Linda Seebach, a Rocky Mountain News editorial writer, brought this one to my attention. Her article is titled Report: Grad programs for school leaders appalling.

She refers to Arthur Levine's report, "Educating School Leaders," from the Education Schools Project (www.edschools.org).

Levine, president of Teachers College, Columbia University, describes graduate programs for school leaders - principals and superintendents - as being in "a race to the bottom." Competing for students who primarily want a credential so they can qualify for bigger salaries but want it to cost as little as possible in money or effort, universities lower their admission standards, weaken their degree requirements and course standards, and rely more and more on low-cost adjuncts to teach courses that have little or nothing to do with what school leaders need to know.

I decided to read the report for myself. It is quite eye-opening what the educational "establishment"–the very people who want to ensure that homeschoolers are "credentialed"–require of themselves.

Among the findings in Levine's report:

• "The nation’s 1,206 schools, colleges, and departments of education [may be found in] 57 percent of all four-year colleges and universities, . . . award one out of every 12 bachelor’s diplomas; a quarter of all master’s degrees; and 16 percent of all doctorates." (5) Yet

• Few programs provide a coherent and rigorous curriculum specifically designed to give principals and superintendents the preparation they need. Rather, most seem intent on helping students meet the minimum certification requirements with the least amount of effort, using the fewest university resources. Indeed,
• "Collectively, educational administration programs are the weakest of all the programs at the nation’s education schools" (13).
• "The majority of programs range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country’s leading universities. . . . Their curricula are disconnected from the needs of leaders and their schools. Their admission standards are among the lowest in American graduate schools. Their professoriate is ill equipped to educate school leaders. Their programs pay insufficient attention to clinical education and mentorship by successful practitioners. The degrees they award are inappropriate to the needs of today’s schools and school leaders. Their research is detached from practice. And their programs receive insufficient resources." (23)

How bad is the situation, really?

Levine is ruthless:

Masters I and weaker research-intensive universities are pushing to award doctoral degrees in educational administration. The goal is to increase institutional stature by joining the doctoral granting university club. The field of educational administration was chosen because, as we were told repeatedly, it is the easiest area in which to win state approval. Too often these new programs have turned out to be little more than graduate credit dispensers. They award the equivalent of green stamps, which can be traded in for raises and promotions, to teachers who have no intention of becoming administrators. These programs have also been responsible for conferring master’s degrees on students who demonstrate anything but mastery. They have awarded doctorates that are doctoral in name only. And they have enrolled principals and superintendents in courses of study that are not relevant to their jobs. (24)

Uh, yes!

But it gets worse.

Levine continues:

To attract a student body less interested in obtaining an education than in accumulating credits, a growing number of education schools are lowering admission standards, watering down programs, and offering quickie degrees. This can only be described as “a race to the bottom,” a competition among school leadership programs to produce more degrees faster, easier, and more cheaply. . . .

[S]tates and school districts as well as universities are fueling this race downward. Today, all 50 states and 96 percent of public school districts award salary increases for teachers who earn advanced degrees and credits beyond the master’s. The effect of this incentive system is to create an army of unmotivated students seeking to acquire credits in the easiest ways possible. They are more interested in finding speedy and undemanding programs than in pursuing relevant and challenging courses of study.

As for universities, they push school leadership programs downward either by underfunding them or treating them as “cash cows”—diverting revenues they generate to other parts of the campus. A cash cow program is pressured to keep enrollments high and reduce costs in order to bolster these transfer payments. This encourages programs to set low admission standards in order to hit enrollment targets; admit more students than the faculty can reasonably educate; hire lower cost part-time faculty rather than an adequate complement of full-time professors; and mount low cost, high volume, off-campus programs.

In the end, the combination of school system incentives and university funding practices serves as a barrier to improvement. In fact, it spurs the race to the bottom. (24-25)

Levine illustrates his charges by telling the stories of "two competing education schools, one highly respected nationally, the other well regarded regionally. The names of the schools and some insignificant details of their stories have been changed to mask the schools’ identities."

Some of the nuggets from these stories:

At the nationally recognized university . . .

• One administrator is quoted as saying, “We have admitted some people with GRE [Graduate Records Exam] scores just above what you get for filling out the form.”
• A faculty member says, “I almost never share journal articles with master’s students. They don’t know how to read them because they don’t take research methods courses. It is not built into the expectations of the state.”

Meanwhile, the regional school, with an off-campus program housed across the street from a similar off-campus program directed by the nationally-recognized university, has reduced its standards in almost every imaginable fashion in order to compete for the dollars that come from students who are motivated by salary aggrandizement rather than the desire to learn.

When the regional university came to believe that it was losing students to the nationally-recognized university, "[i]ts 36-credit on-campus master’s program was pared to 30 hours. Faculty claim that this was done to trim fat from the curriculum, but the university provost acknowledges increasing pressure from students to 'speed up programs.' " (26-27)

More findings:

• Applicants for educational administration programs have some of the lowest standardized test score in the entire range of education fields, let alone in academia as a whole. Elementary and secondary level teaching applicants to graduate schools outscore the educational administration applicants in all sections of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).
• Ed admin applicants score 46 points below average in the verbal and 81 points below average in the quantitative (math) portion of the GRE! (Levine is quick to qualify this, however: "Since only the stronger and more selective educational administration programs require the GRE, the data may, in fact, overstate the academic profile of educational administration students." (31)) –For your information, the GRE math and verbal scores range from 200, at absolute bottom, to 800, tops. According to a chart Levine provides (p. 32 in his report), the national average verbal score on the GRE from July 1, 2000 to June 30, 2003 was 475; educational admin applicants average 429. Only social work applicants fared worse on average: their score was 428. In math, the national average was 602. Educational admin applicants averaged 521. Social work, public administration and nursing candidates where the only other groups with lower average scores: 464, 510 and 519, respectively.
• Levine made a comment about "selective" programs. Just how "selective" are these schools?
  

  A dean from the Midwest proudly stated that her leadership program was becoming more selective. While the overall admit rate was still about 95 percent, she said, the program had recently decided that 20 to 30 percent of students should be admitted conditionally, pending the students’ first year performance. In other words, the decision to acknowledge that many students are underqualified is an indicator of rising quality. (32-33)

I could go on. The entire report is both fascinating and disturbing.

The key point I want to make, however, is this: When the education establishment can't (or won't) police its own, they should not be permitted to lord it over others of us–the homeschooling community–who believe we have found a better way.

The second point, as a taxpayer: As Linda Seebach says in her article,

School districts pay more to people with advanced degrees, even if the degrees are worthless, so people go and earn them. They don't want to spend a lot of time jumping through pointless hoops, so they choose the easiest and cheapest programs they can find and universities accommodate them.

You can't blame people for responding to incentives, but when the incentives are perverse, they ought to be changed.

–John Holzmann

According to a recent article in The New York Sun, you are less and less likely to find room for alternative viewpoints in America's public schools. Aspiring teachers are now being evaluated not only unofficially and informally according to their political beliefs; such evaluation standards have been formally adopted into the accreditation standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.

That 51-year-old agency, composed of 33 professional associations, says it accredits 600 colleges of education - about half the country's total. Thirty-nine states have adopted or adapted the council's standards as their own, according to the agency.

In 2000 the council introduced new standards for accrediting education schools. Those standards incorporated the concept of dispositions, which the agency maintains ought to be measured, to sort out teachers who are likeliest to be successful. In a glossary, the council says dispositions "are guided by beliefs and attitudes related to values such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social justice." . . .

It is that last value, "social justice," that causes consternation.

Critics of the dispositions standard contend that the idea of "social justice," a term frequently employed in left-wing circles, is open to politicization.

And so we find a course called Language Literacy in Secondary Education. It is a required course for all Brooklyn College education candidates who aspire to become secondary school teachers.

The course, which instructs students on how to develop lesson plans that teach literacy, is built around themes of "social justice," according to the syllabus, which was obtained by The New York Sun. One such theme is the idea that standard English is the language of oppressors while Ebonics, a term educators use to denote a dialect used by African-Americans, is the language of the oppressed. . . .

Among the complaints cited by students in letters they delivered in December to the dean of the School of Education, Deborah Shanley, is Ms. Parmar's alleged disapporval of students who defended the ability to speak grammatically correct English.

Speaking of Ms. Parmar, one student, Evan Goldwyn, wrote: "She repeatedly referred to English as a language of oppressors and in particular denounced white people as the oppressors. When offended students raised their hands to challenge Professor Parmar's assertion, they were ignored. Those students that disagreed with her were altogether denied the opportunity to speak."

Students also complained that Ms. Parmar dedicated a class period to the screening of an anti-Bush documentary by Michael Moore, "Fahrenheit 9/11," a week before last November's presidential election, and required students to attend the class even if they had already seen the film. Students said Ms. Parmar described "Fahrenheit 9/11″ as an important film to see before they voted in the election.

"Most troubling of all," Mr. Goldwyn wrote, "she has insinuated that people who disagree with her views on issues such as Ebonics or Fahrenheit 911 should not become teachers."

Students who filed complaints with the dean said they have received no response from the college administration. Instead, they said, the administration and Ms. Parmar have retaliated against them. . . .

[According to Christina Harned, one student who alleges she was discriminated against, f]our students . . .. dropped out of Ms. Parmar's course during the semester. One of the students was a former mechanic from Bay Ridge, Scott Madden, who said he wanted to become a teacher because "I like explaining things."

Mr. Madden, 35, said that after he disputed a grade he received from her, Ms. Parmar encouraged him to withdraw from the course. He said he changed his plans to take the course in the summer after finding out that Ms. Parmar was again teaching both sections of the required course.

"Basically, she's a socialist, she's racist against white people," Mr. Madden said. "If you want to pass that class you better keep your mouth shut."

In an interview with the Sun, Ms. Harned said she dropped out of the School of Education and switched her major to political science because of her experience in Ms. Parmar's course.

"I'm blacklisted," she said. "How am I supposed to move forward in a department I'm not comfortable in?"

That is the point of the new format, critics of the dispositions standard said.

"In its most pernicious form, then, dispositions theory is a tool for education schools to ensure that the next generation of public school students is educated solely by those teachers who have accepted the kind of extremist beliefs articulated by Professor Parmar," [wrote a prominent history professor at Brooklyn College, Robert David] Johnson.

Will homeschoolers provide the last opportunity for students to learn truly diverse viewpoints?

Isabel Gottlieb, a holder of multiple varsity letters in sports, won't be permitted to graduate from her high school . . . because she hasn't taken enough Phys Ed, according to the school principal.

At the school she used to attend, students who participated in varsity sports could receive gym waivers. Not so in Bow, NH.

"Waivers vary from school to school and they're not standardized at all," said Bow High School Principal George Edwards.

Bow requires students to take a PE class called BEST, or Building Essential Skills for Tomorrow. Somehow, when they helped establish Gottlieb's senior year schedule last spring, the Bow counseling office missed the fact that she had not yet taken the class.

Gottlieb added the class in the fall when she was told she had to take it, but then dropped it when she found out it was too much on top of all the other classes she was taking.

Both Gottlieb and her mother said the school suggested dropping either band, chorus, AP biology or calculus. But she and her mother decided sacrificing any of those would have diminished the quality of Gottlieb's education.

"I'm trying to get into college and someone isn't going to want to see someone drop an AP biology class a month into the year in order to pick up P.E.," Gottlieb said.

Our eldest daughter, Amy, had a similar experience in her public high school: they weren't going to let her graduate unless she took another gym class.

Her swimming coach finally gave her the waiver she required. But not after inadvertently revealing the true reason for concern about offering PE waivers.

You see, Amy had lettered in varsity swimming all four years of high school. She had set numerous school swimming records. In her senior year in high school, she not only lettered, but competed in state finals in not one, not two, not three, but four varsity sports (cross-country, swimming, tennis, and track)–an unprecedented achievement. (There are only three sports seasons. And you're normally not able to participate in two varsity sports at one time.) But, y'see, there was this little issue of not enough gym during her senior year. Indeed, she had taken no PE classes, preferring, instead, AP English, Calculus, and other such academic courses.

And lacking any gym in her senior year, she was one class short of the school requirements.

"But, come on! I've received more true physical education this past year in each and every one of my varsity sports than any student in any regular gym class is likely to receive!" Amy argued.

"But what would happen if we gave a waiver to every student who participated in varsity sports?" asked the teacher. "Our PE enrollment would drop."

Ah! And we know what would happen then, don't we?

There wouldn't be as many jobs for PE teachers.

And that would be a difficult problem, indeed, wouldn't it!

After all, public schools are "all about the kids," right?

Karen Scherr of Kingwood, TX, has the highest GPA in her graduating class. She has attended Kingwood Public Schools since kindergarten. But she won't be class valedictorian unless the powers-that-be decide to bend a little on a 15-year-old rule that was intended to keep incoming students from other school districts from inappropriately grabbing the honor–students who might not have had to face the same standards Kingwood students confront.

The problem: Scherr wasn't "enrolled" at Kingwood High (or was it, really, she wasn't in attendance?) on the 20th day of her junior year. Instead, she was in a hospital being treated for anorexia nervosa.

It appears that a large percentage of other top seniors at the school all oppose the school administration's decision in the matter. "My rank as valedictorian is hollow, tainted by this unjust situation," said Alex Gorham who was named valedictorian in Scherr's place. "She deserves it more than anyone. She had an eating disorder and went to an Oklahoma hospital for help and still maintained her No. 1 rank."

A spokesperson for the Humble Independent School District in which Kingwood is located said the district must "decide if it would be fair to retroactively change a rule that would affect other students who had followed it."

I say, the district should leave the rule in place. This has nothing to do with the rule. (Or, rather, it need have nothing to do with the rule.

District officials should take a peek at their history books and recall why the founding fathers inserted the rule concerning an "impartial jury" by persons "of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed" into the U.S. Constitution (Art. III, Sec. 2; Amendment 6). They should recall the history of jury nullification.

Scherr has, if you will, been "tried" by a jury of her peers and they have found her innocent, despite the law. The law (the rule concerning enrollment) can stand. But Scherr can be set free by this "jury of her peers."

I hope I can find someone at the Humble Independent School District who might listen to my plea.

*Addendum (May 18 at 10:05)*

—–Original Message—–
From: John Holzmann
Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 10:02 AM
To: ‘webmaster@humble.k12.tx.us'
Subject: Historical solution for Scherr case . . .

I was informed of y'all's dilemma concerning Karen Scherr.

May I suggest that the District apply the theory of "jury nullification" to the case rather than thinking it must "change the [longstanding] rule" concerning enrollment?

Check out Jury Nullification by Doug Linder for a little history on the subject. Jury nullification has a long and illustrious history in the United States.

Based on the news report I saw (the Houston Chronicle article Head of class may not be valedictorian), Karen has been judged "innocent" by a jury of her peers.

Apply the lessons of history and let her go free.

John Holzmann

Thought this was a fascinating commentary from the Chicago Tribune:

When American novelists gave their books titles like "East of Eden," "Absalom, Absalom!" and "Song of Solomon," they assumed their audience would immediately understand the biblical allusions. With today's readers, that may be a mistake. In a recent survey, only 1 out of every 3 American teenagers could identify who asked, "Am I my brother's keeper?" . . .
It's every person's decision whether to believe or practice what is taught in the Bible. But no one can deny its influence. Trying to understand American literature and history without some knowledge of the Bible is like trying to make sense of the ocean despite a complete ignorance of fish.
Religion, particularly Christianity, has played a large role in our culture since the Puritans arrived. . . . Yet many American high schools choose not to teach their students about what is undoubtedly the most influential book in Western history. . . .
[W]hen college English professors were asked in 1986 what book they wished incoming freshmen had read, the Bible ranked first. Some 90 percent of high school English teachers in the new survey said it's important for all high school students to be acquainted with it. But they said most of their pupils are not.
That ignorance acts as a hindrance to learning. "I'll make comparisons. . . . I'll say, `You know, like Noah and the ark or like Moses,'" one teacher reported, "and I'll have kids kind of look at me: `Who's Noah?' or `Who's Moses?'" One teacher gave up using Charles Portis' novel True Grit because "the kids were so stumped" by its many biblical allusions.
But many high schools don't offer courses . . . about the Bible. Some teachers and administrators fear that any such instruction is constitutionally forbidden or that it would somehow be inappropriate. In fact, the Supreme Court has made it clear that public schools are free to teach about the Bible just as they would any other work of literature or history. The U.S. Education Department has issued guidelines stressing that religion is an appropriate subject for study.

The commentator concludes:

Public schools have no business using Bible instruction to advance a religious agenda. But when they decline to impart knowledge about such an important subject, they are not doing anything to preserve the separation of church and state. They are merely failing their students.

I'll say a hearty "amen."
What "blows me away" is the response to this editorial.

There is an online survey form. It asks, "Should public schools teach the Bible?" The response at the moment I write this? 49.1% (764) "Yes"; 50.9% (792) "No."

Why? An animus toward the Bible? Perhaps. Or a fear of religious zealots hijacking a true Bible-as-literature course for their own sectarian ends. Or, perhaps, a foolish sense that cultural literacy is truly unimportant. . . .

But any way one looks at it, it appears that a perverse extremism has taken over the public schools. Fear of one extremism (the religious zealots) has pushed many to fall into the hands of another extremism (anti-religious-zealots zealots). So now you can't even talk about the Bible for fear of retribution.

I'm glad for the homeschool option!

Wyatt Webb, an MIT graduate and homeschooling father from Oregon (and lead programmer with Inspiration Software in Portland, Oregon) wrote a great article about "The Benefits of Home Schooling."

If you need a good summary, look no further.

Among the benefits Mr. Webb mentions:

• Permits children with unique learning needs to have those needs met.
• Permits children (and parents!) to avoid the "drugs, violence, and excessive political correctness" that seems to pervade public schools.
• Provides a low-cost alternative to private schools.
• Enables parents to impart their values to their own kids.

  As Mr. Webb puts it:

  If you want to teach your child why gay marriage should be legal or spend a few weeks explaining how deforestation is threatening the planet, you can do that. You do not have to lobby the principal or fight the school board to do so. If you want to teach your child about the Christian backgrounds of the founding fathers or study evidence that contradicts the theory of evolution, you can do that, too. We simply do not have to deal with the concern that what our child is being taught may contradict our personal values.

• Provides greater freedom for children (and parents) to go deeper into subjects of particular interest.
• Permits parents to control their children's social environment.

  "Whoa! Whoa!" you can just hear people say. " ‘Control children's social environment'? So what homeschooling is really all about is control, isn't it? So you homeschoolers are a bunch of control freaks!"

  Mr. Webb offers a very reasonable answer:

  Controlling anyone's life is a bad thing…if that person is a capable adult. When that person is not capable though, it is a generous thing to care for someone and control the parts that they cannot. We do it with infants, we do it with the mentally disabled, and we do it with the elderly. Heck, we even tell our children how much TV to watch, when to use the phone and what time to be home. We do these things because they do not yet understand how to control those parts of their life without harming themselves in some way. It seems clear that, until they reach adulthood, children are not capable adults. They need help controlling the parts of their lives that they are not yet prepared to deal with on their own. The difference is that, as a society, we have been conditioned to entrust our children's education and socialization to an institution. Why not keep the reins and do it yourself?

• Offers exceptional socialization.

  Mr. Webb has much to say on the subject, but I believe this is the nub of his argument:

  One dictionary definition of socialization is "the adoption of the behavior patterns of the surrounding culture." Now, when you are asking children to "adopt the behavior patterns" of their surroundings, wouldn't it make sense to surround them with good examples? Think about it; we are asking our children to learn how to behave in society by isolating them from real society with twenty or thirty other children who are learning how to behave, too. Sheer numbers dictate that the impressionable child will learn more from the other children than from the one or two teachers they observe. Additionally, the effect of peer pressure is that a child is more likely to want to be accepted by his peers rather than please his teachers. This seems to be a fundamentally flawed way to teach children to interact in society.

There's more great stuff where this came from. Check it out!

I've read three separate "articles" in the past couple of days that all seemed to coalesce in my mind. Let's see if I can bring them together for you.

First was an article by Kay S. Hymowitz called "What’s Holding Black Kids Back?"

Social scientists have long been aware of an immense gap in the way poor parents and middle-class parents, whatever their color, treat their children, including during the earliest years of life. On the most obvious level, middle-class parents read more to their kids, and they use a larger vocabulary, than poor parents do. They have more books and educational materials in the house; according to Inequality at the Starting Gate, the average white child entering kindergarten in 1998 had 93 books, while the average black child had fewer than half that number. All of that seems like what you would expect given that the poor have less money and lower levels of education.

But poor parents differ in ways that are less predictably the consequences of poverty or the lack of high school diplomas. Researchers find that low-income parents are more likely to spank or hit their children. They talk less to their kids and are more likely to give commands or prohibitions when they do talk: “Put that fork down!” rather than the more soccer-mommish, “Why don’t you give me that fork so that you don’t get hurt?” In general, middle-class parents speak in ways designed to elicit responses from their children, pointing out objects they should notice and asking lots of questions: “That’s a horse. What does a horsie say?” (or that middle-class mantra, “What’s the magic word?”). Middle-class mothers also give more positive feedback: “That’s right! Neigh! What a smart girl!” Poor parents do little of this.

The difference between middle-class and low-income child rearing has been captured at its starkest—and most unsettling—by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley in their 1995 book Meaningful Differences. As War on Poverty foot soldiers with a special interest in language development, Hart and Risley were troubled by the mediocre results of the curriculum they had helped design at the Turner House Preschool in a poor black Kansas City neighborhood. Comparing their subjects with those at a lab school for the children of University of Kansas professors, Hart and Risley found to their dismay that not only did the university kids know more words than the Turner kids, but they learned faster. The gap between upper- and lower-income kids, they concluded, “seemed unalterable by intervention by the time the children were 4 years old.”

Trying to understand why, their team set out to observe parents and children in their homes doing the things they ordinarily did—hanging out, talking, eating dinner, watching television. The results were mind-boggling: in the first years of life, the average number of words heard per hour was 2,150 for professors’ kids, 1,250 for working-class children, and 620 for children in welfare families.

But the problem went further. Welfare parents in the study didn’t just talk less; their talk was meaner and more distracted. Consider this description of two-year-old Inge and her mother:

Inge’s mother is sitting in the living room watching television. Inge . . . gets her mother’s keys from the couch. Her mother initiates, “Bring them keys back here. You ain’t going nowhere.”

Inge drops [a] spoon on the coffee table. Her mother initiates, “O.K., now leave it alone, O.K., Inge?” . . . When she picks the spoon up again, her mother initiates, “Come here. Let me bite you if you gonna keep on meddling.” Inge goes on playing; when she bangs the spoon on the coffee table, her mother initiates, “Inge, stop.”

. . . Inge sits on the couch beside her to watch TV and says something incomprehensible. Mother responds, “Quit copying off of me. You a copy cat.” . . . Inge gets a ball and says, “Ball.” Her mother says, “It’s a ball.” Inge says “Ball,” and her mother repeats “Ball.” When Inge throws the ball over by the TV as she repeats words from a commercial, her mother responds, “You know better. Why you do that? . . . Don’t throw it no more.”

It’s easy to spot what’s wrong here. Inge’s mother does not try to interest her daughter in anything—though observers noted that there were toys, including a plastic stethoscope, in the house. A different mother might pick up the stethoscope, call it by its name, pretend to use it, and invite the child to do the same. Instead, Inge’s mother’s communication can largely be summed up by the word “no.” You can’t chalk this up to a lack of feeling. Hart and Risley observe that the mother is “concerned, nurturing and affectionate”; at other points in the transcript, she kisses and hugs her child, dresses her, and makes sure she gets to the bathroom when she needs to. Nor can you argue that she simply doesn’t know how to engage or teach her child. Notice that she repeats the word “ball” to reinforce her daughter’s learning; at other times, she points out that a character on television is sleeping. But she does all this as if it were an afterthought rather than, as a middle-class mother might, one of the first rules of parenting.

In other words, Inge’s mother seems to lack not so much a set of skills as the motivation to bring them to bear in a consistent, mindful way. In middle-class families, the child’s development—emotional, social, and (these days, above all) cognitive—takes center stage. It is the family’s raison d’être, its state religion. It’s the reason for that Mozart or Rafi tape in the morning and that bedtime story at night, for finding out all you can about a teacher in the fall and for Little League in the spring, for all the books, crib mobiles, trips to the museum, and limits on TV. It’s the reason, even, for careful family planning; fewer children, properly spaced, allow parents to focus ample attention on each one. Just about everything that defines middle-class parenting—talking to a child, asking questions, reasoning rather than spanking—consciously aims at education or child development. In The Family in the Modern Age, sociologist Brigitte Berger traces how the nuclear family arose in large measure to provide the environment for the “family’s great educational mission.”

Key points:

• On average, low-income and middle-class families raise their kids differently.
• On average, low-income parents treat interaction with their kids and, most especially, training their kids as "an afterthought."
• On average, middle-class families view interaction with their kids and training their kids as their raison d'etre, their reason for being.

Next article.

Not really an article. It was a letter. A post. On the Sonlight forums. I didn't see it until I saw yesterday's Beam of Sonlight. ElaineB wrote:

Our children are not just learning logical thought and critical thinking (important but not an end in themselves). They're gaining an understanding of what to do with that knowledge. They're becoming passionate about changing things that need changing, righting wrongs, seeking justice. They've grown up with examples like William Wilberforce, Nathanael Bowditch, William Carey: average people who became pioneers . . . world changers . . all within the context of the history we're studying.

They're not only learning about the problems and the evils of the world, but getting to know people who overcame the problems and fought the evil and influenced their world.

In my kids, this has resulted in a confidence that they can do big things in the world. They have big dreams to change big things. When I hear my son talk about the things he hopes to accomplish in his life, sometimes it's hard not to be dubious about it. For instance, one of his goals is to reform the Philadelphia foster care system. But I have to remind myself that sometimes people do change things, big things. Some people do make a huge impact on their culture. Maybe he will be one of those people.

I believe Sonlight is helping us to raise not only thinkers, but world changers–whether it's a little corner of the world, or a larger aspect of it. We are barely beginning to see what this first generation of children raised in Sonlight is capable of. I will not be surprised if within the next ten years or so, many of them will be on the forefront of positive change in many industries, vocations and ministries throughout the world. I'm seeing that the impact of Sonlight on my children's lives is helping to make them into people of purpose and passion. Look out world!

Wow! This brought tears to my eyes.

Fifteen, sixteen years ago, just before Sarita and I began working on Sonlight Curriculum, I had actually spent about a year and a half working on a prototype and business plan for a magazine whose name I had conceived of as . . . WorldChangers.

And to think that . . . just maybe . . . God might bring about through this curriculum what I now believe could have never occurred through that magazine . . . !

* * * * *
The third article: Joel Belz's lead editorial in this week's (April 30, 2005) World magazine: "Aim low":

George Barna, who heads [The Barna Group] research organization, has said more and more emphatically that evangelical Christians are a lot better at talking than they are at walking.

Now Mr. Barna and his number crunchers say that a whole lot of Christians aren't even bothering to talk with all that much seriousness. His recent survey focuses on what kinds of goals parents are setting for their children. . . . Even on that front, Christians come across as timid and flabby.

It may not be surprising, for example, to find that American parents in general (four out of 10) say that a good education is the main goal they are pursuing for their children. . . . But wouldn't you expect that seriously committed Christians might state the goals they have for their children in a faith-centered way? Mr. Barna says we shouldn't kid ourselves. We look pretty much like our secular counterparts. . . .

[B]y a 2-to-1 margin, [self-identified "born again"] respondents said they'd simply consider whether they'd done the best they could [at raising their kids]—regardless of the outcome. The Barna report didn't indicate if the same folks would be so forgiving toward surgeons, car mechanics, stockbrokers, and airline pilots who might take the same approach.

Indeed, "discipline" and "toughness" were hardly dominant in the characteristics respondents describe as most important to effective child rearing:

• Patience: 36 percent
• Demonstration of love: 32 percent
• Being understanding: 22 percent
• Enforcing discipline: 22 percent
• Significant faith commitment: 20 percent
• Good communication skills: 17 percent
• Being compassionate: 14 percent
• Knowing how to listen: 12 percent
• Being intelligent: 11 percent

"Being a praying person" got a measly 4 percent score, while "having integrity or good character" got just 1 percent.

Let me confess: I was not so shocked at these numbers as I was challenged: challenged to consider anew what my goals are for my kids . . . and for education.

Have you thought and prayed through your goals for your kids' education and, if I may suggest that all of life is education (Deuteronomy 6:6-7), have you thought through your goals for your interaction with your kids?

I pray they may be along the lines that ElaineB suggested she is holding out for her kids!

–John