Ah yes. The important lessons of school:

A high school senior says he earned an A+, not an A, and has sued to get the grade changed to bolster his chance at becoming valedictorian.

Brian Delekta, who finished 11th grade in 2002 ranked at the top of his class, says he should have received an A+ for a St. Clair County intermediate school district work-experience class in which he worked as a paralegal in his mother’s law office.

Let’s see: grades are important for what they get you, not as a reflection of what you’ve learned. And you should sue to get what you want. (His mom’s a lawyer—probably not a help.)

(From the Volokh Conspiracy.)

Jon Carroll’s column today talks about why we might do better just staying home with our kids and teaching them what we know, instead of shipping them off to other places to learn:

And I’m thinking: Maybe it would be better if we just stayed home and taught them what we know. Not all of us are famous mandolin players, of course, but all of us are something. We garden, we cook, we sing, we collect clocks. Nothing the matter with teaching a kid to collect clocks.

The bonus is obvious. We get to spend time with our kids; they get to spend time with us. They’ll want to spend time with their friends too, and they should, but there are lots of hours in the day if you look for them. And you’ll begin to build a relationship based on something other than the natural power differential in families.

Not that I did this when my kids were young. I was having an important career. It worked out OK in the end, but I ain’t gettin’ those hours back, and I think about that sometimes, even now.

According to a story in today’s LA Times (sadly, registration required):

Today’s college freshmen got more A’s than ever in high school while studying a record low number of hours in their senior year, according to a national survey by UCLA. But they may not be any smarter than those of past generations.

Instead, frenzied competition for college admission has inflated grades and trained students to become experts at winning A’s, say the survey’s director and college students and officials in Southern California.

“Students are more savvy about what it takes to get an A,” said Linda J. Saxon, the UCLA education professor who directed this year’s American Freshman Survey, which has been tracking students’ opinions and habits for 37 years.

In the classes she teaches, students now “focus more of their energies studying what it takes to get a grade.” They might be able to study less if they focus on that as the outcome, rather than on learning, which would take more time, she said.

Well, is anyone surprised? Christ, everything is so high stakes today, of course you need an A in everything you do. Competition for grades is killing any desire on the part of children to learn, as has been so well described by Alfie Kohn in Punished By Rewards, a book I cannot recommend highly enough. If you’ve ever wondered what’s wrong with incentives like grades, Kohn will explain it for you.

One change Kohn recommends to our system of grading is changing to a system where you get an A or an incomplete. You’ve either done the work, or you haven’t.

Of course, a great many people would howl bloody murder if their kid can’t have a much better GPA than the next kid. The current grading system enforces the notion that some children must be left behind. As the article in the Times goes on to say:

At one prestigious Los Angeles prep school, which he asked not to be identified, Poch said he had found every student in an English class earned either an A or an A-minus.

Well, you know, maybe everyone in the class did the work to get an A, you know? Should we have a system where some kids are forced to fail?

If you’ve followed my links under “On Education,” you might have noticed a certain theme running through them: homeschooling. I’ve developed a serious interest in homeschooling. I have one metric ton of book suggestions, if you happen to be interested.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of reading on education and educational theory over the past few months—if you want educational whiplash, read E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Howard Gardner’s The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think back-to-back. The net result of all this reading has been that my ideas of what a good education is all about have changed radically. I used to say that the kids could never know until they were in their 20s that Daddy dropped out of college—now I’m all over the idea that they should make their own way in the world, pursue their own goals, don’t follow the beaten path!

And one of the educational ideas that I have found extremely attractive—in the abstract, of course—is homeschooling. I don’t know if we can do it: all of the personal accounts I’ve read about homeschooling families certainly make it sound like a gigantic investment of time on the parents’ parts. But on the other hand…isn’t that why we had kids? To get them ready for the world?

Pros:

• Darin and I are pretty smart.

  I can’t imagine there’s any topic that between the two of us we don’t know something about. For example, one thing I’ve read over and over again about homeschoolers is that the parents have a fear of mathematics. Well, Darin and I both loved math in school. I was even going to major in math at Stanford (until I discovered that there are a whole bunch of people out there who were way better at math than I was).

• We know a lot of smart people.

  Anything the kids need an explanation of that we don’t know? I’m quite sure one of our very smart, and extremely pedantic, friends will be happy to oblige.

• You get to take vacations any time you want.

  Not that we’re taking tons of vacations now. But being able to take advantage of the off-season, should we ever take a vacation, has definite attractions.

• Being able to follow your interests is wonderful.

  I know how I learn a subject: I dive in and go nuts. I would love for my children to have that freedom as well, whether it’s reading every American Girl book at the library or taking jujitsu classes or whatever. Without having to do the stupid crap at school that we all remember doing (and hating).

• I still love learning.

  I want my kids to have that love of learning too. And studying some subject together would be a great way for us to have projects together—”Let’s go take a Latin class! Yeah, we can have a secret language!” “Mom, would you dial it down a notch? Do you have to be so excited about everything?”

  Although Darin’s probably right: the kids will simply think the way their parents are is the way parents are.

Cons:

• Darin is a big believer in the public school system.

  He and his brothers went through the wonderful public school system in Highland Park, IL, where they all got great educations. He still has friends he met from when he was in kindergarten. He had some amazing classes in high school he still talks about.

  I am not a big believer in the public schools. I attended public school for one year: I started out in kindergarten, moved into first grade, and was about to move into second grade when my parents said, “No, perhaps not.” I attended parochial schools until my parents couldn’t stand the screaming any more, and after that I attended private schools, right up through my master’s degree.

  Add to this living in California, where Proposition 13 and other forces have conspired to trash the public school system from the bottom up. Plus the “back to basics” and “No Child Left Behind” standardized testing—I don’t need my kids to be champion test takers, thanks. (And as a graduate from elite private schools, I know perfectly well that the politicos who are deciding that kids need to be tested constantly aren’t sending their kids to schools where they’re going to be tested constantly. Which makes me wonder exactly how important that testing is.)

• I’m sure our families wouldn’t think much of the idea.

  Every homeschooling family I’ve read about reports that it took time to win over other members of the family, if, in fact, they could be won over. Darin’s mom was a teacher for years.

• I would miss out on the babysitting aspects of school.

  I know, that’s kind of a sad thing to say, but school is the primary babysitter out there, the social construct that makes it possible for parents to work.

  But school is what, six to eight hours a day? That’s crazy. If school were three hours a day, I might be more inclined to send the kids off, but eight? No wonder parents complain that their kids are strangers: their kids are strangers.

  We had two weeks’ vacation from preschool and by the end I was counting the days until preschool started again. Preschool. What’s going to happen by the time she’s in kindergarten?

• I don’t know if I have the patience to be with the kids that much.

  There are times—like, just this morning!—when I find myself thinking, “It’s me or it’s them,” and the fight music from “Gamesters of Triskelion” starts. My friend Mary, who has two kids who are slightly older than mine, says she knows exactly how I feel, because she was at this same place when her kids were this age. And the more time I’ve spent with the kids the easier it’s been to be with them. But sometimes I wonder if I could be with them all the time.

• I don’t hang with reactionary, right-wing, religious types.

  Like everything else they touch, reactionary, right-wing, religious types are all over homeschooling, making it sound like a way of shielding kids from that godless secular humanism stuff at school. Actually, that godless secular humanism stuff, like evolution, is one of the things I like about the public school system. I don’t believe in shielding kids from the more difficult parts of life, I believe in teaching them how to deal with them.

  One of the great secrets of parenthood—well, I didn’t know it, at any rate—was that a great portion of your social life post-children revolves around your kids’ friends’ families. You’d better like them; you’re going to be spending a whole bunch of time with them. If homeschooling means I’d be hanging out the Religious Right, well, thanks, I’ll pass.

I don’t know what’s going to come of all of this—Sophia may turn 5 and I’ll shriek in a crazed way, “Which kindergarten can we drop her off at?” But I like watching her discover things, learn how to do new things, and I’m not at all sure I want her to be off somewhere else half the day (and half her life) learning how to do them.

§

Every parent I know is doing a lot of thinking about schools: asking every other parent they run into about which schools they like, what they’ve heard about various schools in our area, how much each school costs…

Something curious I’ve noted is that many of the moms I know have checked into LA Unified’s Gifted and Talented program. They know which schools are GATE magnets or have GATE programs. They know what the GATE programs consist of. They know that the GATE programs are the extremely good side of the LA USD. And they all assume their kids will be in the GATE program.

Now, it’s quite possible that I have managed to luck out and my kids just happen to hang with the most gifted and talented kids in Los Angeles. Or maybe we’re all so crazed about our children that we won’t accept any label less than “gifted and talented.” Of course, I do keep in mind that a friend of mine, who’s a teacher in the LAUSD, knows how to hack the system to ensure our kids get into the GATE program. She told me all about it.

Alfie Kohn, in his wonderful book What To Look For In A Classroom, discusses the phenomenon of gifted and talented programs and how they’re basically draws to keep middle-class white kids in the school system—albeit segregated from the Great Unwashed.

After reading Ellen Winner’s Gifted Children (did you think I was kidding when I said I’d been doing a lot of reading?) I know my friends and I have bright kids but so far none has shown any signs of being truly gifted. So I don’t know whether the LAUSD is just chock full o’ kids who are off-the-charts in terms of abilities, or whether they have a different measuring scale than Ms. Winner does.

I thought most of the ideas I came up with about how competitive parents are with their tots were over-the-top. As usual, I didn’t come close to reaching the heights that some parents go to:

Manhattan’s top schools for 2- to 5-year-olds offer some of the finest education a preschooler can get, with on-staff child psychologists, movement and music specialists, artists in residence, custom-tailored programs and computers. Children enjoy individual attention from directors with 20 years’ experience and multiple degrees in education and early childhood development. Classes have three teachers for 11 to 20 children. To insure matriculation at a good private kindergarten, most have on-site testing for the ERB, the preschool equivalent of the SAT.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/edlife/112GOLT.html

(Link via The Rittenhouse Review.)

Jesus, people, they’re two. Yes, early education is important. But I think we’re getting crazy here, trying to make sure that at two they’re ready for Harvard (which is what this early education is about, at core).

At a recent birthday party—as far as I can tell, preschool is all about finger painting and birthday parties—I was discussing with a few other mothers how we all came to decide on the preschool we were at. I mentioned that I was very pleased with its progressive approach—let the kids go crazy with playing and painting and singing, and no academics. One of the preschools I’d visited must have had the alphabet on every wall, plus the letter and number of the week, plus the word of the day. Now, maybe I’m blasé because Sophia already knows her alphabet and numbers, but I figured there was time enough for all that.

“Oh no,” said another mother. “In fact, I’m kind of disappointed that (our preschool) doesn’t have that. By the time they get to kindergarten they’ll be behind.” (emphasis mine)

Behind?

In kindergarten?

If that’s true, the problem doesn’t lie with our kids, folks. It lies with our education system. Susan Ohanian, by the way, goes into this in some detail in What Happened To Recess And Why Are Our Children Struggling In Kindergarten?

Of course, I have plenty of thoughts about school these days and what an acceptable approach is. Which I’ll get to in just a sec.