Regarding your last statement– I have no problem with Carol Caref's opinion because everyone is entitled to one .

My turn — Are you a teacher brucedixon? Do you actively volunteer in the schools or in your community? Are you an active parent and what do you do to support education in your own home?

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Oh yea – you said “Fundamentally reforming an institution, like public education does not “start” with parents. It starts with all of us re-dreaming the educational mission and re-imagining how it is accomplished. Right now, schools of education don't even teach teachers or administrators how to work with parents, and for generations school systems have treated parents, especially poor parents like ignorant cattle or worse. “

that is utter hogwash.
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“The meme about it “starting” with parents is a destructive one because it tries to blame the crisis of education on the individual behaviors of parents and takes no account of social factors which affect millions of parents at a time. For example, employed parents are likely to be working ten or twenty or more hours per week than they did a generation ago, leaving them with less time to oversee homework, let alone to visit schools and take an active part in what happens inside the school building. Public transit cuts and suburbanization mean commutes are longer too, forcing more parents into situations where children are unsupervised for more and more hours during the week. We do not see the media informing parents of how schools work either.”

also BS. If parents don't take the time to help their own children succeed it is their fault and their personal responsibility and not the schools, not the transportation departments, not the governments, or the media. It is the responsibility of the parent who made the decision to create these children, took steps to bring them into this world and now want everybody else to raise them because it is inconvenient and does not work with their preferred schedule. Stop making ridiculous excuses for making the decision to neglect your children.

Regarding your last statement– I have no problem with Carol Caref's opinion because everyone is entitled to one and because sharing an opinion does not mean it is correct.

My turn — Are you a teacher brucedixon? Do you actively volunteer in the schools or in your community with kids with issues described in your article?

*“If I could get a few minutes of the president's time,” Carol Caref told
us, “I'd tell him that public education and quality neighborhood public
schools are the foundations of stable, livable communities. Turning schools
into test-prep centers doesn't improve the quality of education. Neither
does repeating the corporate propaganda about our schools being 'dropout
factories,' as Arne Duncan does. What works are resources, stability, parent
and community involvement and smaller class sizes. Schools in wealthier
neighborhoods have all these things. Children and families everywhere
deserve them.”*
* *
*Effective teaching, as one CORE teacher put it, is a performance art. You
need commitment, connection and experience to pull it off, not hysteria,
insecurity, mass firings and more tests. Somebody, they say, needs to tell
President Obama.*

Now exactly what parts of that do you have a problem with?

thanks for clarifying.

Where did I make that assumption? Oh yea . . . I didn't.

But I see that Miranda responded to you the same way I would have. and she is exactly right in her statement that without ACTIVE parent involvement it is a waste of time and there WILL BE NO solution.

And if the parents won't get it together and work hard to improve their children's futures, then that's their fault, not those who are trying this turnaround program. It's high time that folks get up off their ass and work instead of sitting back, waiting for others to solve their problems.

“A lot of these school turnarounds are going to fail because the work is so difficult,” Mr. Hassel said.

That doesn't give me a lot of confidence that this will work. For one thing, can they get parents across the country to be as involved and committed to what's going on in their child's schools as the parents at Orr? Honestly, I doubt it.

“… Mr. Poole recruited a new instructional staff that included some strong teachers at Orr who had reapplied for their jobs.

“They’re the best leadership team that’s been in the school in the last 12 to 15 years,” Mr. Walker said.”

I think it's worth a shot because what's in place right now isn't working.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/education/02e...

Apparently “turnaround” programs don't have a very good track record in business or in education.

An excerpt:

…”Still, it remains unclear whether the changes will sharply raise student achievement. Eighteen months ago, Bryan Hassel, a Harvard-trained education consultant, reviewed conditions in half a dozen Chicago schools that had been turned around.

“I was favorably impressed with some of the schools, and not with others,” Mr. Hassel said. “It was a mixed picture.”

In the corporate world, Mr. Hassel said, turnaround efforts transform failing businesses only about 25 percent to 30 percent of the time.

“A lot of these school turnarounds are going to fail because the work is so difficult,” Mr. Hassel said. “But as a nation, we’ll never have the capacity to do this work successfully until we make the commitment.”

Blaming the powerless for the destruction wrought by the elite IS destructive of the ability even to envision change, let alone enact it.

Fundamentally reforming an institution, like public education does not “start” with parents. It starts with all of us re-dreaming the educational mission and re-imagining how it is accomplished. Right now, schools of education don't even teach teachers or administrators how to work with parents, and for generations school systems have treated parents, especially poor parents like ignorant cattle or worse.

Back in the eighties when Harold Washington was mayor of Chicago we put through a piece of fundamental reform — elected councils of parents for each and every public school with veto power over the contracts of principals and veto power over a small portion of local school budgets. The political bad guys in Chicago have tried to game that system wherever they could by installing Daley precinct captains in the councils, but in dozens of Chicago neighborhoods, independent and knowledgeable parents, even in poor neighborhoods, have been aboe to work constructively with teachers and the rest of the community in selecting good principals, funding good programs, and the rest.

It was beyond the scope of the article to do more than a single sentence in mention of it, but just as the corporate-inspired advocates of charters, privatization and “turnarounds” detest organized teachers, they don't like input from organized parents either. One of the motives that CORE teachers cite for the turnarounds is City Hall wanting to eliminate the elected parent councils.

The meme about it “starting” with parents is a destructive one because it tries to blame the crisis of education on the individual behaviors of parents and takes no account of social factors which affect millions of parents at a time. For example, employed parents are likely to be working ten or twenty or more hours per week than they did a generation ago, leaving them with less time to oversee homework, let alone to visit schools and take an active part in what happens inside the school building. Public transit cuts and suburbanization mean commutes are longer too, forcing more parents into situations where children are unsupervised for more and more hours during the week.

We do not see the media informing parents of how schools work either. I'll wager you that many parents in Chicago, a generation after the school council laws have been in effect, don't know what they are or how they function. None of the powerful interests in the city, from the corporate media to the public school administration which is run by City Hall want to inform them.

Finally, it says something that the same City Hall crew which have run the schools for a generation are the ones advancing the claim that it needs to be “reformed” with charters, militarization, and “turnarounds”.