Monthly Archives: October 2012

Video: Where does the workforce begin?

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Smart Beginnings Virginia has produced a short video on the “workforce pipeline” that highlights the tremendous influence of the earliest years in promoting learning and preventing educational failure.

httpv://youtu.be/dhUDYBjTYkQ

Videos like these should prompt robust questions:

  1. What role do families, businesses, schools  and other institutions play in early childhood?
  2. Is the “workforce pipeline” an authentic, human way to speak about nurturing young children? What does this say to children about their identity and purpose?

Politics and Parenting

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On Saturday, Nicholas Kristof became the next op-ed thought leader (following David Brooks’ example) to engage Paul Tough’s new book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character in his article Cuddle Your Kid.

He does it well by calling on our political leaders and candidates to recognize that nation-building hinges on family-building.

Yet the cycle [of poverty] can be broken, and the implication is that the most cost-effective way to address poverty isn’t necessarily housing vouchers or welfare initiatives or prison-building. Rather, it may be early childhood education and parenting programs.

It is not only the most cost effective way to address poverty; it is also the most pivotal way. If all other social institutions are restored, and the family remains in ruins, a community cannot thrive, because the family is the lynchpin of character formation, skill development, and cultural transmission.

But this isn’t just about poverty. It is about virtue. It matters no less what goes on in the homes of affluent children in early childhood. Indeed, it matters more because these children will grow to have even more cultural power to do good or harm to their neighbors. Indeed, they can be the ones who pioneer creative, merciful ways to strengthen and support shattered families.

I don’t hear anyone talking about that: neither of the presidential candidates; nor Paul Tough; nor Messrs Brooks and Kristof. Now is the time for that meaningful conversation to begin.

Zero percent: Home Life and Thriving Schools

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In Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed, he recounts a conversation with Elizabeth Dozier, the principal of Christian Fenger High School in Chicago.

When we spoke . . . Dozier said her thinking about schools had been changed by her time at Fenger. “I used to always think that if a school wasn’t performing, that it was strictly because there was a bad principal, or there were bad teachers,” she explained. “But the reality is that at Fenger, we’re a neighborhood school, so we’re just a reflection of the community. And you can’t expect to solve the problems of a school without taking into account what’s happening in the community.” (p5)

That is a wise insight. If you listen to the public dialogue about the education crisis and the achievement gap, the tacit assumption underneath much of it is that the school is the exclusive locus of education (and therefore the problem to be solved).

It is not. The school is vitally important, but it is primarily a reflection of the community. And therefore any attempt to address the needs of the school must address the needs of the community.

Tough and Dozier continued their discussion of the adversities that children in the community face.

A quarter of the female students were either pregnant or already teenage mothers, [Dozier] said. And when I asked her to estimate how many of her students lived with both biological parents, a quizzical look came over her face. “I can’t think of one,” she replied. (ibid)

Zero percent. Statistically that might be inaccurate. Despite the fact that Dozier couldn’t think of a single student, surely there was at least one in her school. How many children live not only with both biological parents, but with both biological parents who are married and were married at the time he or she was born? That might just be a statistical zero at Fenger.

What’s Going On in the Community
This is the elephant in the room that no one seems to have the courage to address publicly (unless it is finger wagging). What is going on in this community, and in virtually every community of endemic poverty in the United States is the devastation of the family. Since the family is the primary locus of cultural transmission and character formation, the devastation of the family is the demolition of the community, and the culture.

Any serious, courageous attempt to combat cyclical poverty must not only acknowledge this, but ardently seek to undo it. That means having the courage to say emphatically, “This is not the way things ought to be,” and “Because this is not the way things ought to be, we are willing to walk with those dying in it and call their children to lifelong, chaste marital faithfulness.”

The Other Zero Percent
I know almost no one who has the courage and integrity to boldly make both of those statements and live them out. It is that hard. It is like committing to live with the maimed in a mine field while slowly and painstakingly marking, disarming, and removing the land mines. That is the measure of the virtue required to serve and renew a shattered community.