Daily Dose of Common Sense

I don’t agree with everything Bill Maher says, but in this particular case, I think he nails it.

Maher just wrote a piece on Huffington Post called, New Rule: Let’s Not Fire the Teachers When Students Don’t Learn–Let’s Fire the Parents. It’s a long title, but a great read.

A struggling high school in Rhode Island fired every single teacher recently. Certainly there might be bad teachers in that group, but ALL of the teachers? That sounds reactionary and drastic. And, more importantly, it’s not putting a big chunk of blame where it should be placed: the parents.

From Maher’s piece:

According to all the studies, it doesn’t matter what teachers do. Although everyone appreciates foreplay. What matters is what parents do. The number one predictor of a child’s academic success is parental involvement. It doesn’t even matter if your kid goes to private or public school. So save the twenty grand a year and treat yourself to a nice vacation away from the little bastards.

Teachers make a pittance of what they should and most of them work incredibly hard to make our kids better people. Yet, we continue to set them up as the fall guys. A speech pathologist friend of mine said, “There are many more factors to consider as to why these students are failing: learning disabilities, parent responsibilities of making sure homework is done and kids are on time and in school EVERY day, a stable home environment etc.” In other words, it’s not always the teacher’s fault.

So, give teachers a hand and spend some time helping your kids learn.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.