Underexposed Phil Valentine complains in today's Tennessean that low-income parents are to blame when their children aren't prepared for school. He also believes pre-K programs are relieving parents of their responsibilities and that expansion of those programs is wrong.
It would do him well to spend six months as a low-income parent to understand the challenges they face, why government help is needed and, yes, how parents can fulfill the responsibility they have for helping their children get a good education.
Perhaps in Valentine's world families have the option of one parent, who already has a good education, greeting a child after school and working with them on homework assignments. That parent may also have helped prepare the child to go to school by exposing him or her to a wealth of experiences.
In reality, poor households are often one parent households and that parent must work more than one job in order to provide for the family. The luxury of taking time to work with children just doesn't exist and the money to expose them to new experiences just isn't there.
Valentine says in his world, poor parents don't value an education, but he ignores the reality of recent efforts to block proposed school rezoning because it would have resegregated schools. Research shows that mixing low-income and moderate or upper income students helps the low-income students do better without affecting the test scores of more affluent students. Low-income parents knew their children would be the losers in redistricting and they fought the battle hard enough to convince the school district to reconsider its decision.
In criticizing pre-K, Valentine quotes the National Bureau of Economic Research, a neoconservative-funded organization of questionable findings, saying that children do better with pre-K, but become problematic in later grades. In reality, many other studies done by more reliable institutions discredit those facts.
Programs like pre-K can provide quality experiences and trained educators that can work with parents in the schools to better prepare children. But for those parents to become more involved, they need time and additional resources.
If Valentine wants low-income parents to be more involved in their children's education, he should be advocating for better paying jobs, better transportation, better housing, safer streets and universal health care -- things that would help poor families gain the time needed to spend with their children and the money that would allow them to make that choice.
If we all lived in Phil Valentine's world, perhaps everything would be like it is at 211 Pine St., the home of Ward and June Cleaver.
In reality, the world is a much more complex place that requires solutions that go beyond the unfounded prejudices and fears that Valentine offers up.
- Jim Grinstead
The whole premise of the Valentine argument is something akin to blaming a rape victim for dressing provocatively in public.
For 35 years, multiple tools have been used to drive down the income of the lower third of families, especially the working poor.
I grew up in such a household. My father often said, "Poor folks have poor ways." Yes, parents in poor households fail to give their kids many of the essentials they need. But it is not usually not for a lack of wanting to or a lack of trying.
The Reagan Republicans have gamed the system to work against the bottom third. Now they want to kick them for being poor.
They will never change.
Will we?
Posted by: Catfish | November 26, 2007 at 09:23 AM