No issue has more preoccupied our political and cultural debates than the condition of the American family. From welfare and gun control to taxes and the Internet, every discussion of public policy eventually seems to turn to the relationship between parents and children. This is especially the case when the subject is education.
As conservatives see it, the existing public-school system has actually exacerbated many of the ills afflicting our families. American students, they point out, have never before spent so much of their lives in school, and—thanks to the insatiably self-aggrandizing tendencies of the liberal state—never before have the public schools reached so deeply into domains once reserved to parents, churches, and neighborhoods. Today, teachers and school administrators busy themselves with everything from sex education and social services to drug counseling and values “clarification.” At the same time, the public schools have been swept by a thousand trendy pedagogical feds and theories. In the eyes of conservatives, these developments have robbed the family of much of its traditional authority while doing less than nothing to mitigate the problems of American children. Today those children are behaving worse and learning less than ever before.
Since the mid-1980’s, there has also been a conservative response to these dismal trends: a counter-movement that marches under the banner of school choice. At its boldest, in cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, and recently in the state of Florida, school choice has meant vouchers to help low-income families send their children to private schools. More modestly, it has meant new options within the public-school system, from charter schools (many of them founded by parents) to schemes of open enrollment under which students may attend any school in their district or, sometimes, their state.
The core conviction behind these varied strategies is that parents should make more of the important decisions about their children’s education—and that the state should make fewer of them. Indeed, the movement for school choice can be said to hinge on the conviction that putting parents in charge is the surest, perhaps the only, way to raise successful kids, shore up our weakened families, and cure our ailing education system. For not only do parents have their children’s best interests at heart—more than any government official or paid professional ever could—but the decisions they make on their children’s behalf can be counted on to be wise and conscientious.
But is this so?
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This very question has been raised in the context of today’s education debate—by, as it happens, fretful defenders of our current public-school system. Alarmed at the spread of choice programs, spokesmen for teachers’ unions and others have suggested that the low-income and minority parents whose children are the primary beneficiaries of such programs tend to lack the necessary background or motivation to make sound education decisions, and will end up basing their choice of school not on academic excellence or discipline but on factors like sports teams or proximity to home.
It is too early in the voucher experiment to answer such charges definitively. But what we do know is that every voucher program to date has drawn an overwhelming response from parents determined to improve their children’s prospects. To take one notable instance, the Children’s Scholarship Fund—the ambitious, privately-funded voucher program recently launched by the philanthropists Theodore J. Forstmann and John T. Walton—received more than a million low-income applications. In Baltimore alone, over 40 percent of eligible families sought this aid. It seems that, given a chance, many disadvantaged parents will grab any opportunity for their children to do better, knowing full well that doing better will require them to work hard, acquire habits of study and discipline, and subject themselves to rigorous standards.
But put aside the special case of school choice. What of the role played in general by today’s parents—rich and poor, blue- and white-collar, of every race—in shaping their children’s attitudes toward education and, by extension, society? Here, even though hard statistical evidence is scarce, every informed observer knows there is reason to worry. Although many parents continue to work with great determination to ensure that their children develop into adults of sound character, an appallingly large number are falling down on the job. The problem is not usually gross negligence but rather a kind of moral indifference, and its consequences are no less visible in our better schools than in our more troubled ones.
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Consider, to begin with, the steady erosion of the very idea of academic merit. Professional educators have long tried to banish competition and rankings from the schools. Once, parents used to resist this trend, but now many have enthusiastically joined in. They insist that schools make their children appear outstanding—or at least on a par with their classmates—whether they are or not.
Pressure of this sort can start early. In Annapolis, Maryland, the parents of one five-year-old recently filed suit against his expensive private school. Their aim: to force the school to promote their son to first grade rather than giving him another year of kindergarten as his teachers recommended. Many elementary schools have also been hit by their own variety of the grade inflation that is the curse of contemporary colleges and high schools. A fifth-grade teacher in Rhode Island reports that parents these days “won’t accept anything less than an A or a B.”
Parental resistance to academic distinctions is even more ferocious at the secondary level. This year, Lake City High School in Coeur d’Alène, Idaho, designated no fewer than ten valedictorians for its graduating class of 265 students. As the lone valedictorian of the class of 1992 philosophized, “more parents and students are happy for the recognition, . . . and administrators avoid having to take any kind of stand that might upset families in town with children contending for the award.” At expensive private schools, parents increasingly feel angry at the school if their children do not bring home respectable grades; after all, as the chief counselor at one upscale institution outside Philadelphia put it, they are “paying much too much money to have their kids in the bottom half of the class.” Such attitudes no doubt help to explain why more than half of American secondary schools have already stopped ranking their graduates by grade-point average or other gauges of academic attainment.
Standardized tests, too, have been opposed by parents who seemingly care more about the appearance than the reality of academic success. In Michigan, some parents have kept their college-bound children home from the state’s tough new proficiency exam lest their scores prove disappointing. Some psychologists report getting calls from parents who actually want their high-school children to be classified as “learning disabled”—a designation that will win them extra time for completing the SAT and other tests.
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If many parents are willing to resort to open deception when it comes to accurate assessments of their children’s academic prowess, they are also far less inclined than they once were to insist that their children behave properly.
Disputes over basic questions of decorum and conduct are now routine in American schools. For every parent who enthusiastically endorses school uniforms, there are many more who object to even the most rudimentary dress code, like the families in a posh New York suburb who protested collectively when a local middle school tried to ban tank tops. Simple orderliness has also become a matter of contention. According to one veteran school-bus driver from Buffalo, New York, a child on his route had the full backing of his father in rebuffing the driver’s efforts to make him “stay seated and keep his voice down”; this is hardly an atypical example. Even outright displays of violence are not enough to persuade some parents that their youngsters would benefit from disciplinary action. After suspending a third-grade boy for attacking a female classmate, an elementary-school principal in New Hampshire was surprised to receive a visit from the child’s indignant mother and father. “Boys just express their anger physically,” they informed him.
In sum, whether the transgression is of the academic variety—one father of a plagiarizing high-school senior, after intervening unsuccessfully with the teacher, contacted several school officials to get lighter treatment for his son—or touches on physical misbehavior, the trend is unmistakable. Where once schools and parents generally joined forces to help a child understand how he erred, endure the penalty, and conform to educational and social norms, today parents go to great lengths, from lying to litigation and political pressure, to keep their child from suffering the consequences of his own actions. “If I had a problem with a teacher,” a New Jersey parent recently recalled in a focus group, “the first thing my mother said was, ‘What did you do?’ Now the teacher is always wrong.”
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As teachers themselves see it, the problems of the classroom—including, according to a recent survey, students who are late and unprepared, who are disruptive, who fail to do homework, or who try to get by with as little work as possible—have their roots in children’s home lives. Overwhelming majorities of teachers complain that parents are not doing their part: not only do they refuse to hold their offspring accountable for their performance at school, they also fail “to set limits and create structure at home” or to control the amount of time their children spend with television and video games.
Such complaints must be taken with a grain of salt: teachers are not eager to blame themselves for the problems in their classrooms. But there is no doubt that parents can be counted on less and less to reinforce whatever efforts are in fact being made by the schools. They take minimal interest in their children’s studies, fail to meet with teachers, and do not participate in school events. As a teacher in Cleveland lamented, “You send notices home, there’s no response. You ask parents to come to conferences, they don’t come. You send homework home, and you can see that parents aren’t paying attention to it.”
One reason for this general pattern of neglect is self-absorbed and/or workaholic adults. Occupied for long hours at the office, at the health club, or perhaps at “day-trading” on their laptop computers, many parents leave the supervision of their children to others. “We have to shoo [the children] home at six sometimes,” says a New York City middle-school director quoted by Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal. “They don’t want to go home. No one’s there.”
Typically, such parents try to compensate for their many absences by indulging their children, thus making matters even worse. These are the parents who let their children watch television while ostensibly doing homework, or skip school when there is something else they would rather do (perhaps even faking an excuse-to-the-teacher on their behalf). Purchasing the beer for underage youngsters’ weekend parties is also hardly unknown among today’s parents.
More conscientious mothers and fathers sometimes suffer from a different problem: they are stymied by the task of teaching responsibility. Heirs or alumni of the 1960’s counterculture, they tend to be ambivalent about the exercise of authority, fearful of upsetting their children or of quashing their self-expression, eager at all costs to appear “supportive.” When faced with unsavory friends, or evidence of drugs or alcohol, they are reluctant to intervene, for did not they, too, “experiment” in their youth? This style of “passive parenting,” as Hymowitz calls it, comprises equal parts of incompetence, feel-good psychology, and the remnants of 60’s ideology. The combination is deadly.
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Whatever form it takes, today’s pattern of parental abdication helps explain why the mission of our schools has expanded so radically in recent years. With more and more children arriving in the classroom in obvious need of a moral compass, teachers, counselors, and administrators have willy-nilly taken on more and more nonacademic duties, reaching into every corner of their students’ lives. As one veteran Virginia teacher puts it, “Most schools do more parenting than could have been imagined a few decades ago.”
The trouble, of course, is exactly what conservatives have pinpointed: schools are no good at this sort of thing, and when they attempt it, they are apt to resort to politically-correct fads of dubious merit, from AIDS prevention to training in self-esteem. Worse, as parents begin to think it is the school’s job to see that their children have the right values, they become even more disengaged, prompting demands for still more action by the public-school system and playing into the hands both of an overreaching education bureaucracy and of interest groups keen to inflict their favored causes on malleable children.
The path out of this maze is far from clear. Certainly, given the experience of the last 30 years, the last thing we should want is to provide an excuse for the state to resume or expand its parental ministrations to our schoolchildren. Focusing on the institutions themselves, as conservatives and alarmed parents have done, is obviously a good idea. There is already some evidence that voucher programs, charter schools, and home-schooling foster a greater sense of parental involvement and civic engagement. Entrusting some extra-academic services to faith-based organizations might also relieve the schools of some of their burden and help teachers—at least those teachers so disposed—to concentrate on things that are within their control, like basic academic skills and fundamental knowledge.
All such efforts are to be encouraged, and deserve widespread emulation. But we also need to be realistic: the problem I have sketched is a matter by now of entrenched cultural assumptions and routine adult behavior. As such, it cannot be easily or speedily addressed by changes in institutional policy alone. Francis Fukuyama has lately suggested that our society is on the verge of a large cultural shift, away from the destructive habits and attitudes of what he calls the Great Disruption and toward a broadly-based re-assertion of more traditional norms. If so, it will not come a moment too soon. But until that blessed day arrives, and works its transforming power in the minds and hearts of American parents, we have, alas, no good reason to hope that their children will become much better educated or much better behaved than they are right now—and plenty of reason to fear that many of them will be worse.
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