I missed the first episode where problems with education was discussed. But I don't really have to watch Oprah to understand the problems with our schools. They are plentiful and farspread from the teacher's unions that keep poor teachers, to the politics that drive out new teachers with potential.
(I am watching part two of this episide, and just 10 minutes in I am distressed. I feel like the solutions about to be offered are still band-aids. The first guest, a star teacher in Harlem requested 1 extra hour a day... an hour of what? More crap? Ugh!. ) She presents her own Supermen who she thinks can effect change, and they are calling for mothers, fathers, teachers, adminstrators to join them... they don't realize that so many of us have... by homeschooling.
I watched the Govenor of NJ talk about a mother who said that a school lottery would be the difference between her child going to college or going to jail. It really gets the heart strings. What really makes me sad is that she doesn't know that she can affect the child's destiny herself. Does she feel so insufficient as a parent that a SCHOOL LOTTERY determines her child's fate? Where are her responsibilities as a parent? Where is her strenght as a parent?
Mark Zuckeberg is giving 100 million dollars to Newark NJ schools. This is lovely... for Newark. Hopefully it will help them set a model that other schools will follow.
In the meantime, we must make do what we can to effect change for education on a national level now! The best way to stop a system or service that is not working it to pull out of it. I realize I am being blasphemous here but if you were in a restaurant, could you eat the salad and then complain that it was bad? NO. You have to push away the plate and say NO. Thank-you.... try again. This is what I am saying as an educator and as a parent.
Oprah's site mentions 38 ways to get involved in the classroom, and most of them are very valid. In fact, I will do several of them myself, in 3 years, when I have graduated my own children from homeschooling, because in the short term, no amount of parent involvment is going to make enough change to benefit the children that were put on this earth in my charge.
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