It Takes a Village to Raise a Child

Something is going wrong with how we raise and educate young people, and the signs are hard to miss. Plenty of adults look at the public school system and feel something close to despair. Juvenile detention centers and county jails take in more students every year. For a lot of families, public schools have quietly turned into little more than free daycare. And the achievement gap separating African-American, Latino, and white children keeps widening in plain view.

The numbers aren't all bleak. The Digest of Education Statistics reports that the high school dropout rate across all races fell by 20.5% between 1960 and 2012 (US Department of Commerce, 2013). Progress, yes. But the gap between white students and minority students hasn't closed with it. So the question stands: what happened to public education, and why are so many kids failing?

There are plenty of explanations, and most people reach for the same few. Kids don't want an education. They aren't motivated. They don't grasp why schooling matters in the first place. Fair enough. The better question is why any of that is true.

I've said a fair amount about social media before, and I'll say it again here. Social media runs the show now, and television isn't far behind. Reality programming like Mob Wives and The Real Housewives of Atlanta pours into the lives of teenagers. What a teenage girl watches is grown women brawling over men and other nonsense. The messages reality TV sends are mostly corrosive, and neither it nor social media ever bothers to tell a kid that an education is worth having.

Blaming the screen alone is too easy, though. Parents belong in this conversation, and so do the people who work inside the schools. Teaching is a profession worth respecting. The trouble is how few teachers genuinely care whether a child walks away with a real education, and the worsening teacher shortage across the country only deepens the problem. States have tried to patch the gap with alternative certification routes, but those programs seldom turn out teachers who are ready for the job, and the teachers who come through them often end up disenchanted with the work.

The outcome shows up on the tests. Standardized exams keep stamping children as below average in math and reading, and the response has been to teach straight to the test, drilling kids on how to pass the mandatory exams rather than how to think. Add to that a basic disconnect: a lot of teachers simply can't relate to the students in front of them. College doesn't hand out street smarts.

Districts around the country have built after-school programs to answer this, and most of them fall flat. Parents don't back them, and the staff running them aren't equipped. Still, I don't think the next generation is lost. There are things that actually work.

Start with what your community already has. Nearly every city holds at least one community center, literacy program, or nonprofit. School districts ought to lean on those, literacy programs especially, since they zero in on reading and writing. A district could set up a referral pipeline, sending students with weak reading and writing skills straight into one. Before you commit, read through the program's curriculum and check its track record. Then build an interdisciplinary team around it: the literacy program's director, the superintendent, a principal, a school counselor, plus a language arts teacher and a math teacher. If special-needs students are part of the mix, the special education coordinator has to be at the table too.

If a district is struggling academically but already runs school-based programs, the move is to rebuild those rather than start from scratch. After-school offerings fit here. Put underachieving students into mandatory tutoring, but get parent consent first, every time. Administrators should comb through student records to find exactly who is failing, then sit down with those students' teachers to dig into why. Some kids learn by seeing, some by doing, some both ways. More often than people admit, the student isn't the problem; the teaching method is. That's where a curriculum coordinator earns their keep, helping staff write sharper lesson plans that still meet federal and state rules. Rework the plan and the grades can follow.

Counselors are the piece most parents never understand. In a lot of districts, the counselor is the person you send a kid to when they act out, nothing more. But children absorb whatever surrounds them and carry it through the school doors. Poor grades often trace back to a child's environment, and the two causes I see most are bad nutrition and an unstable home. Some of what a counselor encounters, abuse among it, is beyond what a school counselor should be handling alone. When that happens, bring in licensed professionals from outside or reach out to a local community counseling center. Whatever route you take, keep the parents in it. Fixing this takes more than the school system on its own.

- Heather Browning, MBA, BA

References: National Center for Education Statistics. Percentage of High School Dropouts Among Persons 16-24. (2013). Digest of Education Statistics. Retrieved March 21, 2015.