Superintendent T.C. Wallace and former mayor David Hollister have to be nice, politic even about the problems besetting Lansing schools. I don’t.
You want the schools to succeed by having more kids learn? Then go take a cattle prod to all the parents who are so obviously failing. In this free society, if the parents aren’t doing their work, schools have very little chance of changing the outcome.
Want to be outraged? Fine. Want to argue? Fine. Here’s a couple of numbers to chew on:
2,531 -- that’s the number of students in Lansing middle schools and high schools who had racked up at least 10 absences by early December, or, in other words, about one semester.
As I said today during our meeting, no school is going to succeed in educating kids who are missing that many days. So, do you, Mr. and Mrs. Lansing, want to hire platoons of truancy cops to sweep neighborhoods in these schools or are we going to be honest here and say Mommy and Daddy (if he’s around) are ultimately responsible for getting little Johnny to the little red schoolhouse?
And Wallace pointed it out that’s not unusual for 70 percent or more of a particular class to change over a school year. For example, out of 20 kids on day one of the year, only about 5 may make it to the end of the year. In this community that deifies neighborhood schools, kids are changing schools with alarming frequency.
And who moves a kid from school to school? Not Wallace or teachers. It’s the parents who do it.
There are things policy-makers can do to better compensate for bad parents. But, in the end, if you really want to see much better schools, go find much better parents.
