Parents are the key to good education

This post was published in the Wilson Times on Sept. 21, 2019.

Tuesday’s headline in the Wilson Times proclaimed, “Parents are key to student success.” A proper response to this news might be, “well, duh!”

Recent studies have shown that it is not unskilled teachers, incapable students or poor school administration that cause failures in public schools. It’s the home environment that makes the difference between student success and student failure.

America has been trying at least since the 1983 “A Nation At Risk” report to tinker with curriculum, accountability, teacher training and motivation, teaching techniques and school governance in hopes of improving public education. But the problems cited by the Reagan administration report continue to plague public schools in America.

Recent studies have found that schools whose students come from homes with incomes in the top quartile of wealth have higher success scores than schools whose students come primarily from low-income or below-poverty-level homes. You can change teachers, change principals, change curriculum, change school spending and still find the same educational results based on income.

Students from homes with well-educated parents will do better than students with less-educated, lower-income parents. Beyond simple income, there are reasons for the disparity between high-achieving schools and low-scoring schools. Teachers, the focus of much of the educational reforms over the past quarter century, have about six hours a day to alter the lives of students. Their home environments have those students for the remaining 18 hours a day.

The low income of some families often comes with additional educational handicaps: uneducated or poorly educated parents, violence in the home, lack of reading resources (each class of kindergartners might include students who have never been read to), overwhelmed, under-employed parents and unstable family relations.

I’m glad to see Wilson County Schools is paying attention to students’ home environments. The school system is offering a Parents Academy to teach parents how to help their children be more successful in school. Some tips are quite simple: Be in school, be on time, set a routine for school days and ensure children follow the routine, make school a priority.

Unlike most possessions, children do not come with instruction manuals, and some parents have had little guidance or negative influences in how to care for children and help them grow into successful adults. A parent might have had a bad school experience and dropped out. Such a parent might transfer her distaste for education to her children, perpetuating an unfortunate experience to another generation.

A Parents Academy cannot compensate for poverty, a lack of reading materials in the home, absent fathers or other difficulties. The academy can teach parents how to improve their children’s behavior and help them be more successful in school. It can change attitudes, ambitions, goals and values. Children need to experience unconditional love and a stable home. A school system cannot provide that, but schools can show parents how to help their children succeed.

The rest is up to the parents — and the student.

Old newspaper clippings provide reminders

This post was first published in the Wilson Times July 27, 2019.

My wife and I have been going through boxes and throwing away things that we once thought we’d like to keep forever, or at least a year. Among these boxes are several boxes I brought home from my career as a newspaper editor, going back to 1975. In 34 years as a newspaper editor, I wrote something like 1,700 columns and close to 9,000 editorials.

These are not exact numbers, just approximations of the number of editions the newspapers I edited had published and my usual writing schedule. I’m sure I took some days off (but I often wrote editorials and columns in advance so as not to burden someone else with having to do my work while I was away).

My wife suggested that I should save the columns and other items that dealt with our children and our home life, so that our children might recall their younger days. Two of our children were born while I worked for newspapers. Our youngest child was 29, the oldest 37, when my newspaper career ended. My wife thought compiling these personal memories in some printed form, such as a book, would be an excellent gift to our children.

So I’ve been pulling musty clippings of columns from dusty file folders and deciding whether my topics were anything our children would care about. The jury is still out on that question. Whether anyone else ever reads these articles, my tedious exercise in separating wheat from chaff has been eye-opening to me.

I discovered I wrote a good number of columns of a personal matter, such as the surprising joy of seeing our children learn to read, learn to drive a car (scary!), welcoming children into “adult” conversations, seeing children move out of the house and become independent (sort of), and so on. I tried to write columns that were not strictly personal but would find an audience with people who could identify with my experiences. Comments from friends and strangers indicate that some of those columns resonated with other families.

In my review process, I discovered that I often used my columns to explain newspaper issues to our readers. As editor, I was the final arbiter of what news went into the paper. I wrote about how we made news decisions (a daily meeting of editors discussed the importance of our available news articles). I wrote about anonymous callers and letter writers who would criticize or threaten me and the newspaper, often because they didn’t understand what we were trying to do, and sometimes because they just had their facts flat wrong.

Good example: An angry woman called to say I was a racist because we didn’t run an appropriate photo of the new Miss America because she was black. I told her I was sure no racial discrimination was involved in Miss America coverage, but she insisted that we ran a large photo of white Miss America on the front page in color but ran a small, black and white photo of the black Miss America a year later. I told her I honestly couldn’t remember how we ran the previous year’s photo but I would check. I flipped through the bound volume of newspapers and found out the caller had it all wrong. We had run a two-column photo of the black Miss America, the same size as the white Miss America got. Both photos were in color.

She wouldn’t give me her name or phone number, so I couldn’t prove to her that she was wrong. I had to settle for writing a polite column, which she probably didn’t read. But I got it off my chest.

When the newspaper changed its policy and began endorsing political candidates, I wrote many columns explaining the decision and reminding readers that an endorsement is just one entity’s opinion. Other opinions are valid and can be published in the paper as guest columns or letters to the editor.

I’ve also gone through about 30 years of calendars I had kept as editor and as a nonprofit manager. They brought back a few memories, but mostly they proved that I couldn’t read my own scribbling done while hurriedly writing down an event or appointment. No point in keeping any of those calendars. At first, I was disappointed that I had made no notation when my parents died, my siblings died, my children married, and other life events occurred.

Then I realized these were calendars — appointment reminders — not diaries. No need to keep any old calendars.

Dogs are not children, but there are similarities

I used to cringe every time a couple referred to their dogs as "our children." I had small children at the time, and I knew the difference.

When our children grew older and moved out of the house, we got a dog. I didn't have anything against dogs. I grew up with dogs, which were never allowed in the house. Dogs were my playmates on the 26 acres of rural land where my parents had moved to in 1940. I loved our dogs, but they never went inside and probably never had a bath or a flea treatment. Only once can I recall taking a dog to the vet, and that was a stray Chihuahua whose hair was falling out.

My relationship with dogs was not hands-off. I wrestled with dogs, ran with dogs, cuddled with dogs and loved those dogs. But even then, I knew they were not my children — or my parents' children (they already had five bipedal children). 

Nevertheless, the past three nights, without a child in the house, I felt like I was caring for infants again. Each night, I was awakened between midnight and 1 a.m. to the sound of a bark or a scratching on the hardwood floor accompanied by peals of thunder or the roar of heavy rain. Those sounds drove our old rescue dog (of indeterminate age) into panting anxiety as he searched for the source of the noise, sought safety from it or tried to protect us from it — who knows what he was thinking?

What worried me more than his anxiety was his "solution" to the problem — he would urinate on the dining room floor, apparently in the belief that would make the annoyance stop, and someone would have to clean up the pungent puddle.

So for three mornings in a a row, I got up from a comfortable bed, went downstairs (the old dog can no longer climb the stairs), opened the back door so he could urinate in a better place, let him back in and spent an hour or two trying to calm him down so he'd go back to sleep and, hence, I could go back to sleep.

Sometime during those nightly sojourns it occurred to me that I had been through that sort of thing before. It was 40 or more years ago, but the memories are sharp. An infant's cry or a toddler's frightened shriek would arouse us from our own sleep, and we'd spend an hour or so calming down our child and getting him/her back to sleep so that we could sleep too. My wife was usually more attuned to babies' crying sounds, so she was usually the "first responder" in these frequent incidents.

My recent care-giving for our dog reminded me of those long-ago nights. In 40 years, we have graduated from a distraught, crying baby to a distraught, anxious dog. I could pick up our babies and cuddle them, whispering softly to calm them, but all I can do with the dog is pet him and recommend good spots to go to sleep. The last two nights, I have grabbed a book I had been reading, turned on a light and sat on the stairs within reach of the dog's ears and read for as long as it took for him to calm down and close his eyes.

Although my recent experiences have been similar to those sleepless nights many years ago, I'm still not going to call our dog our "child." Like a child, a dog can be expensive, but the child is exponentially more expensive. And, I would add, more rewarding, loving, stimulating, caring, satisfying.

So I'm not my dog's "daddy," as some pet owners would say, but he does get me out of bed in the middle of the night, just as our children did.

For 26 years, a family gathers together

Our family has just returned from an annual trip to Charleston, S.C., trips we have been making for 26 years. The tradition began when my brother moved to Charleston and invited us — our parents and siblings and their families — to celebrate Christmas and the completion of repairs on his historic house, which had been clobbered by Hurricane Hugo.

The first trip was a long haul down Interstate 95, a grand dinner at our brother's renovated house, and a long return trip back home. All of us were enchanted by Charleston, though many of its most magnificent homes, churches and vistas were screened by scaffolding as the years-long process of recovery from Hugo went forward. Despite the long road trips, all of us were eager to continue the new tradition, which evolved into an annual late-December weekend (not just one day) in charming Charleston with dinner at a private club.

The cast has changed. Our own children, who were 12, 15 and 19 that first time, now have children of their own, ages 8 to 12. Similarly, my siblings' children have grown up, married, divorced, and produced children of their own. The annual dinner now requires seating for 25 or more.

Charleston has its charms, but the primary attraction of this December weekend lies in the fact that we see some of these nieces and nephews and their children only in Charleston. During a Friday night conversation with a half dozen of our entourage, I had to remind myself that I was talking to my eldest niece and not to her mother, who died six years ago. The voice, expressions and laugh were all the same, and I felt both a longing to see my sister-in-law again and the comfort that her personality and spirit remains.

Our parents died in 2006 after a decade of decline. My sister-in-law died in 2011, and her husband died unexpectedly a year later. Then my younger sister died shortly after a cancer diagnosis in 2013. With each death, the Charleston weekend had been more difficult but also more important. We know how ephemeral our lives are and how uncertain next year might be.

Soon after returning from Charleston on Sunday, my wife happened across a digital photo album of pictures taken during our 2010 Charleston weekend. Seeing my brother, his wife and my sister enjoying the family again made me gasp. The photos of our grandchildren as toddlers and preschoolers evoked almost as much emotion. But I was so glad to see the pictures of so many smiling faces and conversations.

This is our family, and neither death nor distance can change that.

Some parents miss the higher calling

In this post on her blog, my wife reminisces about her baptism and about the little baptism service book that she has treasured for years. The stilted language derived from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer seems quaint and dated now, but the verities are undeniable: Parents' greatest responsibility is to nurture their children, not only physically but spiritually. "Given to God" is the title of this baptismal service, affirming that parents have a duty to present their child to God in humble thanks for the miraculous gift God has presented to them.

Many of the problems parents encounter today could be avoided if they fully appreciated their responsibility to guide their children spiritually as well as physically, academically, culturally and emotionally. There is no more solemn responsibility, no greater task, no greater honor than the privilege of raising a child miraculously formed by God's plan. Too many parents see their parental responsibility as getting out of the way so that a child can "find himself" or "express himself" in his own unique way. What the church of the era when "Given to God" was written knew was that children are not born perfect and in danger of being corrupted by the world. They are, instead, born as blank slates, or (more contemporarily) as unprogrammed computers. Children need discipline and social skills that usually do not come naturally. They also need spiritual guidance, which won't come to them if their parents follow the plan of one young mother I overheard. She was going to avoid church until her son was 12 or 15 and then let him decide whether he was interested in attending church. I'm betting he's never darkened a church doorway.

We all feel the death of a child

We were among scores, maybe hundreds, even thousands, who shed tears for a child we had never met, had never even heard of just days before. Such is the impact of the loss of a child.

We learned from our son of the illness of a classmate's young daughter. She was hospitalized with bacterial meningitis, and the prognosis was dire. By the time we heard of it, she was already in what he called "miracle territory." That's what doctors said it would take for her to survive. Despite fervent prayers from friends, relatives and strangers, the little patient did not survive. We received the heart-wrenching news this morning.

Before that curtain fell, we had read a forwarded e-mail from the mother, filled with gratitude for all the prayers, concerns and best wishes for "our precious girl." I read it, utterly astounded that this young mother could put together those words so eloquently, despite the burden on her heart.

Every parent's greatest fear is the death of a child. Fortunately, few parents have to endure such a tragedy. When this happens, all parents feel the horror and the gratitude of that dagger to the heart that barely misses. There but for the grace of God ...

The "sweet girl" whose parents now face a "world forever changed" was just weeks older than our son's younger child, who had himself faced a frightening bout with pneumonia when only a month old that left him hospitalized for a week. Modern medicine allowed him to come home and grow into a healthy toddler. This new tragedy slaps us with the reality of how close we had come to a similar fate. Nearly 30 years ago, a colleague's firstborn son was hospitalized with meningitis, and the young parents stared blankly at the shattering of their hopes and dreams. That baby survived and has grown to adulthood, but fate could have twisted another way.

Years ago, my brother and I sought out and found an old family cemetery, which had been untended for decades and was overgrown with trees and weeds. Walking among the stones, looking for names we knew from family histories, I happened upon a small grave marked by a stone larger than the grave space. On the top of the moss-laden stone were carved two words: "OUR BABY." At a time, in the early 1900s, when couples produced broods of eight, 10, 12 children, this ancestor of mine grieved for the one who was lost. Having a half-dozen other children to love could not fill the vacuum left by the one who died far too early. Even in a house filled with children, the loss of one imposes a world "forever changed."

The death of a child is so powerful, you don't even have to know the child or the parents to be knocked askew.

A quiver full of them

The grandchildren gather for a photo, Sept. 26, 2009

"[Children] are indeed a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the [children] of one's youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them."

Psalm 127

By all means, hold parents responsible

The Wilson Police Department wants to start holding parents responsible for the behaviors of their children. What a revolutionary thought! The Wilson Daily Times gave prominent play to comments by Officer Reggie Smith that police would find the parents of children roaming the streets in the wee hours and hold the parents responsible.

Unfortunately, we've heard these kinds of promises before, and the problem never seems to get any better. Former Police Chief Willie Williams made "community policing," police visibility and enforcement of minor offenses key parts of his success in reducing crime statistics. Like Officer Smith, Williams had been appalled by the sight of small children wandering the streets at night. Most Wilson residents, it seems, have seen this phenomenon, either in their own neighborhoods or along major thoroughfares. Children as young a preschool can be seen late at night wandering around without any adult in sight. Police Chief Harry Tyson made a public appeal last year for parental assistance in caring for and disciplining children.

Smith says parents will be held responsible. Good! They should be held responsible. But Smith was vague in his speech, according the the Daily Times, about just what the police would do. Let me suggest this: Don't take the children home and talk to the parents; charge the parents with child neglect. If letting a 7-year-old wander the streets at midnight isn't child neglect, I don't know what is.

The problem with holding parents responsible is that parents who let their children wander at night are, by definition, irresponsible. In fact, they may be unfit to be parents, and they are unlikely to respect the police department or social workers who are looking out for the best interests of their children. Many of these parents are single mothers who began birthing babies before they could drive. Many have chips on their shoulders and negative attitudes toward law enforcement, courts, schools and society in general. These are the parents who terrorize teachers who dare to discipline their misbehaving children and who beg judges not to send their babies to prison.

By all means, hold parents responsible for their children. Hold them responsible for setting these children off on their one-way path from neglect to gangs to prison.

Parents are the key to a civilized society, and we are, sadly, paying the price for policies and attitudes that make parenting nothing more than a biological act.