The airwaves are bustling and bristling this week about education. Our U.S. school system is making front page news like never before. Sadly, sometimes it takes a crisis to raise awareness.
Yesterday, one of my readers of this blog who has decades of experience in education voiced his opinion about one way to repair the system: parents. Get them interested and engaged, and the system has a far greater chance of turning around. Yes, teachers are important, critically important. Though consider how many hours a child spends with a teacher versus a parent. Consider that parents are responsible for a child’s living conditions, what they eat, where they sleep. Parents are largely responsible for their children’s emotional and mental well-being. Combined, all of these “non-education” factors come to bear in a big way in the classroom. If a child is hungry, sick, or lacks confidence, how can they focus on math, science, and reading? Social programs can only do so much.
My reader’s comment about parents being involved in public education made me consider how involved my own mother was in my education. Sometimes, we didn’t have enough to eat. We were part of the free lunch program for as long as I can remember. We almost lost our house a few times. We had trouble paying bills. For a good portion of my childhood, we didn’t have health insurance. Our childhood had a lot of instability and sadness and fear. But the one constant was my mom. She served on the school board. She went to every parent teacher conference, every sports event, every band concert. More than anything she cared about our education. She didn’t have time to help us with our homework – she always worked 2 – 3 jobs so we could get by. I came to value education and where it could take me in large part because my mother valued it. I wanted to make her proud of me, and I knew my high grades made her proud.
I went to Penn because of my mom. She wouldn’t let me lower my standards of the college I could get into. She wouldn’t let me stay home and go to school. She wanted to me to go away to the very best school I could go to. It was hard. I struggled for my first two years at Penn. I had a hard time adjusting to a place that seemed so out of reach to me. Everyone else around me seemed to have means beyond anything I could ever dream of. I worked several jobs and put myself through school with the help of lots of financial aid. I studied all the time just to catch up. Eventually, I found my bearings, largely because I got involved in theatre, but even more importantly because I’m stubborn and proud. I couldn’t give up and go home. I had to keep trying to live a better life. That’s what my mom wanted, and so that’s what I wanted.
I had good teachers, in public school, at Penn, and later at UVA, where I got my MBA. Those teachers inspired me, pushed me, challenged me to be better than I thought I could be. And with just those teachers, I would have built a decent life. But my mom’s involvement and concern for my education helped me strive for more than decent – it keeps me working for something extraordinary. And as I think of it now, my blog reader was absolutely right – parents have the ability to turn around the whole system just by showing their care and concern for what their kids learn. I’m living proof of their power.
Christa Avampato 