the Los Angeles Times reports. The charter was supposedly proposed “as an alternative to the standardized-testing culture of district schools.”

Something about this story doesn’t quite sound right. First of all, charter schools are subject to testing too. It’s also baffling that the parents felt the only way they could make a statement about testing was to start their own charter. Testing is seldom the problem. The mischief is in the test prep and endlessly sweating children to perform. It strains my credulity to think that the principal of a “high-achieving” school wouldn’t feel accountable to parental pressure to back off if that was the problem. Push comes to shove, the parents could make an even more effective statement with a testing boycott.

How to Evaluate Teachers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 11, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy, Parents and Teaching. 2 Comments

The New York Sun once again shows why it’s a must-read for anyone who cares about education in New York City. In an editorial on this week’s test-for-tenure flap, they have a different take on how to hold schools accountable:

“The schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and the president of the teachers’ union, Randi Weingarten, are locked in a bitter debate over whether test scores should be used to evaluate teachers. Mr. Klein thinks they should and Ms. Weingarten thinks they shouldn’t. The legislature and the governor have sided with Ms. Weingarten, and it looks like New York is going to be the only state in the union that will forbid using test scores to evaluate teachers. As it happens, we’re not terribly excited about this fight one way or another, because we don’t think test scores should be the device for evaluating teachers. We have another contraption we favor for evaluating teachers. It’s called parents.”

Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 3, 2008 in Educational Policy and Parents. 0 Comments

Officials in Australia have an answer for truancy: throw the parents in jail. New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma’s proposal has been pilloried by education and welfare experts who say the plan is over the top, and “will only hurt the most disadvantaged students.”

The plan announced earlier this week gives courts the power to impose “special orders on parents of children who don’t attend school, including the ability to force them into rehabilitation, mediation or counselling. If they fail to comply, they could face jail,” reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

“It’s not about punishing parents that are doing the right thing, or because of circumstances beyond their control - either the kids are disobedient, or there is a problem with drugs or alcohol - it’s about those parents who are physically, mentally, or financially able to do the right thing but point-blank refuse to accept their responsibility,” says Iemma. The new legislation was aimed at a “very small minority of parents who simply won’t do the right thing.”

Father, er Obama, Knows Best

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 3, 2008 in Parents. 4 Comments

Democratic front-runner Barack Obama got all Bill Cosby on a predominantly African-American audience in Texas last week, and the crowd ate it up. Thanks to Joanne Jacobs for pointing to this Los Angeles Times article that I’d overlooked.

Spending alone will not cure what ails education, scolded Obama. “It doesn’t matter how much money we put in if parents don’t parent,” he said. “It’s not good enough for you to say to your child, ‘Do good in school,’ and then when that child comes home, you’ve got the TV set on,” Obama lectured. “You’ve got the radio on. You don’t check their homework. There’s not a book in the house. You’ve got the video game playing.”

“So turn off the TV set. Put the video game away. Buy a little desk. Or put that child at the kitchen table. Watch them do their homework. If they don’t know how to do it, give ‘em help. If you don’t know how to do it, call the teacher.”

“By now,” reports the Times, “the crowd of nearly 2,000 was lifted from the red velveteen seats of the theater, hands raised to the gilded ceiling. ‘Make ‘em go to bed at a reasonable time! Keep ‘em off the streets! Give ‘em some breakfast! Come on! Can I get an amen here?’”

“Whooooooooooooooooo, went the crowd. “You know I’m right,” Obama laughed. “And, since I’m on a roll, if your child misbehaves in school, don’t cuss out the teacher! You know I’m right about that! Don’t cuss out the teacher! Do something with your child!”

Tellingly, the first of many comments on Joanne’s blog is from a teacher who posts, “Up to now I’ve been sitting on the fence, but Barack Obama may have just gotten my vote!”

Bet there are more than a handful of teachers thinking the same thing today.

There’s No “A” In Whole Child

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 15, 2008 in Education Practice, Opinion and Parents. 0 Comments

Writer and parent Maura J. Casey complains in the New York Times (So Is That Like An A?) about report cards in Hartford, Connecticut. The reports—clearly not cards—are up to seven pages long and grade a child on how he or she “establishes and maintains a healthy lifestyle by avoiding risk-taking behavior” and 57 other academic, social and behavioral criteria. In music class, for example, students are being graded on how they make “connections between music and other disciplines through evaluation and analysis of compositions and performances.”

It’s no mere rant. Casey points out that the academic measurements, which are designed to grade areas of student performance that are also measured on state standardized tests, seem more likely to confuse than illuminate. “I confess that as a parent, I’ve always focused on the basics. I want my children to be curious, enjoy learning, to read for pleasure, to be polite, to do their homework and to try not to hate school. If my kids got A’s or B’s, I got a pretty good sense that they were mastering the necessary skills. If they did much worse, I knew that it was time to call their teachers,” Casey writes.

In cities like Hartford, where many students come from non-English speaking homes, Casey points out that educational jargon like “uses numeracy and literacy skills to describe, analyze and present scientific content, data and ideas” seems destined to confuse, not clarify. “If report cards are weighed down with educational jargon that even native English speakers have to struggle to understand, ” she concludes, “it is fair to ask who the administrators are really reporting to: students and their families or the educational bureaucracy?”

Guess Who

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 2, 2008 in Parents and Students. 1 Comment

Identify the socioeconomic group under discussion in this article about student achievement.

A mere 15 per cent master the “three Rs.”
Studies cite parental indifference and family break-ups as reasons they have slipped behind other groups.
Some are held back by a peer culture which encourages low aspirations and holds intellectual effort in contempt.

It’s not who you think.

Press release: The Savvy Source

Published by CKF on November 30, 2007 in Education Practice, Parents and Preschool. 0 Comments

The Savvy Source, in partnership with Core Knowledge, launched a free, online Learning Guide on Nov. 28 to give parents a relatively simple process for identifying the best books, toys and activities to meet their child’s developmental strengths and needs. All parents of toddlers and preschoolers have to do is answer a simple set of questions about their child’s development and then Savvy Source provides parents with a customized set of recommendations of the very best educational books, toys and activities to engage a child’s imagination and development at this particular moment of their growth. The free program was launched around the holidays so that parents can share the recommended gift list with family and friends.

Some of the preschool activities are adapted from the upcoming workbook to be published as a part of What Your Preschooler Needs to Know, to be published by Random House in March, 2008.

Read the complete Reuters press release

Visit the Savvy Source website — click “start here” to start the Learning Guide questionnaire