Our Views: Education Goes Beyond Schools
By OPINION PAGE STAFF
Published: Aug 8, 2006
As another school year begins in the Baton Rouge area this week, perhaps it is useful to remember the comparison of a child’s education to a three-legged stool.
As the analogy goes, the legs of the stool represent the school, the parent and child. If any of the legs proves weak or absent, the three-legged stool falls. It is the same, of course, for the three-way relationship among parents, children and schools.
Unfortunately, when it comes to education, we tend to focus on only one leg of the stool, the school system.
What of the other legs of the stool — children, and the parents or caregivers whom these children see when they get home?
In an ideal world, there also would be a way to hold parents accountable for their involvement — or lack of involvement — in a child’s education.
That’s a problematic proposition, of course, and as Charlotte Placide, superintendent of East Baton Rouge Parish public schools, has pointed out, a public school system must educate all children, regardless of the homes from which they come. Placide has challenged principals and educators within her system to improve academic performance in parish schools, and not use a child’s socioeconomic background as an excuse for failure.
We agree schools must do the best they can to teach children, even when those children arrive at school with numerous social and emotional challenges.
But as a new study conducted by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber reminds us, what goes on beyond the classroom can be as important — indeed, more important — than what goes on when a child is in school.
The chamber looked at school systems in Ascension, East Baton Rouge, East Feliciana, Iberville, Livingston, Pointe Coupee, St. Helena, West Baton Rouge and West Feliciana parishes.
It found that school performance and child poverty are closely related.
When poverty was factored out of the equation, differences in achievement scores for local school districts nearly evaporated.
Poverty can stem from any number of sources, some more challenging than others.
When we see first-generation immigrants of very modest means come to the Baton Rouge area and produce class valedictorians, we know that limited income alone is not an insurmountable obstacle for students. It is notable that many of these immigrant academic success stories started in homes with strong, two-parent families.
But too often, in Baton Rouge and in the state at large, the word “poverty” is shorthand for a more troublesome phenomena — the single mother, frequently unskilled and unemployed or underemployed, who is trying to raise children without a father anywhere in the picture.
Such circumstances often arise from teen pregnancy, a large problem in Louisiana. Children who live in such single-parent households are at far greater risk of academic failure and are more likely to be chronically unemployed and commit crimes.
We must do all we can, with innovative programs and the resources that we have, to help at-risk youngsters succeed in spite of their circumstances.
Until we can break the cycle of single parents raising youngsters who also grow up to be single parents, the three-legged school of childhood education is going to be weaker than it should.
Story originally published in The Advocate
