Schools Must Diligently Filter Personal Information

Here is my monthly parenting column in the Home News Tribune

What responsibility does a school have in filtering personal family matters that a child might innocently offer in a public display?

This question occurred to me after reading about one mother’s hurt feelings when her daughter’s publicly displayed essay listed Dad as her role model in life and not Mom. I wondered why the daughter wasn’t approached by her teacher who might have suggested that she warn her mother about the essay which would be posted, and discuss why she picked her dad over her mom. This may have softened the blow.

Rather than trying to hypothesize about where free speech ends and where school censorship begins, I contacted my friend Philip who has been the associate principal of a large elementary school in South Jersey for over twenty years. Right off the bat he declared, “It always comes down to common sense, and unfortunately that’s hard to bottle.”

“Our teachers know that essays, computer postings and year-book entries all have to be read carefully while letting children have free speech. But they do not have the right to gratuitously insult people in a school setting. We will not provide students with a forum to be hurtful.”

When I described the essay that caught my attention Philip responded, “When a student says that her role model is her father, that’s not gratuitously insulting to the mother, even if it is a bit hurtful. Maybe the child wants to be a musician like her dad, and not a biochemist like her mom.”

Philip believes that the school should seek out the offended parent and accept some part of the responsibility together with the student. “I would tell that parent that we didn’t intend the essay to be hurtful. It did not appear blatantly hurtful, but since you have expressed that you are hurt, we are sorry.”

He wants students in his school to know that free speech exists, but the school, as an institution, has standards and will not support hurtful speech. Philip expects his students to be sensitive to that. Philip gave an example of an essay that a child wrote about a teacher who he really liked. “Mr. Smith is a great teacher who explains things thoroughly unlike Mr. Jones, who always leaves me confused.” Philip brought the student to his office and explained, “You need to rethink the way you are complimenting person X and simultaneously hurting person Y, so think of a better way to do it.” Philip correctly refers to these discussions as an educational opportunity which is part of their mission as a school.

Providing another example from his school, Philip described a young boy who, in an essay about family life, went into great detail about his parents’ divorce and how the non-custodial parent just picked up and left town. The child was expressing the hurt that he felt, but it was totally inappropriate to display publicly. The teacher grasped the teaching opportunity and the child was able to redirect the essay without the anger. “The teacher brought the student with his corrected essay, to the Principal of the school who complimented his maturity and sensitivity.”

Philip appreciates when parents preemptively share problems at home (in confidence) with a teacher and administrator, so that educators can be on the lookout for behavioral or academic fluctuations. “If a parent fails to warn the school about family matters, be they emotional or health-related, and the school calls home describing behavioral problems, we have already made errors in the classrooms that may have exacerbated the situation.”

In closing Philip urged, “These children are precious souls. Adults have armor to protect themselves from hurt, not children. Anything we can do to make the child’s environment in the school healthy and positive, we are required to do. If we can avoid a situation because we are sensitized by some extra information, we must do it.” To all of you who are students, have a wonderful and safe summer.

Be Counted columnist Dr. Alan Singer is a Marriage Therapist in Highland Park. Respond to this column via his website www.FamilyThinking.com

College Students’ Healthy Sense of Entitlement – Aren't They Confusing Level of Effort with Quality of Work ?

I believe that unwarranted praise of children is a contributing factor in this entitlement psychology. Here's a welcome back to college post.

Max Roosevelt wrote an excellent piece for the NY Times. He interviewed Prof. Marshall Grossman, who has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers in his English classes at the University of Maryland.

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.” He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

Roosevelt added, “A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.”

Making Kidergarten Less Stressful (huh?)

Stress Week installment 3 of 4
If Discovery Channel presents Shark Week for your entertainment each summer, then we at FamilyThinking.com can present "Stress Week" so that you enjoy a stress-free and fun-filled summer.

Peggy Orenstein recently lamented (in the New York Times magazine) that in the old days, kindergarten was a place to play and not even consider something as ridiculous as homework. She criticizes the multiple choice tests and early-literacy measures that are administered to millions of very young children.

“According to Crisis in the Kindergarten, a report released by the Alliance for Childhood, all that testing is wasted: it neither predicts nor improves young children’s educational outcomes. More disturbing, along with other academic demands, like assigning homework to 5-year-olds, it is crowding out the one thing that truly is vital to their future success: play.”

Orenstein emphasizes, “Play — especially the let’s-pretend, dramatic sort — is how kids develop higher-level thinking, hone their language and social skills, cultivate empathy. It also reduces stress, and that’s a word that should not have to be used in the same sentence as “kindergartner” in the first place.”

And have you heard the acronym KGOY? — Kids Getting Older Younger — it is the marketers’ explanation for why 3-year-olds now play with toys that were initially intended for middle-schoolers.

Seriously folks, would you want your kindergartner doing homework each night?

Upcoming - the Final installment for Stress Week:
Post 4: Stress Gene Found in Infants (we kid you not)

Babies Born in Winter Months Are Less Intelligent?

In a 12/22/08 article in USA Today Rita Rubin described new research that suggests, on average, that winter babies grow up to be less educated, less intelligent, less healthy and lower paid than people born in the spring. Many of the reader comments were from people projecting (and rejecting) this research based on their own lives and those of their children or siblings.

Click here to read the article.

Here are my comments which I posted to the USA Today website:

This is interesting research that reminds me of the family size and intelligence debate. As family size increases, intelligence of children tends to decrease. Researchers found that it is not that more kids means less time and money to educate kids, rather that lower IQ parents tend to have larger families.

Also, can everyone who is angry at this research study please remember that correlation is not causation. You've heard it many times; that's because it's true.
If this same data for birth month are analyzed for day of the week and it shows that Tuesday babies have the highest IQ, would you tell your doctor to schedule a c-section for Tuesday?

And if the data show that the smartest babies were born between 3 and 6am, and your water breaks at 3 pm, do you tell your Ob/Gyn to put on the brakes for 12 hours? Clearly not. It's just some interesting research; not to worry.

Home is the Heart of Learning and Where Education Starts by Dr. Alan Singer

The ETS does some things other than scaring teenagers with those 3 dreaded letters--SAT. In this column, I describe a terrific study that was recently sponsored by the ETS. This column was published in the Home News Tribune on 02/20/08.

Three letters send shivers down the spine of most academically conscientious teenagers — ETS. Or maybe you know the Educational Testing Service by the better-known abbreviation — SAT.
SAT questions "are developed by a prestigious team of world-renowned academic experts, who get them from "Jeopardy!' " according to humor scholar Dave Barry. In fact, Barry says "the original idea behind the SATs, as stated in the ETS's Official Historical Statement of Goals and Purposes, was "to sell a huge quantity of No. 2 pencils that we ordered by mistake.' "

When I came across a recent research study published by ETS, I was gratified to learn that there are products of this company that are not designed to primarily put fear in the hearts of adolescents. And what a terrific piece of research they produced, "The Family: America's Smallest School." In the introduction, the study's authors, Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley, state, "Improving a child's home environment to make it more conducive to learning is critical if we are to improve the educational achievement of the nation's students." Toward reaching this goal, the authors suggest, "We need to develop cooperative partnerships in which families are allies in the efforts of teachers and schools."

I called Richard Coley to chat about the study. He directs the Policy Information Center of the ETS. "This report seems to have struck a chord," Coley said, adding, "ETS has conducted research reports that go back over 20 years."

Here are several types of family and home conditions that research has found to make a difference in children's cognitive development and school achievements:

Parent-pupil ratio: "In selected international comparisons, the U.S. ranks the highest in percentage of single-parent households, and Japan ranks the lowest." The number of U.S. children who live without two parents has declined to 68 percent (from 77 percent in 1980). An astonishing 44 percent of births to women under age 30 are out of wedlock. "Being raised by a single parent in itself steepens the odds considerably," explains Michael Winerip (The New York Times, December 9, 2007). "On average," suggests Winerip, "the child with a single parent is 2.5 times more likely to repeat a grade." Children need as many contact hours as possible with their parents. I have urged it before in this column, and it bears repeating. Children need quantity time with parents, not just quality time.

Family finances: "Income is an important factor in a family's ability to fund the tangible and intangible elements that contribute to making the home an educationally supportive environment," explain the authors of the study. "Nationally, 19 percent of children live in poverty, and 11 percent of all households are food-insecure. One-third of children live in families in which no parent has full-time year-round employment."

Literacy development: Income has relevance to this category as well. The study's authors found, "By age 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in a working-class family, and about 35 million more words than children in welfare families." Can we agree that talk is not cheap? The spoken word is vital to each child's education. And the written word? There is an income disparity in this category as well. "Sixty-two percent of high socio-economic status (SES) kindergartners are read to every day by their parents, compared to 36 percent of the kindergartners in the lowest socio-economic status group."

The most interesting finding of the study, in my opinion, is the ability to predict two-thirds of the large differences among states in the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade reading scores. Four family-home factors stand out, and — to some degree — each is likely to be related to the others: single-parent families, parents reading to young children every day, hours spent watching television (35% of eighth-graders watch four or more hours of television on an average weekday) and the frequency of school absences (one in five students misses three or more days of school each month). Therefore, if you want to help your children academically, keep your marriage strong, read to/with your children frequently, discourage excessive "screen time" and monitor your children's attendance at school carefully.

And one more interesting tidbit that the study's authors found: Make sure your child has a desk or table where he/she can study. Eighty-six percent of U.S. eighth-graders do, which is just above the international average. In our phone conversation, Coley stressed, "Not all kids have a quiet place to study, and they certainly need it."

"Be Counted" columnist Dr. Alan Singer is a marriage therapist in Highland Park. Respond to this column at Dr. Singer's blog http://www.familythinking.com/ or e-mail DrAlanSinger@aol.com "Be Counted" columnists are members of the public.