The following is a letter to the editor I submitted to the Independent Record today. My guess is they won’t run it. What a glorious day we live in that the former gatekeepers in the media are no longer the only game in town. So I publish it here.
Parents, we’ve been sold downriver. And the betrayal will continue if our current school board and Bruce Messinger are left unchallenged in the upcoming school board election.
Jobs, poverty and public welfare are all tied to our schools. And our schools are failing. Times have changed and their insistence at maintaining the broken status quo is to the detriment of our kids.
The icing on this nasty cake is the school administration’s ongoing refusal to work with parents beyond addressing us with placating doublespeak as though we’re the village idiots.
We are at a crossroads in history and I believe education reform is the civil rights movement of this century. It is clear from this session that as a state, Montana is not open to reform. (Thanks to the deep pockets of lobbyists.)
The outrageous campaign efforts on behalf of Planned Parenthood for the incumbents further indicate where their interests lay. (And their manipulative radio ads using the voices of the children chill my blood.) Never mind declining academic performance; we’ve a lot of social engineering to do!
Reform must begin on a local level and I can’t think of a more urgent need anywhere than here in Helena.
Theresa Lode
Filed under: Current events, education, Public schooling, The Mother Lode Project Tagged: | Helena school board elections, school reform
I hope they print your letter! Unfortunately, I think that school administrators treat parents like the village idiot because there are SO MANY parents who are. Too many, while possibly unhappy with the system, aren’t willing to do anything about it. I liken it to people who complain about the government, then admit that they don’t vote. Others, still, are perfectly happy to go along with it all as long as somebody else is “responsible” for their kids. I have found this to be true regardless of the parents political affiliation or economic status (oddly, some of the worst offenders that I’ve met are very affluent.) Until there are enough people who are willing to put in the work, I’m not sure that real positive change can, or will, occur.
I could not agree with you more! And yes the sad fact remains…there are a lot of idiot parents out there who are more than happy to send their kids into the arms of the system. (And in their defense, I believe many of the administration DOES think they’re serving in the best interests of the kids.) This whole mess is so convoluted and multi-faceted, it’s a long road to any real change.
I too wrote a response to our local paper that had implied parents need to get their priorities straight as there is a reason for homework. It is unfair to say that parents today do not value literacy and learning but there is the public perception that schools do teach our children to read and write and do accurately assess their achievement levels until they leave school, there is this perception and also a growing ‘deficit perception’ and that is what I see as the foundational schooling problem. It took years of trying to help our own child, researching and interpreting data from our experiences. I did learn that, a decade ago or more, schools were mandated to find the problem and ‘fix it’ quickly and told to experiment on ways to reintroduce grammar, sentencing back into the class. My child was obviously struggling in school. He began to bring work home to complete but I could not know the teacher was providing more time in class to finish assignments as a strategy or to avoid the homework dialogue. When my child began to bring work home it was actually a ‘warning sign’ that endless classroom adjustments prevented me from seeing and understanding. Am I an idiot? If I had know he was struggling because of deteriorating literacy skills I would have sent a note back to the teacher with incomplete work and requested/insisted on a proper reading skills achievement test CAT and language lessons to bring his literacy level up to his grade achieved, but I was not trusted enough to have that knowledge. I could not protect or guide my own child through their schooling years. I can’t understand why it is difficult to believe a mother wants her child to excel and ‘worn down’ is likely to believe the the rhetoric, satisfaction surveys and outcome reports of excellence, to trust that the experts would not ‘lie’ about the fact or cause of decreasing literacy rates. now that our top tier students 30-1 level have had their diploma marks drop for five years, I am almost afraid to ask what their problem will be perceived as?
As a parent who as worked in the class, on School and District School Councils, even volunteered as a parent representative on Board Policy as well as AISI Committees and trained as a volunteer facilitator for school council development – an Alberta Education pilot project and even spoke out as an advocate for public education, I am ‘dumbfounded’ by my own ignorance but somehow managed to save my own child from the downward spiral or revolving door matter of coding students who struggle as learning disabled where they get the type of supports that are inappropriate as they require the very literacy skills the child may be lacking. I have worked hard to learn that it is not people or places but perceptions that stop us from ‘challenging ourselves and truly changing our attitude of blaming students who begin to struggle to ensuring that their literacy levels are well maintained K-12 and basic ELA instruction is reinstated past grade three and supported in every subject area until they leave their public schooling years. Idiotic idea, perhaps not. If individuals look inward and consider that decades of ‘trying to find a problem to fix and not being able to ‘fix it’ no matter the incentive innovation, intervention or technology – literacy levels have not improved, then who is not going to eventually ‘believe that it must then be the child’, their family life, economic status, nationality, society….etc. This would naturally result in a ‘deficit perception’. Perhaps it is really a simple solution, reintroduce and teach every student to read and write cursives again and they will do well…empowered and reengaged, our child did.