I’m an inveterate listener to bloggingheads.tv, and during a recent diavlog, Eric Alterman took this swipe at teacher’s unions:

Alterman on schools

and discussed how his child’s school was successful because the West Side (NYC) parents kept on the teachers to make sure they were doing their job.  I rolled my eyes, and listened on to the rest of the show.

Apparently, another comment led to a whole “slapfest” between Alterman and teacher union bloggers in New York. The whole argument starts to spiral-down into some internecine argument about AFT political endorsements.

Now for my 2 cents: I didn’t like his whole tone of “parents” keeping the teacher’s honest/hard working.  Lets turn his argument around, maybe the parent involvement is not keeping teacher on their toes, but helping the teachers by making sure their kids are doing their homework, or even helping them with homework, and by volunteering in the classroom and school? That is often sited as the biggest difference between a school like his, and a school like mine. But I don’t want to leave the argument there because that implies that the problem at my school is in the “parents” which is a shot just as cheap as Mr. Alterman’s. I’d like to instead look at some of the logistical impediments to education that I think can and should be discussed, etc:

1. Afterschool tutoring. There is lots of NCLB money available to afterschool tutoring that goes unspent. Contrary to complaints that schools and districts drag their feet on notifying parents about these services, my school made a significant effort to get out information to parents about tutoring, and got a lukewarm response. This was because parents did not want tutors in their home (for a variety of reasons, I’m sure). For the tutoring at the school site, parents did not want their children staying after school or coming before school because they wanted all their children leaving school at the same time. Most of the families are large and the children are minimally spaced. This means that many families have 3-4 kids in sequential grades all at the same time. Given the violence level of the local neighborhood, I can’t fault parents concerns. The local drivers have little care for pedestrians, and due to recent police sweeps, the dealing and prostitution is starting to move into residential areas and off the local main drag. People RARELY think of these problems when designing and planning programs. It needs to be addressed.

2. Universal Pre-school or Mandatory Kindergarten: Kindergarten is not mandatory in the state of California. In addition, it is still a 1/2 day session, even though the curriculum demands have increased significantly. Who, you ask, would not enroll their child in kindergarten? Well, enough parents to make a difference in a school’s test scores. One problem may be logistics. As I said before, these are large families with students at various grade-levels. If you have a child in a.m. kindergarten, you need to get that child in about 30 minutes before children in other grade-levels. Then, you will need to pick that child up 2.5-3 hours before your other children get out of school. This creates 2 extra trips to the school. If you get your kindergartner in p.m. you just have the trip to school at mid-day, but they will usually get out with their older siblings. From what I’m hearing at my union, the push now is not for universal preschool, but mandatory kindergarten. I think full day kinder will be next.