CNN Special Featuring FIRST, Sunday 5/15

[Dmentor]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Schools can fix parenting issues. Keep in mind, they're teaching the next parents right now.

I'd love to know how to do this systematically. Both of my parents were teachers so I have had a pretty direct perspective on what the school can and can't fix. What I observed was that for my parents to "fix" parenting issues they pretty much had to become the student's parent by proxy. Since my parent's house was always open to strangers, we "adopted' plenty of students whose lives were clearly changed. I think that this had little to do with our school (other than providing the mechanism for them to meet my parents) and a lot to do with my parents. And as successful as they were at radically changing student's lives, they were only able to reach a small percentage of students. More often than not, students would under perform, fail, and ultimately drop out only to become parents of the next generation and then repeat the cycle. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic but it is happening all across the country in large numbers.