If we start fining parents for no-showing teacher meetings, it's easy to see how we will need to expand the school bureaucracy.
A school official would have to be brought in to hear appeals and a low-income fund would have to be set up to pay fines for poor parents. Then we would surely need a gubernatorial task force on parental involvement.
We keep setting up government programs to remove responsibility from people and then wonder why they can't handle responsibility. I get the idea of wanting to start a discussion about parental involvement, but wouldn't that effort be much easier if we didn't go to such great lengths to subsidize irresponsibility?
Reversing course on some of our disastrous healthcare policies would give us a great start away from the ever-increasing need for government solutions to government-created problems. That's what we really need to be talking about.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
This is not how we get personal responsibility
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2 comments:
I understand the sentiment, but this is a pretty stupid idea.
If parents are unable to attend parent-teacher conferences for legitimate reasons, e.g., lack of transportation, conflicting work schedules, then why not make funds available to pay teachers to go to the home of the parent(s), and have the parent-teacher there?
The Fletcher (R) administration made it difficult for parents to sign up for SCHIP by only operating offices during normal working hours, no allowing parents to sign up for SCHIP at schools, doctors' offices and hospital. In addition, the Fletcher administration required that parents had to sign up monthly in order to maintain SCHIP coverage.
Then Fletcher chortled about how much his administration had cut government spending, reduced government services extolling the alleged virtues of "smaller" government.
Parent-teacher conferences should be arranged at times and places that are convenient for parents to attend, even providing transportation to parents if necessary.
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