California is not failing our children - parents are. That is why schools are in trouble and gangs are so successful. This quote from the editorial: “The state must find ways to send more kids to preschool, help them become more physically fit, graduate … from high school.” Nonsense! Parents are supposed to do that. Head Start has not been a failure; parents have failed it. Parenting properly is an inconvenience.

The failing algebra students who refuse to show up for tutoring? Their parents are failing them. The students who push me out of the way to enter my classroom to disturb my class, never do the homework, never bring book/pencil/paper to class, and say “I never do work in this class”? Their parents are failing them.

Here are some more failing parents: The parent who never comes to parent conference night; the parent who tells me he has given up; the parent who, upon hearing from me that her daughter flatly refused to do any work in class yesterday, tells me in front of the student to “put it in writing”; the parent of the student who assaulted me in class says over the phone, “I don’t care, talk to his father,” and when I phone the father at work he says, “I don’t know what to do. Why are you telling me?”; the parent whose son bullied and assaulted my daughter who refused to respond, so I had to pull her out of the school.

Kids are not born with these attitudes; parents teach them. The parents who never show up at school for parent conference night will come immediately to school to pick up a confiscated electronic device or search for a lost cell phone. The iPod is important, but homework is not.

A new state law requires parents of a first-time juvenile offender to attend parenting classes. Someone has figured it out. If this new law were extended to children who disrupt the classroom, the schools could be fixed in a matter of months with no new massive expenditures.

Schools already have adult school in place. And, if the students’ school behavior doesn’t improve, the parent should be required to take a second class under the threat of placing the child in foster care, which is also already in place. Impose parenting on these failures and, suddenly, students will sit down, shut up, pay attention and do homework. That is what will fix schools.

Parents who are not bonding with their children, not reading to them, and not spending special time regularly with them need to be forced to learn how. Children who don’t feel valued at home will act out at school and end up in the prison system.

California is not failing its children. Parents are failing their children. (…)

Source: Pasadena Star-News, CA
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/opinions/ci_8121457