Education and the family, Part 2, K-12 buildings

It is no secret that the MAIN indicator of student success is the parents' involvement in the child's education.  That is, if the parent is on top of things, if the parent is pushing for better performance, checking up on homework, showing up to school, etc. then it is far more likely that the child will succeed in school.

That's primarily why home schooled students do so well in higher education.

So why is our educational system so adamant about breaking up the family?  That is, we want to rip the toddlers away from their parents and put them in preschool.  In some local schools, the K-3 kids go to one building, the 4-6 to another, the 7-8th graders to a third, and the high schoolers to a fourth building. If families have even two children spaced a few years apart, it gets crazy for parents to attend very many functions at all of those different schools.

We tend to think that bigger is better, that bigger is more economical.  But having taught in a K-12 school where all of the buildings shared the same parking lot, and there were only 350 kids K-12, I can tell you that there was a much better family atmosphere in that environment than in the schools I attended growing up, or have taught in elsewhere.  Not only was the holiday program attended by the entire family, it was attended by the entire community.  Parents didn't have to divide up the responsibilities of so many nights out because there was only one event for all of the kids.  They went to events as families.  They got to know their kids' teachers, because the kids would probably have that teacher more than once.  Excellent teachers got the benefit of lots of affirmation, and the community worked to keep them there.  Poor teachers left after a year, because the word got around about them.  Educators had important stakes in how things were done, because their kids were also students in the school.

My gut feeling is that a K-12 school should have no more than 400 kids attending.  Everyone can actually know the names of everyone in the building if that is the limit, and we'll know who their siblings and parents are as well.

If the main indicator of student success is family involvement, then we should not make it difficult for the family to be involved in the child's education.  We should be thinking through school structure and activities with the family in mind.

I would like to propose that school districts offer both kinds of education, large buildings divided by age, and small neighborhood buildings, more like one-room school houses for K-8 or even K-12 kids.  Some folks actually think that changing schools as a child grows is a way to get them ready to transition to high school.  I don't know what's so special about high school that we need to 'transition' to it.  I also don't know what moving to a new building has to do with education.

My experience says that smaller is better, and families are happier that way.  

Education and the family

Topics in this series will include:

K-12 buildings

Busted families and education - the 'need' to warehouse kids under age 18.

Busted families and education - How much can you expect?

Stop assaulting family values!

Re-thinking society and K-12 education

The family and education, Part 1

Watched the 1968 version of "Yours, Mine and Ours" with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda this evening.  Helen North is a widow with eight children.  Frank Beardsley is a widower with ten children. Of course, they meet, marry, and begin to raise 18 children together.  This is the 'Aha' moment of the script:

Frank Beardsley (to eldest daughter, who is complaining that boyfriend Larry wants her to 'prove she loves him'):  "I've got a message for Larry.  You tell him this is what it's all about.  This is the real happening!... And if you want to know what love really is, take a look around you... And take a good look at your mother."

Helen:  "Not now!"

All 18 children are present, rushing her down the steps into the car.  She is in labor with her 9th child, which with their blended family, will make 19 children.

Frank:  "Yes, now!  It's giving life that counts, and until you're ready for it, all the rest is just a big fraud.  All the crazy haircuts in the world won't keep it turning.  Life isn't a love-in, it's the dishes and the orthodontist and the shoe repairman and the ground round instead of roast beef, and I'll tell you something else.  It's not going to bed with a man that proves you're in love with him -  it's getting up in the morning and facing the drab, miserable, wonderful everyday world with him that counts...I suppose having nineteen kids is carrying it a bit too far, but if we had it to do over, who would we skip... You?"

Coming out

It's time to take a stand.  I'd hoped to contribute to discussion on education and cause folks to think and question their long and closely held views, without exposing my specific experience.  I thought this would protect the little school I administrate and current and former students.

But the persecution of the church in America has begun following this November, 2008 election, and I am no longer willing to hide behind any electronic wall and avoid confrontation.  Be assured, the most aggressive thing I'm going to do to you is pray for you, and vote.  And ask you to think about behavior, yours and mine.  Educate me, if that's what I need.  After all, that's the business I'm in.

Today my real name goes on my blog, and you can find me.  I'll entertain any civil comments.  Name calling will not survive comment screening.

Student loans are EVIL!

There have been many who have called into question the financial return that a college education gives the American wage earner.

I'm going on record as stating that WHATEVER the returns might be, they will be grossly offset by any student loans the graduate has to pay back.

First, let's establish that colleges don't loan money.  Colleges often have nice grant money that one does NOT have to pay back, but they don't usually loan money longer than the term the student is enrolled, meaning the money is paid back by the end of the term or the student cannot enroll for the next term.  Student loans are not the fault of any college.

But our US government has guaranteed money for banks to loan to students.  That means that the bank doesn't have to pay back the money they got from the government to loan to the student if the student defaults on the loan.  (Does this sound like the foundation for the current housing loan crisis?)

Most banks won't loan to a student without a co-signer, which means that a parent is usually responsible if the student can't meet the payments, but the good news is that most students feel obligated enough to establish their good credit and they do pay back their student loans.  Most of them.  A student who defaults, becomes ill, or dies can bankrupt the entire family with those loans.

Student loans have a long payback period, often 30 years.  Students who have achieved a Master's degree or Doctoral degree are going to have a student loan payment equivalent to a mortgage on a decent house.

Yes, you really need to think through the implications of a student loan, and if your college education is worth the payments you'll be making for that education after college.

Here's why student loans are evil:

1.  College graduates need to be able to go to where their new job opportunities are going to take them, to be able to apply those newly learned skills.  If they have a loan equivalent to a mortgage, they aren't going to be able to buy a house when they get there.  Many of these expensive college graduates end up living at home with mom and/or dad until that college loan is significantly reduced.  Then they have the freedom to move about, but that can be years after graduation.

2.  Student loans may well be one of the reasons for the rise in college costs.  Banks love to loan money, the more the better.  If college costs go up, so what?  That means the return the banks earn will be greater.  There's no reason for colleges to curtail costs if students can get the loans to pay for them.  This is probably the reason that college costs in recent years have risen far faster than inflation.

3.  Who would want to marry $40,000 - $100,000 or more in student loans?  Love isn't the same as money, and a warm feeling won't pay the rent or a mortgage.  Debt obligation can limit a choice of spouse, or your own debt obligation can limit who will choose you.

4.  Women with significant college loans may well have to choose between staying home with a family and work.  If her loans are equivalent to a mortgage, then circumstances are going to require her to work.  If she wants a family, then the burden of the loan payback becomes the wage-earner's burden in that family.  If the wage earner also has student loans, the wage earner may well be paying both husband and wife student loans as well as the mortgage.  If your mortgage is 1/3rd of your income, and husband and wife student loans are both equivalent to that mortgage, then you don't eat.  If you want one parent to stay home with your kids, then don't take out those loans.

5.  Student loans (as well as mortgage loans) make you a slave to someone.  You will be obligated to the job that pays those loans back.  If there's a cause somewhere in the world to which you would like to lend your assistance and expertise, then you're stuck paying those loans back instead.  If God would like to use you somewhere else, you will be unable to go.

6.  Your student loan will make someone rich.  Over a 30 year period at 5%, you could well be paying that loan back almost twice.  You'll pay back the full amount of the loan, and the interest you will have paid will amount to about 93% MORE than your loan.  If your interest is 7%, your payback will be about 139% MORE than your loan.  Couldn't YOU use that money?

In general, an educated population is a tax-paying population.  It's in a government's interests to encourage education and research that not only makes life better for its citizens but also protects those citizens (military).  Tax payers in countries such as ours, where the government is by the people and for the people, need to decide how much education is worth, and need to discern if we're getting the return we expected, or are just getting a population burdened with unnecessary debt.  Debt will immobilize a nation, as we're seeing with the current loan crisis.  Debt can even obligate one nation to another.  The US may well be the biggest lender to other nations, but that CAN change.  Keeping American citizens out of debt is in our national best interests.

If your college education will guarantee you 50% more income then it may be worth it to do that.  ('Guarantee' is a funny word in this context!)  But you will have more flexibility and more choices after college if you have no loans.  You can take some time and see the world.  You can use your education to help folks in out-of-the-way places.  The money you earn will be yours to do as you please.  But if you take those loans, you may well be stuck with a job that earns your loan payment and leaves you with little else.

Don't do student loans!

Pre-school. PRE-SCHOOL?

What film was it years ago, in which the couple moves to NY city and the neighbors start asking about which pre-school they'll be sending their kids to?  Then we see the mad rush to get the kids into the 'best' pre-school, which is the guarantee to get them into the best grammar school, which will get them into the best high school... You see where this is going.

Schools are institutions, and somehow we've come to believe that what happens inside those four walls will be much more important than what happens in the world.  Please don't institutionalize your child too soon!

My kids were born in the mid-80's, which today makes them 20-somethings.  We participated in a play group, organized by the local tech college as a class, open to the general community.  It wasn't for credit and no grades were awarded.  Moms with toddlers showed up, watched the interaction with the kids on different kinds of play equipment each week, then a couple of us would watch all the kids while the rest of the moms had some discussion time on a parenting topic with an early childhood expert for about 30 minutes.  It was a nice time to compare notes with each other and talk about fussy eaters, fussy dressers, sibling rivalry and potty training.  We learned our kids were normal, that we were doing fine, and we taught each other the finer points of frugal living and shopping with stay-at-home moms and limited incomes.  The kids played hard with each other for 90 minutes, had a snack and went home and took a nap.  It was really a time for parents as much as the kids.

But what is pre-school?

It really doesn't make sense to start kids to school much before they are cognitively ready to read.  If you do, all you really accomplish is to get them to line up and follow each other to the rest room, drinking fountain, and bus to go home.  Or as my daughter answered after she finished kindergarten "We learned to sit in a circle with our feet crossed and our hands folded in our laps."  And I thought, at the time, that she had a pretty good kindergarten teacher whom she enjoyed.  That answer was unsolicited and caught me by surprise.  It was one of the things that led to my rebellion about public education.

What if we just started school later, like eight years old when almost all kids are able to learn to read easily?  Would we really be losing valuable time?

At the community college where I teach we have classes for adults that begin with 1-2-3 and A-B-C.  It takes us about two years to get the completely illiterate adult through an 8th grade education, and about two more years to get them through a high school education.  Then we plop them into college level classes, and they perform.

So why would we want to spend more of our public funds on pre-school, when we could just wait and do it later in a short amount of time?  Very, very few 3-year olds will learn to read.  I haven't seen any data that suggests that kids who learn to read at 3 and kids who learn to read at 7 are very different from each other by age 12.

And if a parent can't handle the pre-school curriculum, then perhaps we should be educating the parents and not the children!

Pre-school has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with education.  The pre-school movement is about placating the consciences of parents who choose their careers over their children.  Even assuming for ONE moment that the parents MUST work to put food on the table and a roof over the heads of their kids, our education dollars would be better spent teaching these parents to get a better job rather than teaching their kids to sit in a circle with their feet crossed and their hands folded in their laps.

Kids need their parents to be their parents during their early years.  Rather than sitting in a circle, take your kids for a walk.  Read a book together.  Visit the grandparents and get their stories.  Bake some cookies or a pie and take them to your neighbor as an excuse to get to know them.  Make mudpies in the dirt.  Rub leaves through newsprint with a crayon and look at all the different patterns.  Google "what to do with a pre-schooler" and see what comes up.

Slow Down High School

We seem to think that humans are on an upward evolutionary path.  We keep raising high school graduation requirements, thinking we are raising the bar for basic achievement (after all, everyone needs a high school diploma, right?), when all that accomplishes is more students dropped out of high school.

I don't have a problem with offering more education to high schoolers.  I have a problem with requiring them all to achieve at the same level at the same time.

There are lots of high schoolers out there who need more time to do well in high school.  In my work at the local community college I hear from them every term.  These are kids who were perhaps not quite ready, cognitively, or they may be kids who just never had a chance to do very well.  By that, I mean that their home lives were so disrupted that they didn't get a chance to do their homework.  Parents may have been divorced or their families disrupted in other ways, and it may just have not been possible for these kids to get homework done.  

Some kids just need more time to absorb their learning and do homework, and six classes (or eight in some of the block scheduling patterns) may just be too many for these kids.  Our industrial manufacturing, conveyor belt model of doing education emphasizes getting to the end of the conveyor belt over developing a quality product along the way.

For lots of high school kids, we should just slow down their education.  This is true even for homeschooled kids who have the best families in the world. 

Doing well is more important than getting high school done on time.

The benefits of slowing down high school for some kids is tremendous.  Their grade point average increases.  Their ability to take tougher classes increases.  These two items are the most important part of college entrance decisions.  A good score on the SAT or the ACT tests only confirms what the track record shows.  Scores don't have to be superlative, just good.

A student who has a good track record and has demonstrated ability to do well in tough classes has more doors open, both in colleges that student might attend and in scholarship possibilities.

It's a paradigm shift for high school guidance counselors, but if you have a child who would benefit from taking 3 to 5 classes instead of the usual 6, then ask the counselor if s/he would be willing to allow your child to do this.  You'll have to acknowledge that graduation won't happen 'on time', but again, the track record is more important than the finish date.

You may well find that a year or two of cognitive maturing can make a huge difference later on.  That student who was behind in their second year of high school, because s/he only took four classes, may well be able to pour on the heat and make up the difference as a senior with a supplemental class from a local community college evenings or summers.  The brain matures, and magic happens.   It's not necessary to finish on time in this way, but it can happen.  (I would rather just allow the student to finish in his/her merry time rather than push for the finish line to graduate with age peers.)

Kids who slowed down and stayed at that slower level may be finishing high school outside of the K-12 public school system, but there isn't anything wrong with that.  It may cost money, but this is why we should implement my "Twelve years, take it when you're ready" reform.  These students could get partial credit for one year and be able to have the state pay for it elsewhere during another year.

For the student who may well be cognitively ready but lives with a disrupted home life, slowing school down to two-thirds pace or half pace allows that kid to get a job outside of high school.  This isn't a bad idea for any kid.  But for that kid struggling with drama at home, a job can give that kid a little more power with his or her own money to spend.  The need to be at work on Saturday can have a huge influence on choices for Friday night activities.  There may be a boss or another adult coworker who becomes an advocate for the child both at home and in school.

I would not worry about the child who becomes deeply involved in work to the point where it postpones school.  We have many mechanisms in this country for making up lost school time.  There is NOTHING wrong becoming so good at something that people pay you for it, even at age 16 or 17.  Personal achievement comes in lots of ways.  The level of education is only one of them.

I see these postponed students at the local community college, which is usually a great place to remedy a track record or build a new one.  I love our community college system for this.  These folks show up in my 'remedial' (high school level) math classes, sometimes frightened to death.  They did poorly in the subject the first time, or couldn't do the homework, or perhaps blew off school in high school.  They could have had poor instruction the first time around.  But they begin to soar, and they're amazed at their ability.  It's not that I'm magical, although sometimes they tell me that, but now their brains are better.  They conquer high school algebra, which usually takes a full year in the ninth grade, in two quarters (six months).

It's really fun when these folks tag me a couple of years later, and tell me that they've just finished the calculus sequence.  They are adults of all ages, and now doors everywhere are open to them.

If your child is struggling in high school, consider slowing down high school for your child.  Doors will open later on.  You're the parent.  Come on, you can take control.