Parental Responsibility and Education

Relative to the behavior model with its five dimensions, the problem is that so many other books and articles touch only on one of the dimensions or even a subset of a single dimension. They all come to the same conclusion in a more limited way. They agree that American society is handicapped by poor individual choices and faulty decisions; but only here, at Real American Solutions, is right behavior in all five key dimensions seen as the only way to get out of the hole that Americans keep digging for themselves and their country.

One example comes from John Rosemond, a columnist, public speaker, and author on parenting. “His weekly parenting column is syndicated in approximately 225 newspapers, and he has authored 15 books on the subject.” A common theme of many of his columns is the problem of parental responsibility.

Here is a recent example about eroding discipline in the schools. A “steady stream of missives from teachers, ex-teachers, and other folks who have insider knowledge of America's schools” tells him that “classroom discipline is falling apart” and no one seems to have the answer.

One factor adding to the problem is lack of support from school administrators. When a disruptive student is sent to the principal's office, they often return to class having “received a cookie or some other treat while they talked about their 'feelings.'” On top of that “almost every teacher says that when they call a parent about a child's behavior, the parent makes excuses or blames the teacher." As the problem gets worse, teachers demand smaller class size, increasing overall cost to taxpayers.

Compound those behaviors with teacher unions that have been given legal power to game the system, federal aid to education with strings attached and administrators too timid to back up teachers, and he predicts “that by 2030 nearly every public-school student will have a diagnosis of one sort or another.” This will be a strategy to increase the number of special needs children to maintain funding as responsible parents, many of them teachers themselves, continue to pull their kids from the public schools to send them to available alternatives. 

Ultimately, it all comes back to the parents. They are the ones who side with the child. They are the ones who put the fear of legal action on the administrators. They are the ones who take too little interest in their children’s education in general, passing it off to the teachers and after-school programs. Parental responsibility is at the heart of the problem; it's the answer everyone is looking for.