Parent’s Role in Education

I was reading a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece regarding the Gates Foundation spending on education. The one thing I found odd was that the words parents, father, mother, dad, mom or any other family influence was mentioned. It seems like without tackling the role of family is in education that poor performing students will never get better.

Anecdotally speaking my wife taught in both poor schools and affluent schools and the complaining she did was vastly different between the two schools. In the poor schools the parents would complain about their kids being disciplined for bad behavior. In the affluent school the parents would push to have their children given harder work to expand their knowledge. Is it any wonder that the affluent schools send more children to college?

Maybe it’s time that the role of parents be the main focus on failing schools. By allowing the blaming of teacher unions and administrators we let the parents off the hook for poor parenting. Parents, collectively, push the direction schools to go into by how they raise their kids. The more engaged the parent is on their child’s success it seems would point to a school with a better chance for success. Unfortunately Mr. Gate’s money can’t solve this problem easily.