The US should get kids out of factories

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I have received about ten emails from people who are outraged that the Obama administration is proposing that kids be banned from doing farm work.

People who grew up on farms are posting comments all over the Internet about their farm nostalgia. And I get it. I understand that kids run wild on a farm in a way that city kids could never dream of. But the flip side to that is that kids die too often on farms. From machinery.

A nine-year-old boy in my town just got crushed under an ATV that he was driving himself. And, three days later, a neighbor asked if his four-year-old could drive his ATV on our land so he could go faster.

“The four-year-old???”

“Yeah. He has great body control.”

Seriously. This is the mentality we’re dealing with in rural America where kids are doing farm chores. Read more

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Spying on schools

My son had a friend sleep over the other night. He would be in first-grade, like my six-year-old, who, really, I should have held back a year because all the rich little boys in New York City are being held back a year, and I want my son to be able to compete with them. But water under the bridge, right? Because we are not doing school. And I can just send him to college a year later or something.

So anyway, this boy would be in first-grade, same as my son, and I confess that I grilled the kid about what is going on in school.  I wanted to know what math he was learning. Is he typing? Does he read books with no pictures? Is there fun gym equipment? I start prying: Read more

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School reform talk is escapism

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The Washington Post announced that Sarah Wysocki has been fired. She got great reviews for her classroom performance. Kids liked her, her principal liked her. But the test scores of her students were not good enough.

There is wide agreement that teaching to the test is a vapid way to educate kids. There is wide agreement that young kids should be on the playground way more than they are right now. It’s just that we can’t think of another way to manage education on such a huge scale as the US public school system requires.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put enough money toward solving this problem that we have enough data to know we have nothing that even approximates a solution. Read more

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Your school activism hurts your kids

Most people I know are not homeschoolers. Most of them tell me they understand the benefits of homeschooling, but they are scared to do it. They tell me they feel more comfortable being active in their kids’ school to make sure their kid gets a good education.

But I want to tell all those people that being active in your kids school hurts your kids. Here’s why:

1. You have no tools and no information.
After a huge, protracted battle, courts required school districts to give parents access to the record of teacher performances. Now that we have had ten years of No Child Left Behind, we have ten years of data about which teachers can teach to a test.

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How to address the public good

I am actually a very strong believer in public school. I believe we owe it to kids who are disadvantaged—in a whatever way that is—to help them get a good education and have a decent entry point into adulthood.

I am also a strong believer that every kid can learn and every kid is smart and creative if you teach them the right way. Whatever way that is.

So it’s crushing to me that I am taking my kids out of public school and basically giving up on making it good. Because I think it’s hopeless. There will have to be a sea change, and I am not the activist type. I’m too self-involved.

There. I said it.

I don’t want to spend my days making the world a better place. I want to spend my days making sure I don’t repeat my terrible childhood by making my kids’ lives terrible. That is no small feat. The odds are against me.

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Your school sucks

There is a cognitive dissonance about public schools. Everyone knows public schools in the US are terrible, but everyone thinks their school is the exception. The reality is that your school would be the exception only if it teaches using project-based learning. Which it doesn’t. The public schools that are exceptional are exceptional at teaching to the test – a process that’s widely discredited.

Give your kids more credit than that.

Public schools suck. Reformers say child-driven learning and project-based learning are best. Parents are the only educators in a position to do that. So all kids will get a better education at home. And kids can teach themselves if you don’t knock the wind out of them with school early on.

I put links in that paragraph, but I don’t think I have to. I think all I have to tell you is that public school suck and Time magazine is telling you that you’re delusional about your particular school being the exception to the rule. Do you need someone more mainstream than Time magazine telling you that?

Take some personal responsibility. It’s so easy to bemoan the status of our public schools. And hope someone else fixes them. But get real: Our country is too diverse and too much in debt to fix those schools. The problem is too big. Maybe we’ll solve the problem, but not in your kid’s lifetime.

Talking about school reform is a way to shift the responsibility of educating your kids from you to someone else. Who really, you don’t even know. Because who is in charge of fixing schools, really? Who knows? Instead of talking about school reform, take your kids out of school.

Instead of practicing learned incompetence, admit that you could do as good a job at project-based learning as a school that is not even trying it.

 

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Evidence

There will be days when I will forget how bad things were. It’s like how people think their psychiatric meds are doing nothing, so they go off them. And then it’s bad.

I can already tell there’s gonna be a time like that for homeschooling.

The manic-depressives have to have a scrapbook of what went wrong — like all the sex partners they had during the last manic episode so they remember that mania is not going to feel as good as they think it might feel.

This post is my scrapbook.

It’s the math sheets my son did on his first days of school.

I called the school and said these are not appropriate for a kid who, according to their own tests, is doing math at a second or third grade level.

The school thought it was fine to give him these worksheets.

I want to remember how hard it must have been for my son to do math so far below him. I want to remember that he was so tuned out in this class that on the question that asked how many triangles are on the line, he colored in two and then wrote one.

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Last day of school

My six-year-old made it through three days of school.

Before school started, when I could see that he wanted to go, I asked the school to test him, so the school would be very aware of how far ahead he is. For example, he tested at the end of second grade for math.

On his first day of school, the math he did was circling two balls, and writing the number two. Stuff like that. He brought it home. I said nothing. Although I noticed that after a page of this sort of math, he started making mistakes like writing there is one shoe instead of two shoes.

On the third day of school, I found him in his bed, crying. He said, “I was so excited to go to school and now I’m not excited anymore.”

He said the playground is too scary because there are third and fourth graders and the first graders can’t do anything. He said his best friend got beaten up and no teachers saw.

“What? Beaten up? Like how?”

“His skin got peeled off. Really. I’m not kidding.”

I don’t know about the skin. I’m sure he’s scared, though. The school playground reminds me of Lord of the Flies but without starvation to keep kids focused on the serious issue of hunger.

I called the school to say I am taking him out of school until he gets a differentiated math curriculum.

The school said they thought the math he was doing was okay for him.

So I told them to forget it. He’s not coming back.

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Labeling the liars

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I don’t think single parents can homeschool. I think it’s too scary. (There’s a good discussion about that in the comments on this post.)

According to Shane Krukowski, CEO of Project Foundry, homeschooling is increasing at the rate of 30% per year. And only 38% of homeschoolers today do it for religious reasons. The bulk of homeschoolers are moms who have a college degree and a husband and live in a school district they don’t think is acceptable for their kids.

So this means that

1.     The moms with a college degree and a husband are lying to themselves that the kid’s school is good enough and/or that they cannot homeschool. (Don’t tell me it’s about the money. It’s a bad excuse.)

2.     The school systems should cater to helping single parents and parents without college degrees, because other parents can handle schooling on their own and should stop relying on the public to support them. (A microcosm of this issue is teaching a kid to read.  My friend, Lisa Nielsen, education maven for New York City public schools, explained to me once that kids who have educated parents who read to them do not need to be taught to read — they’ll just learn. The reading programs are only necessary for kids who don’t have educated parents at home reading to them.)

Conclusion: Most moms lie to themselves about school, and then they send their kids there. Me, too, I guess, since I have a kid in public school. It’s hard to make a good decision when public schools are the best all-day babysitting program in the world, and homeschooling demands so much time and energy from the parent doing it.

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About, cross, after

My son came home with a list of words. The goal is for all first graders to read that list by the end of the year. He read the list out loud while he ate his after-school snack.

I was so upset that I offered him another bowl of ice cream so we didn’t have to talk.

I thought I would have fear that I wasn’t teaching my homeschooled son well enough. But all my worries are for the boy who’s in school.

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