Confront that School ! Save Your Child

For four and a half years at monthly meetings of the Chicago Teachers’ Union (Local #1, AFT-AFL-CIO) I heard hundreds of delegates (stewards) discuss their school conditions. I chaired union committees and helped write Board/Union contracts, many Articles of which were beneficial to children as well as teachers. I lobbied for education funds.

For ten years I was a teacher-representative on my local school council and for eight years at the district (umbrella group) meetings where parents and teachers from twenty-one schools negotiated with middle-management administrators. In three community groups--Citizens for Better Community Colleges, Save our Little Village Education, and Para Asistencia Latina al Barrio con Respeto Ajeno--I learned that no parent is helpless in resolving school problems.

No problems are yours alone.

A communist once said, "A good mother is one who makes a decent society for her children.... Education is politics."

He was right. Schools preserve civilization. With the middle class shrinking and a small, wealthy intelligensia controlling an ever-increasing undereducated population, how can our country compete with other industrialized nations? How can our culture and democracy survive?

As a teacher, I once complained to my principal about a corridor safety hazard. He said, "A teacher is responsible for what happens in her room. Anyplace else is not your business." I disagreed. Children are the society of the future. They are everyone’s business. And that is why I wrote this book.

Chapter 1

The Ailing Public Schools

Yesterday and Today

When questionable school practices threaten your child’s health, safety, education or state of mind, you have a right and a duty to protest. But if officials at any level ignore your concerns, don’t give up.

Raise hell.

This book shows how to recognize school negligence and abuses, and how to negotiate and win. It shows how other parents organized to solve problems and how you can avoid their mistakes.

America’s schools have been in trouble for years, a fact brought to light long ago by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, by the Committee for Economic Development and by the National Education Association. They based their evaluation on the inequality of resources and staff competence that prevailed from school to school, city to city, state to state.

Nowadays children of other nations outrank even our most academically advanced students. Their school day is an hour longer and their school year has an additional six weeks. American curricula and standards are less demanding, our society’s attitude toward education is relaxed, and our schools are fraught with hidden hazards.

The events in this book occurred in Chicago, but they are examples of school conditions that plague all American cities and even your hometown. Public schools must presume that all children can and should be educated. Non-teaching, political school Boards force them to accept all students regardless of behavior or receptivity. They erroneously assume that all children can and should be motivated to learn the same material in the same way and that they should be pressured to do so. This assumption ignores the fact that in a homogeneous society children are genetically and environmentally diverse.

In most children the left brain (language, math, etc.) dominates. In some, the right brain (creativity, the arts, and intuition) is dominant. Some children are eye-minded, some are ear-minded, and a few are tactile. Yet the armchair educators place all children in the same classroom mold, where they are sometimes humiliated for inability to conform. .

The public schools are blamed for conditions beyond their control. They assume duties that used to be parental responsibilities; clothing, medical and dental care, and nourishment to children who might otherwise subsist on soda pop and chips.

With the deterioration of the American family, traditional parenting that forms attitudes is becoming a lost art. School psychologists and social workers have ever-burgeoning case loads of kids living in deplorable homes, unable to learn or to cope. One parent, sometimes both, may be absent from the home, leaving no one that children wish to please. Their only authority figure--the one who gives encouragement, listens to confidences or instills right from wrong--may be their teacher. But if Johnny chooses to make his classroom a playground instead of doing assignments, his ineffective parents and the limitation of principals’ suspension and expulsion power give school authorities little redress.