(GLO — March 2010 — Schoolers like to alternatively deny that theirs is a “business”, while employing at certain convenience business analogies or terminology. Generally referring to a school as a “factory” is unappreciated, but, apparently, “unit” is OK. Try doing that with each child unit… Schooling, in my opinion, is very much a business. It is also a “backward business”… focussed not on what comes out but what goes in. And focussed on the “units of improvement” that it largely serves them to improve, in the order that it serves, as well. I believe that improving the “parental units”… even just a tiny bit… will generate material improvements in the “child units”. But since there’s no money in it for the “school units” — and, in fact, less if they share in such fashion — the “schooling business” is unlikely to undertake that kind of improvement on its own.)
The superintendent of our city’s public school board published an article recently titled “The School as the Unit for Improvement in Education”. It is part of a series that began by examining the classroom or teacher as the “unit of improvement” and will follow with examining the school jurisdiction or board.
In case it’s not got around to… as it so seldom is in schooling literature… I thought I might suggest the parent as a unit of improvement in education as something also worth examining… one day… every day… and perhaps granted some meaningful consideration and some meaningful share of schooling resources. Out of every $10,000 per year that on average goes from government treasuries to fund a child’s year in government schools, about 50 cents of that finds its way to anything directly related to improving that child’s parent as an educator “unit”. A great deal more than two twenty-five-cent-pieces goes to improving and sustaining the other units in that child’s schooling.
It’s hard to accomplish much improvement with 50 pennies per day, much less 50 pennies per year.
Multiply that by ten (a good place to start), and with 500 pennies per parent per year schooling might go a considerable way to sharing many of its hard-earned and expensively-purchased “secrets” of how children learn best. Much of its wisdoms and much of its skills and lessons, which it mostly keeps to itself because it mostly can’t find sufficient reason to find sufficient resources to meaningfully share. Not with parents, at least.
Multiply by one hundred and with 5000 pennies (which sounds kinda meaningful… but is only $50 out of $10,000) per parent per year schooling might go a considerable way to sharing not only the “secrets” and the wisdoms but also the workload and the evolution. It might begin to see a glimmer of genuine partnership in co-educating children along with their families, and a thin slice of the potential for each child’s learning when parents and family are genuinely “tapped” as reservoirs of support and reserves of energy in regard to how children learn… if only parents were actually trained to be educators themselves.
Multiply by one thousand and with 50,000 pennies… well, let’s not even go there..
The truly disappointing part of the truly miniscule part of government schooling that is truly shared with parents in any truly useful fashion (useful for parents and for children… and not just useful to schools or their administration), is that the world of schooling and the industry of education has a great deal of wisdom and learning and skills and practices to share with families, and by extension through them and their volunteering and coaching and caregiving, to share with communities and with society. But by not getting that learning and that wisdom outside school walls and into the hearts and minds of parents and community volunteers, it does not get put to work in the community.
By making parents the unit of improvement in government schooling, government schooling would be making an investment in the community and an investment in the world their students live… and helping to make the world-at-large a place where children learn better, learn more safely, and learn more broadly than they otherwise might. Teach every parent… to be better teachers themselves… and the job of teaching in schools will become easier and better and more productive. By making that investment in parents and families, schooling will see returns far in excess of that investment for its own business. Continue to fail to make that investment, in any meaningful fashion, and no amount of improvement in education’s other “units” will likely amount to enough to sustain government schooling as an acceptable vehicle for education for future generations, which future generations will be increasingly hard-pressed to accept the services of an industry that struggles to meet society’s increasing demands for schooling.
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
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