Parents ‘n Schools

The thing about parent involvement in schooling is that parents have the potential to bring independence and diversity of experience, study and perspective that otherwise does not exist in the world of government schooling. One million Alberta parents, by definition, are going to be more diverse than 30,000 government school personnel. Their thinking is going […]

[Read more →]

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, meaningful involvement of parents in government schools has “not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.”
The handy response to advocates of increased parent involvement in government school decision-making, leadership and governance is that “parents don’t want to be involved”. The truth is that government schooling […]

[Read more →]

In the Canadian province of Alberta, where I live and my children attend government schools, there are about 600,000 K-12 schoolchildren and about 2,000 government schools with a taxpayer budget of about $6 billion. Across the province, in addition to those taxpayer dollars, about a million parents raise about $50 million each year from the […]

[Read more →]

In my observation, the half-life of parent involvement with government schools is about six months. Once your first child is registered in Kindergarten or Grade One, it takes about the first half of the year to understand that the “horror stories” about public education are generally and statistically not going to be true for your […]

[Read more →]

A fundamental flaw of government schooling (maybe THE fundamental flaw) is that there is no formal contract between school and family defining what the whole deal is about regarding EACH SPECIFIC CHILD. As a consequence, children in government schooling are a commodity, not individual assignments. And a neglected commodity at that.
What gets natural gas from […]

[Read more →]

Taxpayers fund about $10,000 per child per year in Canada for schooling.
About $2,000 of that is aimed at delivering mathematics.
Over a 12-year course of learning, that’s about $25,000 in math instruction per child (in case you thought their hockey was expensive…).
There are about 6,000,000 schoolchildren in Canada… about 500,000 in each annual class.
So taxpayers fund […]

[Read more →]

Parent advocates in public education discover early on that given the glacial pace of change in government schooling your advocacy is more likely to benefit your grandchildren than your children. Hopefully not just your great-grandchildren.
With that marathon view, it is incumbent upon agents of change to put their minds to what that schooling might look […]

[Read more →]

News out of British Columbia today is that their provincial teachers union has voted to put an end to standardized testing and the public reporting/ranking of results. Imagine a union of public company executives (hard enough in the first place) voting to put an end to financial audits “because they don’t tell the whole story” […]

[Read more →]

Any school board bigger than 10,000 kids is maybe in the interests of paperclips and pensions, but not pupils or parents.
Economies of scale are not economic for the schooled. Only the schoolers.
Size matters in schooling. But not the way you’d think. Or might be told.
GLO

[Read more →]

You don’t go into a restaurant to help run the place.
You go in to be served.
Same for your children’s schooling.
Parents as “partners” is convenient for the schoolers (particularly when they can just CALL parents partners without actually having to TREAT them like partners… like, by sharing any of the resources with them).
Parents as “partners” is […]

[Read more →]