Lifelong Learners

Child Hates School?
You Have More Choices than You May Realize

This time of year, as schools reopen their doors, many parents are hearing the same refrain: “I hate school!” While some families succeed by relocating their child to another classroom, hiring a tutor, coaching their child through the homework, or making other small adjustments, many children continue to struggle in our public school classrooms. And sadly, many parents do not realize that they have the power to opt out of the neighborhood school to find a situation that provides a better fit with their child’s needs.

In fact, the time has never been better for parents and children who discover that their local public schools are not working for them. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 provided new ways open for a variety of educational options. Since the passage of the act, many of these new and expanded options have become a reality in most communities.

This federal law allows parents to take advantage of free tutoring if their child attends a Title 1 school (a school that has been identified as needing improvement) for an extended period of time. And it provides some protections for homeschooling parents as well.

Thanks to this law, it is even possible to take children out of the local public school while keeping them within the public school system. The No Child Left Behind Act allows parents the option of choosing another public school if the school their child attends is unsafe. It allows for the development of diverse magnet schools within school districts; these schools pull students from a wider geographic area in order to focus on a particular educational focus. It even supports the growth of independent charter schools.

Charter schools are public schools that operate with freedom from many of the local and state regulations that apply to traditional public schools. Charter schools allow parents, community leaders, educational entrepreneurs, and others the flexibility to innovate and provide students with increased educational options while remaining connected to the public school system. Charter schools are sponsored by local, state, or other organizations that monitor their quality. For more on charter schools, see this informative US Charter Schools website .

The forms that charter schools take vary widely. Some emphasize technology, foreign language, or specific trade preparation. Others spring from a particular educational philosophy, like Waldorf or Montessori. Still others, like Innovative Education Management schools in California, provide families with a way to homeschool within a charter school.

There are other options outside the public school system as well. There are private schools, including church-related schools. And there is homeschooling, which today takes many forms.

If you are interested in learning more about your choices, call your local school district office. They are required by law to provide you with information on your local options. You can get more in-depth information directly from the www2.ed.gov/nclb/choice/schools/choicefacts.html US Department of Education as well.

So, if you are hearing “I hate school,” take heart. Today many parents are finding great new paths to help their child thrive, learn, and excel – and you can too!

Parent Choice: The Path to Better Education

Parent Driven Schools has long advocated for parents’ choice in the education of their children. After all, who is most motivated to make our educational systems the best they can possibly be? It’s not the educators, the administrators, or the politicians. It’s the parents!

Parents vote with their feet. They move their families to cities and neighborhoods where the schools are known to be good. They seek out charter schools that are a better for their child than the neighborhood schools. They home-school, too, in ever-increasing numbers.

Here at Parent Driven Schools, we are strong supporters of parent choice in the education of their children. We recognize that there’s no one right answer for all children, and we know from experience that parents are in the best position to make educational decisions. That’s why we want every family to be informed and empowered to make the best possible decisions. Following are a few tools and web sites that can help:

• Greatschools.org publishes annual School Chooser guides and distributes them at no cost to thousands of parents so they can make more informed choices about where to send their children to school.
• The US Department of Education provides a webcast called New Tools for Parents: Getting Informed & Getting Involved.  This webcast highlights the benefits of The No Child Left Behind Act, which provides parents with access to a greater range of educational options, including free tutoring programs, charter schools, and scholarships for low-income students. Another US Department of Education webcast, Charter Schools and School Choice, provides a more in-depth look at charter schools. The US Department of Education publicly states that “charter schools, in particular, have become increasingly appealing to parents, and for good reason—as laboratories for new educational strategies, these flexible schools improve education for everyone in the system and offer innovative places for children to achieve at their highest possible levels.”
• The homeschooling movement, while strong, is somewhat more diverse. Some resources for parents considering homeschooling include the Homeschooling section of About.com, Homeschool.com, and Classical Christian Homeschooling.
• Independent study charter schools are yet another option, offering benefits of both charter schools and homeschooling. For examples, see Innovative Education Management (IEM) Charter Schools, Sky Mountain Charter School  and Ocean Grove Charter School . IEM has been successfully developing and operating California charter schools for many years.
• Call our free HelpLine anytime during business hours. Our support specialists provide free information, ideas and resources for parents making educational decisions or experiencing difficulty working with their child’s school. The HelpLine phone number is (800) 893-6199.

Why is Individualizing Education So Important?

In today’s public schools, standardized tests are given annually. All of the children in the same grade are expected to perform well. To make sure they do, teachers are focusing more and more on teaching to those tests. The goal is to spend the most time possible focused on the topics that are addressed in these tests.

Increasingly, brain research is showing that this approach is misguided. Take, for example, the National Institutes of Health study published in Neuroimage in 2007. This study found that boys’ and girls’ brain structures develop in different sequences. Specifically, these researchers found that while areas of the brain involved in language mature about six years earlier in girls, areas involved in spatial memory mature about four years earlier in boys. Could this be why we hear teen-aged girls complain about math being so hard? And teen-aged boys complaining that poetry is girls’ stuff? It seems so.

However, we are not likely to see public schools separate students into classes by gender. But the more you look at the data, the more it really would make sense to do so. Then again, there are many more kinds of learning differences in any given classroom. For example, we have many  children who have been identified as having learning disabilities, and more who seem to be significantly challenged, although we’re not sure why. Even in the same child, we may find giftedness in regard to math and difficulty keeping up with reading, for example. We have children who do well as long as everything is presented in an auditory fashion, or with opportunity for hands-on exploration. Children who seem to need to move, and children who need quiet to think. The variety of unique needs to be met in each classroom is fairly astounding.

It’s a shame that our public schools are so bent on standardized testing. We can only imagine what heights our children might reach if, rather than teaching to the test, we pitched our lessons in the ways that are best suited each child’s unique profile of interests, strengths and challenges.

By Kathleen Bowers

In these days when education reform has become a rallying cry across the country, when classroom sizes are rising and schools are understaffed, parents need more help than ever before. At Parent Driven Schools, we have always believed in the importance of empowering parents, our children’s first and best teachers.

There is so much we can all do to ensure that our children are learning – and that they are developing a love for learning as well. Teaching opportunities are all around us, every day. There are many lessons we can build into our children’s everyday experience, building their confidence and mastery in areas that range from math and science to reading and following directions. By incorporating learning activities into our daily lives, we can support our children’s development as learners as well as their mastery of core subjects.

Math Resources
One of the most natural ways to approach math concepts is to invite your child to work with you in the kitchen. Just about all cooking calls for measurement. More advanced skills are required for conversions between units of measurements (tablespoons to cups, for example), and for adjusting recipes in order to make more, or fewer, portions. (For more on math in the kitchen, seethis page) and this page.

Science Resources
Science is all around us too. The San Francisco science museum, Exploratorium, provides a wonderful web page filled with hands-on science activities to try. More resources for hands-on science activities can be found here, here and here. Tryscience.org is a wonderful resource as well.

Language Arts Resources
Reading is fundamental to so much of our daily lives. From labels and signs to books and magazines, words are all around us. National and international studies show that many children experience difficulty with language arts simply because reading is not part of their home life. Parents who read in front of and to their young children have a huge impact on later literacy. While this includes books, there are many other ways to incorporate reading together into daily life too. Here is a list of reading activities, information on promoting reading skills, and more resources that may be useful in thinking about how to make reading a greater part of your family life.

Do you have favorite online resources for family learning? Or have you had success with particular strategies for learning at home? Leave a comment to share your ideas with other parents and teachers.

If your child wants to go to college, she will probably need to take the SAT. To do well on that test, she will need to take certain courses in high school. And to get into those classes, she will need a good foundation in middle school and elementary school. It’s never too early to be thinking about how to support your child’s educational path!

Parent Driven Schools has long advocated for parent involvement in education. We teach parents how to develop a learning plan early on, and to support the child in refining, and making that plan her own, over time. Many parents have never heard of a learning plan, however. You might wonder what to include. Here are some prompts to help you get started.

1. Think about your child’s unique set of interests, strengths, challenges and needs.
a. What academic, athletic or other abilities does your child possess?
b. What are your child’s strongest interests?
c. What is your child’s predominant learning style? (Unfamiliar with learning styles? Go here for information.)
d. In what academic areas does your child need extra help?
e. In what areas do you think your child will excel?
Note: Parent Driven Schools has developed the Interests and Abilities Map (IAM), a tool to help you better understand and respond to your child’s unique set of interests, strengths, challenges and needs. Take the IAM with your child.

2. Consider your values.
a. What are your hopes for your child?
b. What would the ideal school be like, in your opinion? What kind of school philosophy or mission resonates with you?
c. Is it important to you to choose a school where you can be part of the leadership team? Or one where you will be allowed to participate in the classroom?
d. Do you want a school that embraces certain cultural or religious values?
e. Do you want a school that embraces cultural and religious differences?
f. What extracurricular activities will you provide for your child if they are not available at the school?

3. Compare schools.
a. What programs would be available at the ideal school for your child?
b. Does school size matter to you? How about class size?
c. Do you prefer a neighborhood school, chartered public school, private school or district-based public school?
d. How about a single-sex school?

4. Make it concrete.
a. Write down your answers to the questions above. This is your child’s first learning plan! You will find this a useful document to come back to as you go through the processes of choosing a school, communicating with teachers, and enrolling in extracurricular activities.
b. Share the highlights of the learning plan with your child’s teacher. Don’t be shy about sharing your expectations as well as any concerns. Remember: You are your child’s best advocate!
c. Keep your learning plan in a safe place. Modify it as needed, and review it at least once a year.

5. Use the plan.
a. Continually create and seek learning experiences that support your child’s unique set of interests, strengths and challenges. Use the plan as a guide when planning family activities, buying toys, selecting after-school classes and choosing a summer camp.
b. If at any point you find that your child is not challenged, or is falling behind or unhappy at school, communicate with the teacher.
c. Use the learning plan to help you communicate problems in the fit between your child’s unique set of interests and abilities and the classroom experience.

6. Support the process by making sure your child knows:
a. You believe that education is important.
b. Homework has to be done.
c. They have a special place of their own, with all the necessary supplies, for studying.
d. You believe in them. Remind them of their achievements and successes.
e. They don’t have to be perfect. No one is!

Parents are sometimes reluctant to contact their child’s teachers for fear that they may be seen as meddling, overly concerned, or pushy. Meanwhile, many teachers are wishing they’d hear from parents more often!

A 2004 EPIC-MRA study of parent-teacher interaction found that by high school, very few parents were in contact with teachers (only 2 out of 240). The teachers involved in this study conveyed their concerns about this low level of parent contact, and they made the following comments:

“The more you communicate with parents, the better it is for the kids.”

“It is imperative that we gain more access to communication with parents. Parents can be a school’s biggest ally.”

“Show me a child who has parental love and support and I see a successful child…. Parents, get involved and be involved!”

“I wish there was a way to convey to parents what a teacher really does.”

“Communication is the answer. Many parents who criticize schools never set foot in them during the school day.”

“We have to shout this message loud to parents…. ‘Talk to the teachers’.”

At Parent Driven Schools, we believe that parent-teacher partnerships are essential for student success. Neither parents nor teachers can do it alone. And when students run into learning problems of any kind, a strong parent-teacher partnership can not only solve the immediate problems, it can literally change a child’s life.

Listen to the brief video clips below as two children comment on how their learning experiences changed when their parents and teachers came together to create plans to solve the problems they were having in school.

Student video clip #1:

Student video clip #2:

Does your child complain about school?
Is she struggling to keep up?
Is she bored?

Parent Driven Schools provides parents with an excellent resource, a free hotline for questions and concerns regarding your child’s school experiences, needs, and challenges. Call 800-893-6199.
We’re here to help with your child’s education.

Parent Driven Schools’ web site.
Innovative Education Management web site.

Hear what teachers and students are saying about Individual Learning Plans! This revolutionary new approach to learning puts the child’s unique set of skills and interests at the center of the learning experience.

Would you like to see this whole award-winning documentary? Send an email to kbowers@parentdrivenschools.com, with your name and address, and ask for a free copy of Creating Lifelong Learners.

Take a look at this clip from the new Parent Driven Schools documentary, Creating Lifelong Learners. In this clip, Robert W. Ginther, Asst. Superintendent of Schools, offers his opinions on why individualization is so important. Ginther draws on 34 years of experience in public education to explain the problem and offer some potential solutions.

Would you like to see the whole documentary? See more clips on YouTube (type in PDSparentdriven to see all of the clips, including whole chapters) or end an email with your name and mailing address to kbowers@parentdrivenschools.com for your own free copy of the whole video.

The individual learning plan (ILP) is a new concept that is catching on.

The ILP is something like the familiar IEP designed for students with learning barriers — except that it is designed to meet the needs of all students. It addresses the student’s strengths, learning styles, and interests, as well as barriers and challenges.

Why do we need an individual learning plan for each child? Simply because, in order to best meet the needs of each child, we need to discover and address his or her unique set of skills, interests and challenges.

Teachers who have piloted the ILP are now telling us how well it is working for them. Teacher Jessie Vickers is one of the few instructors who has used ILPs now for several years. See what Ms. Vickers has to say about the experience: