The teacher who wrote this piece for the Washington Post -- Making the Grade Isn't About Race. It's About Parents -- makes a ton of great points, but I think he unwittingly turned the kids into the victims he chastises others for doing. Yes, it is harder for kids who don't have a father at home -- or like I did, a father who was a drunk who beat my mother for years -- to come to school prepared. But that alone can't explain the "achievement gap." It is a lot more complicated than that.
There are school systems which take these kinds of kids and eliminate the "achievement gap" and turn them into solid college students. The now-famous KIPP Program comes to mind. If this teacher is serious about education -- and he sounds like he is -- he can't allow himself to fall back on that "it's the parents fault the kids aren't learning mantra" that too many educators use. If you can't help these kids, then maybe you need to leave the classroom and allow someone else to do the job, or allow school choice so they can get into a different environment. When his students started using the excuse, "we have bad grades because we have no daddies," he should have challenged them and asked some basis questions, beginning with this: Why aren't you studying harder and longer? That's a question I'll be asking next month to a set of boys in a similar situation in Horry County Schools. Many of them don't have their fathers around, including some fathers who are in prison. I won't allow them to use that as an excuse -- I didn't -- and neither will I allow the school system to use it as one either. Besides that, the school system has little control over the behavior of their students' parents. Why are they spending so much time saying things are bad because the parents aren't doing their part? Parents need to do more. We all get that. But when they don't, that should not be used as a crutch by the school system to explain away poor performance.
