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Major problems in public education are being talked about these days like no other time in recent history.  Some of it justified and some of it is the response of the growing trend in America to pass off parental responsibilities on teachers and the school system due to the breakdown of the family.  I would like to focus on the parenting part.

How do major problems in public education get handled?  I would like to start with a situation I found myself in a few weeks ago.  In my city we have neighborhood associations.  At our last meeting, we had a school board supervisor come in to discuss problems.  Immediately, the parents were going off on how lousy the teachers are and how bad the supervisors are performing.  I couldn’t speak to the supervisors, because I couldn’t clearly understand what they were doing, but one thing I did know was that the teachers were young and fresh and ready to teach.  What I wasn’t hearing from the pareents was anyone asking what they as parents could do to help.  I got up and mentioned how I had 4 teenagers and all of them were doing well and asked the supervisor how many parents come for parent teacher conferences or to the parent teacher nights.  The room immediately went silent.  The supervisor thanked me for the question.  He said only 10% of the parents show up.  You see actually I knew this statistic. That’s why I sent my kids to the next town high school where parent participation was 90%.  The 2 schools are literally 5 miles apart.  My kids school has a 80% graduation rate and 60 % college attendance rate.  The school where these parents live has a 50 % drop out rate.

Major problems in public education quite often are directly related to lack of participation of the parents in their children’s education.  Oh, I heard some parents say well we both work, “how can we go to these meetings”?  I mentioned both my wife and myself work and we always go to the meetings.  Again, there was silence.  This pattern went on and on and each time I had to mention about the sacrifices my wife and I made to make sure my kids were in the top 10 % of their class.

I am not here to make myself sound like the worlds greatest parent.  But I do want to say your kids are your kids.  No one does care or should care about them as much as you do or should.  Major problems in public education stem primarily from parents forgetting that the family is the most important element in public education not the school.  Schools across the country have similar curriculum.  Often we see towns that are right next to each other where one town has 70 % going to college and the other has a 49% graduation rate from high school as is the case where I live.  In almost all the cases the difference is the parent participation level.

The bitter pill if you have kids, be a leader.  Raise the bar, go to meetings at school, not to complain but to get involved and watch the results skyrocket.

Dr. Robert Bocknek is a problem solving expert for parents and families.  See him at take back the home project, or keyboardculture.com or contact him directly at bocknek@takebackthehom.com.

I woke up this morning, had a cup of coffee, opened up the laptop to see what the world did last night while I was sleeping.  Lets see, Israel is blasting away at their terrorists, Hezbollah says they will join in.  In Pakistan they moved their troops to the Indian border because of their issues with the Mumbai tragedy only to have the Taliban come in to behead half a town where the Pakistani troops left.

So I’m thinking, to myself, how bad are American society problems.  Honestly, if I hadn’t read the news I would have thought really bad, but after having read the news I came to realize, all things taken into consideration, America will get by.  Then I opened up the financial section, and got to be feeling bad again.  This got me thinking, American society problems, whether I read the news or not are the same problems.  So what was the difference in my feelings about our situation?  It was my perception of the problems.

Continuing on this thought process, American society problems are going to be here regardless of what we do. We must be careful, then, what we are spending our time thinking about, talking about and listening to.  If our societal problems are overwhelming our sense of well being we must be focusing too much time on the negative news.  This is not to say we should be ignorant about the world.  Its just that humans need to be sure to not move into to helplessness because of the overwhelming nature of the world events.

If we extrapolate further from the American society problems to the American family problems we see a similar problem if we spend too much time worrying about what will happen to us during this economic downturn.  We will begin to approach overwhelm within our own family.  This mentality is a devastating place for the family.  Our family (your family) must survive!  So if family issues are arising, its critical to not focus on the overwhelming nature of the bad news that is everywhere.

When dealing with American society problems or American family problems it is essential to take a moment and actively think what can I do right now, today to assure that my family will be Okay tomorrow.  Then spend most of your time working on what you came up with.  We can’t solve all the problems today.  But like the axe hitting the tree, one hit doesn’t seem like it makes that big a difference.  If the axe keeps hitting the tree, the tree will eventually fall.  If we keeping taking actions to fix our family problems, one at a time, we will survive.

Dr. Robert Bocknek is “the Problem solving experts for families”.  For more questions or comments contact Dr. Bocknek at takebackthehome.com.  Dr. Bocknek is also an internationally renown speaker who can come to your company or church and give empowering courses at your facility.