Ab_Normal

cheetah: I just finished Paranoid Parenting, by Frank Furedi, a social worker who maintains that parents have been disenfranchised by conflicting parenting advice, and disempowered by "experts" who say that they don't know how to properly raise their children.

His take is that most parents would do a good job raising their children, as humans have done for the last n-thousand years, and intervention should be limited to those families which demonstrate problems. However, parents internalize the message from the media that they don't know how to raise their children, and give up. He seems to have a special animus toward one professional who advocates parental licensing.

Personally, I have been known to advocate reproductive licensing, especially after a run in with somebody's undisciplined little monsters at the grocery store. I think Furedi might have a point, but I'm certainly not entirely converted to his POV.

mods: that's not an official Amazon partner link, I don't know how to manage that.

Loren Pechtel

I've often been villified for suggesting that blacks aren't going to solve their problems until they wake up and admit they are their cultural problems and not the fault of whitie.

Now, it's possible to have a biased math problem but not likely. (Example I read about: Various bits of data about a baseball hit. Is it a home run? The next day in class one foreign student is puzzled. The teacher goes over the whole thing, the student understands it all but is still puzzled. Teacher "Then what's wrong?". Student: "What's a home run?")

Also, if they would quit harping on race and actuallly study the issue it's no big deal to figure out if the big tests are biased *IF* you have the information as to the race (and any other characteristic you wish to test for bias) of the test taker available on every test. Stick those questions on the test and crunch the numbers.

For every question and every group you wish to test you plot test score vs the percent that got the question right. You'll get a line from 0,0 to 1,1. For an easy question the line will be bowed upwards, for a hard one it will be bowed down. If you get notably different curves for different test groups you've got a bad question. It's a lot of data to crunch but no big deal to do.

ohwilleke

Parental involvement is a poorly defined thing.

I certainly didn't have any significant parental involvement in the "school" itself. My parents weren't on the PTA. Nothing of consequence ever happened in the annual parent-teacher conferences. And, I don't think driving you kid home from detention once or twice counts as parental involvement. I wasn't nagged to do homework. I support there may have been one or two times I was called to the principal's office and parents were involved then. But, it isn't as if they came into school and did stuff, or helped with homework, or anything like that.

On the other hand, my parents were certainly involved in raising me. We went to museums, traveled to various places in the U.S., read stories, had dinner table discussions, etc.

I agree that parents have to play a part in raising their children and that this has an impact on how the kids do (although teachers overstate how much of an impact this has, so long as the kids are not abused or neglected, I think). But, I'm not sure that involvement in the school itself is really all that important.

cheetah

I very much disagree with this point. Your own story points out that time spent with children (talking, traveling, learning) can be valuable, regardless of the involvement in school. So, why would you turn around and say parents need not be involved at all, so long as there is no abuse or neglect? I dont know of any studies, and if you do, please bring them forward, but with a family full of teachers and educators, I hear more often that I need to how the level of success of the child is directly, positively correlated with involvement, closeness and participation of the parent(s) in that child's life. I think it doesn't necessarily have to be the biological parent. Perhaps there is an aunt or another caretaker, but I think there is a lot of importance in, as a child, interacting with adults, learning and socializing with them and understanding more of the ways the world works from a more experienced view. Children are very influenced by the adults around them. Perhaps the key here is the type of influence children are getting from adults, and how they can get more positive influence (for example, how well do programs like Big Brothers and Big Sisters work?)

Vorkosigan

We spend a lot of time hashing this out here in Taiwan, and exactly the same results obtain: where parents have time, money, love and money, the kids do better. Period. But inequality is built into the system here that doesn't exist in the states, by virtue of the centralized educational system. Being here has made me, if anything, an even bigger fan of local control.

Vorkosigan

Aerion

I won't villify you. I agree with you. I truly believe blacks are their own worst enemy right now. If blacks would get off the racial thing and start accepting responsibility for themselves and their lives, they would soon discover that there really is very little racism in this country.

Blaming lack of opportunity on poverty or racism is merely brushing the real problems under the rug and forcing racial quotas by giving preferencial treatment is like telling the world that one race is less capable and NEEDS help.