The Hypocrisy of Education

This could be a thesis paper... Aspiring teachers here you go.

I went to school as a kid believe it or not; you can tell by all my bad grammar and run-ons, and now I'm going back to school as a parent dropping my kids off. You think you are done with school when you are done with school, but no. As a parent, I'm still judged harshly for my ability to "follow the rules," whether it's about attendance or how I walk in the parking lot. I may not get a report card, but I'm still subjected to the labels teachers give students and parents. Those involved in extra-curricular activities like PTA meetings, activity in fundraisers, and volunteer efforts are the preferred parents. You can beat the crap out of your kids on the regular, and as far as the school is concerned, you are a great parent if your kid shows up every day, on time, with homework completed that you had to do. And you are a perfect parent (which doesn't actually exist) if you sell the most in a fundraiser and showed up in decent clothing to the PTA meetings. It's like you stepped foot into a Wonderland ruled by the Queen of Hearts.

As a parent, I'm graded every day on some invisible report card by the same schools I thought I escaped via graduation. But, as a taxpayer, I get to grade the school back.

There are certain institutions in this world we hold to a higher level. You would think with all the education required to teach or serve on the board of education that these educated minds are beyond the illogical sequence behind hypocrisy. You would think they would make more logical sense in their policy and system than some place like your local bar and grille, but no, even the strip joint has a system that is more logical and less shady than our education system.

I can't believe nobody recognizes these things enough to complain about it on a regular basis.

1. Education neglect.

The schools will place education neglect charges on the parents of children who miss a lot of school, regardless the reason whether it's illness or the parent just didn't feel like getting the kid ready and drop them off. The reason behind it is that the children have to be present every day for the full day in order to obtain their education properly. It's important. Studies have shown that students with a good attendance record in as far back as elementary school are more apt to graduate.

Those studies do not mean that students who graduated did so because they weren't absent a lot as kids. More than likely, those studies only show statistics of parents who place a high priority on public education. Correlation does not prove causation, and anyone who claims to be educated and doesn't understand that isn't educated. They were products of real education neglect.

But the hypocrisy is that the schools will tell you how important it is for your kid to be there. It's so important, they will imprison and fine any parent who doesn't force their kid to go every day. However, they are quick to suspend and expel students based on "behavior," which means most of the time, favoritism and labels. They are quick to tell you that your child is not welcome there until immunizations are caught up. In fact, when the school is the reason your child cannot attend, that absence is the parent's fault.

In addition, many schools cannot pass AYP (Annual Yearly Progress). There's a million variables behind why a school doesn't pass AYP, but a school who can't make AYP should be education neglect on the school's part. Period.

When a school passes a kid who isn't ready for the next grade, that is the real education neglect. When children graduate high school thinking "LOL" is a real word and Texas is its own country, that is the real education neglect. When people graduate who cannot solve a simple algebraic equation, that is the real education neglect. When educators graduate twisting correlation into causation and even worse, apply it as such, that is a sign of double education neglect (the educator neglected a real education, and the people in the educator's system being neglected a real educated due to the illiteracy of the educator). Yet when a parent's child misses more than 5 days for illness, they are the ones charged with education neglect. Parents are the only ones who can face prison and fines for education neglect.

2.  Free education.

Education is not free just like freedom isn't free. They need funding, and it being provided by the government instead of tuition makes it free to students and parents so that every person has equal opportunity. That was the point. Equal opportunity. The poor should have access to the same opportunities as the rich, at least when it comes to education.

But it doesn't work that way in the real world. In the real world, the poorer schools have less funding than the wealthier schools. Somehow, government funds end up going to the "better" schools neglecting the ones that don't look so hot on paper. Fundraisers make it worse because students who have money to buy their own stuff make more money for the school than students who can't afford to purchase a vegetable chopper that will fall apart on a potato and magazine subscriptions. The class system is designed to keep poor people friends with poor people, and rich people friends with rich people. They live in the same neighborhoods. Which increases how fundraising raises more funds for the "better schools" than it does for the ones who slipped into the cracks of the system.

But even then, your basic education should be available free. Today's job market is different than it was decades ago. Twenty years ago, you could land a good job with a high school diploma alone. Today, a high school diploma without any college lands you the same job as if you dropped out of high school. Minimum wage. The free education does not, anymore, offer equal opportunity. Only students who can afford college receive any real opportunity. Grants do not usually cover the full cost of education. Student loans are impossible to pay back anymore and set most students finishing school thousands of dollars in debt to start life whereas the wealthy have a clean slate, a trust fund, and oodles of networking when they hunt for their first job.

In order for education to again be an equal opportunity ordeal, we have to make the Bachelor's Degree a publicly funded education.

My personal idea for a solution to this is to tweak high school curriculum to offer college credits for every class, enough to graduate with a degree. Thanks to technology, schools can offer online classes with an online university paid for by the state, especially for specialty job-specific classes. Not all classes would be replaced with a new college professor. Freshman English could be tweaked to offer 6 credits for English Comp 1 and English Comp 2 taught by the same teacher who has been teaching it for decades. Honestly, my high school classes were harder than those offered through my community college. The reason being, high school is designed to prepare students to enter a university like Harvard for the smart ones and the state university for the average. The community college is designed to give people who haven't been to school in a decade a piece of paper that says they are educated. Combining the two worlds would be more productive and make more logical sense in this day and age than keeping them separate.

3.  Special Education

The IEP is designed to grant schools IDEA funds for every child that requires special services. It's also designed for parents and teachers to sit down together to establish goals for their child and figure out which services the child needs and qualifies for.

In real life, the IEP is often misused. Many educators use it as a label for deficiency and behavior disorders than they do as a tool to help a child overcome a learning disability. There's also many stories about the abuse of special needs children, by educators and adults, as a normal part of the special education services. It's part of the system. Part of the child's average day often includes some form of abuse or neglect parents are unaware of. Not every school is like that, but the stories of issues parents face in this realm are so overwhelmingly large that it should be worthy of reform.

It amazes me how so many educators, people who have a Master's Degree in Education and Early Childhood Development, are so quick to mock and criticize the special needs. It's almost as if there was never an Ethics course offered in their curriculum. Was there?

In addition, there is a history of schools telling you how to treat your child's diagnosis that lands them the IEP. Some schools refuse to take your child if your child is not medicated, as if their Masters in Education is equivalent to Medical School. Some will also tell you how you should parent. Others will tell you what your child needs, without a care to your opinion. IN fact, if you disagree with them on what you child needs in an attempt to advocate for your kid, knowing the schools do not know this child enough to diagnose a treatment plan let alone are qualified to do such a thing, you risk having child protection services called on you.

And it's not enough to tell you how to treat your child's diagnosis, many schools will try to diagnose your kid for you. Many parents are faced being forced to get an assessment done on their child through the schools or through professional services they cannot afford over an unqualified opinion.

There are oodles of stories of kids who a teacher thought was ADHD and the parent was told, "You have to get him diagnosed with ADHD and medicate with stimulants or your kid isn't welcome here," and there was one instance in Colorado where the child did not have ADHD according to the shrinks and the father lost custody of his child temporarily for not medicating his kid. Health neglect.

4. Bullying

My state supposedly has the toughest anti-bullying policy out there, yet there is no enforcement of it outside of the occasional parent suing the school system.

Children are taught during the Character Ed class at my kid's school that bullying is wrong, followed by "tattletaling is bad too." In other words, don't bully kids, and if you are bullied, don't bother us grown ups with it. If I parented that way, I'd lose my kids.

Meanwhile, if any of my children are bullied, I wouldn't know what to do. There is no place to fill out a form. No person to call to oversee the protection of the children. I could probably find an anti-bullying policy somewhere on the internet for my state, but who do I bring the case to? There is no judge in the system to say, "hey that was bullying, I sentence the bully to community service and time with a shrink." There is no person to run to with the problem, and the parent has no control over what happens in school to do something themselves. The principal is the only person you can go to, and they don't have to do anything about it. They won't lose their job if they tell you to get over it, or that they are on it and the problem doesn't go away as if nothing was done.

Not to mention, oftentimes the bully is a teacher or principal. Who do you run to with that? The regular courts in a lawsuit, one that will label you one of those people who are quick to sue over anything. There should be a policy that enforces the anti-bullying policy. It's really hypocritical to have a policy that you don't enforce. Period.

With my own daughter, I've stopped letting her ride the bus, and I now drive her to school because of a harassing bully. My nephew, after attempting to switch schools too many times, is now homeschooled to escape bullying from kids who get away with it and from educators. Because he's special needs, nobody gives him any credibility. He's the crazy one, so any time a kid punches him for no reason or a teacher ignorantly ignores the IEP and fuels a meltdown, it's somehow his fault.

When I say we need education reform, I don't mean we need longer days or that we need to introduce common core concepts. I mean we need to actually reform the system. A good start would be to approach the hypocrisy in the system. I only touched on the top 4 that came to my mind here, but there's so much more to this than this. For instance, instead of common core math, why not just teach students to count in different base systems before the onset of addition? Even better, I'd like to see a study done of what age kids absorb that information best and introduce it then. For another instance, we could squeeze most of school to half days and keep teachers full time separating the class into morning and afternoons to create smaller classrooms.

What we really need to do is listen to this guy...

Non-PTA Queen Bitch: Excuse Note from Hell

I tell people I'm a bitch in my school system. I am. I'm  not a bitch to people. I'm a bitch about advocating for my kids' best interest, something the schools really don't seem to give two shits about. Once i realized the schools have their own agenda, separate from us, I realized I am my child's social worker -- another hat us moms wear.

But as mom, I have limited power. The schools are arrogant. They want to dictate everything we should be doing as parents with extreme prejudice, yet they have the lowest of expectations for themselves imaginable. What's okay for the schools to do would get CPS called by the schools on a parent. The hypocrisy is sickening. On top of it, education neglect, my favorite subject. I find it odd that the schools can't make AYP while they have things like Bad Kid Forts and are quick to suspend and expel children for bull shit, and they want to charge us for education neglect when our kids are too sick to go to school. Even worse, most of us accept this logic as sound. 

I've had an issue in the past with education neglect. I might tell the back story in more detail some day, but basically back when my oldest was in Kindergarten (last school year), the nurse told me my kid wasn't welcomed at school until she got her vaccinations caught up (again, long story you are missing details), so my kid missed 5 days to wait on the appointment. Then I bitched about the nurse's fabulous people skills on my Facebook, and it got back to her, so she retaliated by obsessively pushing education neglect charges against me for the 5 days she made my kid miss. The only reason I came out on top is the guy in charge of any and all education neglect charges is a great guy, great at his job, and he's not out to get people like me, and he already knew my story because he and I chat frequently. Not to mention, she started Kindergarten a year early, like technically, by law, she wasn't required to be in school yet. 

But I think the school still holds some animosity because every report card since then says, "Absences are interfering with her work." This year, so far we only have 2 unexcused absences, which are for days that were doctor ordered. I guess he can only write an excuse note for 3 days at a time, and he wanted her home for 5.

So, besides the fact that I'm trying to advocate for my daughter's needs and I refuse to be bullied about it, I also have a lot on my plate as mom and the bull shit the schools add to it pisses me the fuck off. I just don't have time and energy for their Jerry Springer shit, but if they are going to force me to play their games, they are getting me raw. Tired, cranky frustrated annoyed as fuck, resentful raw. 

This is how I'm a bitch, well it's one of the many examples. When my daughter got sick with this horrific cold that's out, I wrote this excuse note. I purposely let myself keep it long just to annoy the ever living piss out of the school. Next time, I think I'm going to copy and paste articles from scholarly journals who use large medical terms. I also keep a copy in the computer, and I make a copy for the teacher, and a copy for the secretary to process. When I handed the secretary her copy, I explained, "You know, if you guys, the school, don't like her missing school because she's sick, then stop making her sick. Every ailment she has caught this year, she caught from here."


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To whom it may concern:

Please excuse [my daughter] from the following days of school:

Wed.  February 20, 2013

Thurs. February 21, 2013

She was sick.

Thank you.



[Mom]

Educational Reference NOTE:

In case someone doesn't believe me, or thinks I'm not qualified to determine if my child is sick (I know it sounds rude, but it's XXX County policy, not mine, that I am only qualified to excuse 5 absences a semester)…

There's that thing going around that looks like strep throat at the beginning, but then it turns into something that becomes more obvious that it's viral (common cold). It's even tricked some nurse friends of mine (the symptoms tricked them; Strep you can test for).

[my daughter] and my middle kid woke up Wednesday morning with a sore throat and mild fever.  I know most people generally don't send their kids to school with a fever at all, usual rule of thumb being 24 hours no fever with no fever reducing meds, so I had that going with my decision to keep them home. Plus I worried it might be strep, even though I knew it probably wasn't. Because I knew it probably wasn't, I watched it instead of rushing them to doctors.

Thursday rolled along and they still just looked sick. No fever that day, but it wasn't quite 24 hours no fever without fever reducing meds. They also started to develop the cough by the end of Thursday, and the sore throat got better.

Friday, fortunately, was a snow day or she probably would have missed that day too. It was one of those where she could have probably gone, but it was probably in her best interest to take that day and the weekend to get better before going back to an environment of a swarm of children and their germs, for her sake and the other kids.

Subjects that should not be open for debate:

I would think most people in their right mind can agree, don't send your kids to school sick and get everyone else sick. Right? Some parents feel so strong about that, that they verbally threaten and insult parents who send their kids to school sick. The problem is, when you are dealing with the common cold, the policy pretty much determines your kid to go to school contagious and sick.

Contagious period of a cold:

"First, scientists involved with common cold research do not know exactly how long a person with a cold is contagious. Based on previous studies, their best guess is that a person becomes contagious about two to three days before developing the usual symptoms of a cold. Second, this contagious period can last until the person no longer shows any symptoms. So in theory, a person is contagious for about two weeks."

Pasted from <http://cold.emedtv.com/common-cold/common-cold-contagious-period.html>

"When Am I Most Contagious?

Let's assume you're the one with the cold. During the two-week period when you're contagious, research indicates that you'll be most likely to transmit the cold virus when you're experiencing cold symptoms. The period when you're most contagious is when your symptoms are at their worst -- day 2 to day 4 of the cold. You'll become less contagious as the cold symptoms improve."

Pasted from <http://cold.emedtv.com/common-cold/common-cold-contagious-period.html>

So I shall be sending my kid to school contagious. She's not as contagious as she was on the days she missed, but she's still probably contagious for another week average.  This is why viral activities in the schools become small, localized epidemics. "It's going around…" Yes it's going around because we send our kids to school contagious. We don't have a choice. Then on top of it, I don't think the cleaners the schools use kill (so to speak) viruses, though whatever you use seems to be very effective on bacteria.  So my daughter is going to sneeze or cough on Monday, touch something, and that virus is going to sit there on that hard surface ready to infect people for at least 2 days unless intercepted with an EPA approved pesticide (disinfectant) for that specific virus.  Fortunately, I'm sure every kid in her classroom already has had this and built an immunity for it because that's probably where she got it from to begin with.

Doctor's Note:

Now, the doctor issue. I know these absences can be excused with a doctor's note because they are at least more qualified than I am to determine if my kid is too sick to miss school, well at least for 3 days at a time without getting under some strange radar. According to Pub Med, cold symptoms…

"Calling your health care provider

Try treating your cold at home first. Call your doctor if:

• Breathing becomes difficult

• Your symptoms get worse or do not improve after 7 to 10 days"

Pasted from <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001698/>

I did not need to call my doctor in this case just like most cases. While we do thankfully have insurance, they don't seem to cover the costs too well. Even when it was 100% insurance coverage, I still had a 10 to 20 dollar copay plus the insurance just refuses to pay some of the doctors for whatever reason. I am not racking up any more future collection letters from doctors who can't get paid from the insurance and instead of calling me about it, turns me over to collections 6 months after the appointment. I will do that when my kids need to see a doctor. Otherwise, taking them to a doctor just to retrieve a note for XXX County Schools to make you guys happy:

1. I can't afford it
2. I don't have time for it
3. Immune systems weaken a bit while fighting off colds. It's dangerous to put kids in a germ infested environment like the doctor's office, hospitals and schools when they are sick. I wouldn't let them visit a nursing home even while sick, not even to see their favorite family member had we had one in a nursing home.

I would apologize my child's best interest interferes with the school's convenience, but I won't because the apology is owed to me. The schools should not be placing their convenience of paperwork and policy over the health and well being of the child. I am well aware most people reading this, whether you agree with me or not, have no control over XXX County policy. I'm merely adding this information in the case there ever is a debate about negligence as a child's health trumps education, and for the record, we did read, add, and learned a new animal at home, among other things. Completely unrelated, but I also taught some adults, over the weekend, including a secondary education math teacher, the basics of division and fractions, which is sad like who's really neglecting education in this world? You guys really need to remove the old fashioned divide by symbol completely from the curriculum. It just confuses people.

If the absences are interfering with her work, my suggestion is to find a better EPA approved pesticide for the classroom because that's where she's catching everything. Chlorox offers some fabulous wipes for the healthcare setting (not the kind you get at Walmart). I also suggest upping hygiene in the school entirely. I believe her teacher is on it to the best possible paradigm of classroom hygiene, but they often leave the classroom. In addition, if people would stop sending their kids to school sick to conform to policy, you'd greatly reduce absences overall. On my end, we are doing what we can. We up the Vitamin C and Zinc during the school season, though I have yet to really find a product that bypasses the digestive system to intake those vitamins on a regular basis (as they are often killed in the intestines before absorbed).  We wash hands, and I germ chase (controlling the unwanted pests of the viral and bacterial world).

For more information: Jump on Google. Avoid WebMD and stick to CDC, WHO, EPA (pesticides, like instead of killing roaches and rats, you are killing viruses), and PubMed (my favorite), as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics and other places doctors with an IQ over 140 might bookmark.

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