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February 2009
Community votes on Sunday alcohol sales
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The president of the Georgia Association of Convenience Stores, argues for Senate Bill 16, offering Georgia communities an oppportunity to allow Sunday alcohol sales.
The chairman of the Georgia Christian Alliance argues that if the Georgia Legislature passes this bill, it will cost lives, burden taxpayers and tear apart families.
What do you think of the bill that would allow communities to vote on Sunday alcohol sales?
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Public needs schools that listen, not vouchers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Before my twins entered first grade, I sent a note to the principal asking if one of them could have the same teacher who taught my older children in first grade and was dearly loved by them. Close to retirement, this teacher would be one of the few that my teens and my younger kids would ever share in common.
With only four first-grade classes, the odds were already good that one of my pair would end up in her class. Neither did. And when I inquired, the principal suggested it was because I asked.
The class was not full. In fact, the principal added students to the roster even after school started. Nor had there been a long list of requests, she said. And, yes, the principal acknowledged, either of the twins would have been a fine fit for the class. But she just didn’t believe in honoring parent requests even when it was possible and painless to do so.
That uncompromising posture — shared by many school leaders across the state — has helped lay the groundwork for the voucher bill introduced last week in the state Legislature that would allow all parents to use tax dollars to send their kids to private schools.
Let me be clear. I think the voucher bill is counterproductive legislation that will only help its sponsor’s political career. However, I also think the bill represents an overdue wake-up call for public schools that they must be more responsive to parents.
Schools can’t afford to brush off parents as irrelevant, irritating and uninformed. They can’t ask parents to hold bake sales, chaperone class trips and organize field days and then deny them a meaningful voice in their children’s education.
I wouldn’t pull my kids out of public school because they didn’t get the teacher I wanted — I’m aware of the many pressures on principals, and can recall only one other time in 16 years that I even met with a principal about one of my children. But I left the principal’s office that day feeling that she valued absolute control more than parental goodwill, and that she preferred parents be seen and not heard. For the rest of her tenure, I kept my distance and my tongue.
During legislative hearings on vouchers, many parents testified to far greater disappointments with their local public schools. I recognize that for some parents, public school will never be good enough; they will always find reasons why their children belong in private schools. But there are also parents who have been pushed out of public schools by repeated indifference to their concerns or rigid adherence to policy and procedure.
At the hearings, parents described public schools that wouldn’t accelerate bright kids who were way ahead of their peers, often because of the administrative headaches involved. Conversely, parents complained about schools that were slow to provide their struggling student with individualized help. Parents told lawmakers that they found private schools more responsive and more flexible in such instances.
In battling the voucher bill, public education advocates can and should point to research raising doubts about the effectiveness of vouchers. But the most forceful defense against vouchers is a receptive, creative and innovative public school system that doesn’t treat parents as uninvited guests, that doesn’t wield policy as a shield and where children are more than faces in the crowd.
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Should parents run interference for students?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For children to succeed in school, we’re told that parental involvement is key. But I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve pushed that theme too far.
I’m not talking about the fourth-grader who shows up at the science fair with a rotating solar system powered by a blender motor, the product of a parent’s all-nighter in the garage. Nor am I worried much about the bleary-eyed mom or dad with a glue gun who produces an exquisite miniature of the White House built out of sugar cubes.
Such heavy-handed involvement typically fades by middle school and disappears altogether by high school, when most kids refuse to even acknowledge they have parents.
Increasingly, though, parents are running interference for their children well beyond senior year.
College professors say it’s not unusual to receive an irate e-mail from parents complaining about their child’s grade or the class workload. Even graduate schools are seeing more prospective students arrive on campus with their parents, something almost unheard of 20 years ago.
I’ve heard those stories for a few years now, but I have to admit being stunned by a story in the Wall Street Journal last week about parents buying summer career internships for their college kids. According to the story, parents fretful that the dour economy will limit summer internships are hiring professional placement firms to get their students into internships, most of which are unpaid. Others pay marketing companies to promote their children through direct-mail campaigns.
Capitalizing on these anxious parents, savvy charities ask companies to donate internships and then auction them to parents, one of whom paid $12,000 for a weeklong internship at a music-production company, according to the story.
On one hand, you want to scoff at these helicopter parents’ expensive exertions on behalf of their grown children, who eventually are going to have to fend for themselves in life.
But then that thought worms into your brain: “Is that what it takes?”
It may seem folly to spend thousands to buy a 22-year-old an unpaid internship with a law firm, but many parents invest that much and more to assure their children an educational leg-up in other ways. And they do because their efforts pay off later.
I know several kids who were awarded one of those pinnacle scholarships that pay them to go to college and send them all over the world. The students often share driven parents who heaped every educational advantage on their offspring, from math and science camp at Johns Hopkins in elementary school to Duke’s creative writing seminars in high school.
Indeed, parents told the Wall Street Journal that paying for internships is no different than paying for all the other opportunities they provided their children along the way, such as foreign-exchange programs in France and teen-leadership conventions in Washington.
They contend they’re only buying their children entry — the kids still must prove themselves once they get in the door.
But there’s value in facing closed doors now and then, and then finding a way to get in anyway. When parents refuse to dash to school with their second-grader’s forgotten book report, don’t kids learn to put their work in their backpack next time? When parents don’t get out the glue gun to complete the science project that their 11-year-old delayed until the last minute, doesn’t the child learn about time management? When college students don’t get that first internship, don’t they try harder for the second?
In trying to give our children an edge all the time, we may be denying them important life skills — resiliency and resourcefulness.
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