From yesterday, discussing the importance of parents:
Everyone agrees with that, even the most ardent believers in the transformative power of public schools, writes Stewart. Yet we limit the options of all parents because we’re suspicious that some will make the wrong choices.And today, discussing victimhood:
But, if our goal is to find solutions to the educational failure that compounds year by year, all logical roads lead back to parents or guardians and their ability to access educational opportunities.Stewart believes in “parental sovereignty” rooted in “roles, responsibilities and rights.” Talking about parent “engagement, involvement, participation and partnership” implies that “some divine entity (is) graciously loaning decision-making power to parents to raise and educate their children,” he writes. But, “parents don’t need to be empowered. They need to be in power.”
That means school choice (and even the right to choose no school at all), and that scares people to death.
What if they make bad choices and their children suffer for it?
Rejecting personal responsibility, because it’s “blaming the victim,” is not the road to educational equity, writes Rick Hess on Project Forever Free. It’s a dead end that sets students up for failure.I'm constantly reminded of President Bush's comment about the "soft bigotry of low expectations."
I’m admittedly a simple guy, but the suggestion that it’s unfair to expect certain students and families to manage their part of the social compact seems to me the rankest kind of prejudice. Presuming that some students or parents are such passive victims of circumstance that it’s unfair to expect them to be responsible for their actions is to deny these individuals their agency, and to strip them of their dignity....If you’re an eternal victim, with no power to shape your future, why do the homework or show up to class? Why try to make good choices?
It’s not that those who don’t take responsibility aren’t real Americans. They’re not adults.
If you have children, unless you are utterly destitute or mentally ill, you are capable as an adult of producing a meager breakfast for your child. YET, in my upper middle class neighborhood, our local public school district is providing breakfast for ALL students. They say this is to destigmatize free breakfasts. In reality I think it is a way to get more Federal and State money by pretending that all your students are in need of food assistance. A couple of slices of toast, a bowl of cereal, a piece of fruit, a scrambled egg made in a microwave all take less than 5 minutes to prepare. Students can even learn to make breakfast themselves. This is just more of the incursion and erosion of parental responsibilities at the expense of taxpayers.
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