Not More but Different

It took me nearly 15 hours and a night's sleep to consolidate my outrage at a desultory discussion on "new initiatives" (how I hate that neologism) with a school system. The end of the discussion - and clearly the objective of the school committeemen in charge - was to identify the "top five" priorities of those attending, as if this meant any more than the bottom five of the next group attending, and to illustrate how they all - or almost all, this was a savvy group - cost more money. They never reflected on how several alternatives might have saved money if they'd been re-configured, nor on how several actually displaced programs that were actively failing children, as observed by their parents.

When parents suggested that foreign languages begin in first grade, for one particularly insulting example, no one observed that the system is rapidly becoming 60% non-English speaking, with remarkable community (although certainly not school) resources for Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian French. No one - including myself, but not in the future - jumped at the opportunity to offer courses to parents, and thereby secure their help in offering bilingual speech courses to children.

While it is absolutely certain that not all people can teach, it is also just as certain that they do - particularly if they are parents. The question, therefore, is not "if they can teach," but "how can they teach better" their own and other children or adults. That is a very worthy charge for a school system to offer the larger community, since they are not - legally, constitutionally, or even organizationally - an exclusive province of children.

It is merely that we let them retreat to that safe, and often, much too often, unsuccessful refuge.