Personal Stories of Parents

Listen to these personal stories from real parents, describing their experiences:


• A mother tells of her experiences with her child's school in "The Value of Asking Questions." Excerpt: "... Seeing all [the beautiful classrooms and wonderful] things, I couldn't believe my child's good fortune at being able to attend such a wonderful public school. I'd been told, 'Feel free to ask questions.' So, I did. 'Why don't the children use lined paper to print the alphabet?' I asked. The teacher's explanation had something to do with 'small motor skills' ... and 'developmental learning.' The jargon threw me off balance and made me ashamed to admit my ignorance. Like so many other parents, I just smiled and nodded my head. That was the beginning of my asking questions of the system." (Click to read how the story continues.)
  
  
• Hear a mother of three describing her personal journey in understanding what was happening to her local school -- and to her children -- in "My Conversion". She was a true believer in her district: "I had helped found a parent advocacy group aimed at passing a local tax referendum to build badly needed new schools. ... I gave speeches, did talk shows, drafted information pieces, helped coordinate a cadre of wonderful parent volunteers around a petition drive and the fundraising for a special election." But slowly, she realized that in academics the school "wasn't delivering on its promises. Reading was labored and slow; my children 'hated to read' - despite having been read to daily for most of their lives. Math facts were insecure, despite heavy doses of manipulatives ... As a classroom volunteer, I saw that much of the general content delivery was embedded in student presentations of group projects, and that the teacher rarely intervened to separate the 'dross from the gold', even the correct from the incorrect. ... By the end of elementary, we acknowledged to ourselves that something had gone badly wrong."
  
  
• Leah Vukmir was a working mom in a Milwaukee suburb, who was troubled by her five-year-old daughter's school projects. In this article, "When Schools Ignore Parents" from Investor's Business Daily, we read more: "She dug deeper. She found her school ... wasn't using proven teaching methods. Concerned, she began to attend school board meetings and ask for research on teaching methods. That's when the trouble started. Like many parents, Vukmir's simple interest in her child's education soon became unwelcome."
  
  
• One of our own, west suburban Dad and activist Dave Ziffer, writes about his experiences with his local school system, experiences that transformed the way he perceived education today: "When I approached my district authorities eight years ago to discuss the enormous problems that I preceived in my two daughters' educations, I quickly discovered that my district's concept of education and my concept of education had nothing to do with each other."
  
  
• Hear the story of this Rhode Island father in Dad Puzzled By Approach to Math, English:
  "Osiris Harrell is a child of the '60s, but he never considered himself a rebel until his children began coming home from school empty-handed. Where, he wondered, were their textbooks? Why weren't his children learning how to diagram a sentence? And why weren't they memorizing their times tables? 'At first, I thought it was a mistake,' the 44-year-old father of four said Friday. 'Then, I started volunteering in the school. I noticed that the children weren't bringing home any regular homework.' No longer, he said, were teachers correcting his children's writing and sending it home so Harrell could review it. And when the report cards arrived, he discovered that letter grades had been replaced by a 1-4 numbering system. Harrell said, 'It's all so confusing.'"

• Here is a personal story from a child: A fifth grader in Glen Ellyn writes a moving story in a letter to her local newspaper, which starts, "I'm having fun in fifth grade in District 41."
  
  
• Nancy Granstrom, a mom in Wheeling, dissects the classes in her daughter's school, subject by subject, in "A Parent Criticizes Middle School Theory." Hear how the "latest thinking" in language arts, writing, poetry, science, math, social studies, critical thinking, higher thinking skills and cooperative learning affected this local family.
  
  
• The New York Times reported on one community: "For Joe Hoover, the epiphany came two years ago when he took his daughter, Kathryn, then in sixth grade, to lunch at McDonald's and realized she could not compute the correct change for their meal from a $20 bill. For Claudia Lioy, it was seeing her daughter, Iris, then in third grade, plodding through a multiplication problem by counting 23 groups of four apples. When Mrs. Lioy pleaded with Iris's teacher simply to show the class a times table, the teacher replied, 'But that's drill-and-kill.' For Ben Lee, it was having his teenage daughter, Olivia, trying to answer probability problems by a method called 'guess and check' -- until he pulled out his own 10th-grade math book to instruct her about the appropriate formula. ... By last spring, these parents had discovered one another and their common exasperation ... Bill, a software developer at Kodak, drew up a petition asking the Penfield schools to offer pupils the option of taking traditional math. Nearly 700 residents signed it. Last June, the Board of Education turned down the request."

• Laurie Rogers in Spokane recounts her experiences:
  Your Child's Education Is Up to YouÊ, March 20, 2009. "Over the last 27 months, I've come to see public education as an immoveable force. Administrators are fond of talking about 'accountability,' but it doesn't mean much, not in any real sense. Today's administrators know that all they have to do is produce upward ticks in pretend numbers. The only real accountability comes when unhappy parents leave the school district. ...ÊMy husband and I have therefore taken control of our daughter's education. We now know it isn't enough to just be involved in the school or the classroom; we need to know what she's learning. We also must have some idea of what she should be learning. When the school curriculum or learning environment fails her, we must fill in critical gaps. This isn't a game we're playing. Her future is at stake. Six short years from now, it won't matter whether we helped out with field trips or cut paper for the class every Friday. What will matter is the knowledge she takes with her to college."

• Natalie Kramer in Maryland writes, "People often ask me: 'Who are you to criticize the educational system? What qualifications do you have to render verdicts on what works in classrooms and what doesn't?' I don't have any qualifications. I am just a mother who has seen three different educational systems at work." In her article, "Reinventing the wheel of education," Natalie tells about her discoveries about her children's school experiences.
  
  
• Finally, unlike the other stories above, the boys in the following story are fictional. But the situation that Dr. Hempenstall describes is played out in schools nationwide everyday. If you're wondering why your child isn't thriving in school, read this and ask yourself, "Is my child's teacher more like Amanda or Monica?"
  Two Contrasting Classrooms: Tale of Two Teachers by Dr. Kerry Hempenstall, Department of Psychology and Disability Studies, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.