My daughter, the well-trained monkey

Standardized test questions:

1. What do you need to have a football game?
                (A) Matching uniforms

                (B) An electronic scoreboard

                (C) Players and a ball

                (D) Cheerleaders

               

2. Which of these do children need to learn?

(A)   A working knowledge of the school mission statement

(B)   Daily work habit data tracking

(C)   Books to explain the material they’re learning

(D)   Daily parent signatures in their school-funded FranklinCovey planner

Last night, I attended parent-teacher conferences at my child’s school. Thanks to Stephen Covey, our school no longer offers one-on-one interaction or feedback from my daughter's teacher; instead my daughter led me through our conference. In a cafeteria full of children, my child explained her leadership binder. We reviewed her goals and progress toward those goals. Her teacher bounced from family to family, trying to answer questions and address issues to the best of her ability in a crowded, noisy environment.

What did I learn during this conference? Nothing about my child’s grades that I didn’t already know from our daily discussions about her work. Nothing about my child’s teacher because she was too busy placating everyone to get to know me on any personal level. What I learned that my child spends a considerable amount of time charting progress against poorly-defined, irrelevant goals. I also discovered that she has learned the art of setting mediocre goals so, on paper, she always exceeds them without extra effort. She’s a well-trained corporate monkey

The kids have a school mission statement, a class mission statement, and a personal mission statement. They have homework and behavior data tracking, leadership roles and victories, and daily work habit reflections. They have everything except books.

Yep, you read that correctly. Our school system participates in The Leader in Me and is training my children in the art of corporate lingo, but won’t provide them with books they could use to learn. Instead, our school system only provides enough books for the classroom (not one per student) from sixth through twelfth grade.

Some (for our grade, some = ONE) of the books are available online. Perfect. We live in a high poverty area so, of course, each of these children can run home, pull out their new computer, and read their books over high speed internet. Is our school board really so out of touch with reality that they think that’s an option? Some of our population is so rural they don’t have access to high-speed internet and still have dial-up. That is not an exaggeration.

This means there is no book to study on test nights. No chapter that I, as a parent, can quiz my child over or review with her for content. Even the online book does not always work. Sometimes the website crashes. Other times it simply won’t load.

I’ve always been an advocate of public school. I don’t believe you fix a problem by running from it, but our schools are failing and our teachers know it. Our administration is so busy preaching politically-correct hogwash that they’ve completely ignored teaching our children to think. Mr. Superintendent, you are running a SCHOOL. You are selling out my children. You are not teaching them to become independent thinkers or supporting their intellectual pursuits; you are breeding sheep.

I'm lucky because my child gets the joke. After the conference last night, she made me a PowerPoint presentation in her free time. The irony of using PowerPoint to make a trained monkey slide did not escape her. When I clicked that slide, it made monkey hooting noises.

The biggest lie in leadership marketing is that everyone can be a leader. Leadership is not goal tracking or keeping checklists. Leadership is not using the word synergy correctly in a sentence – which my kids have been able to do since the second grade and it makes me want to vomit. Leadership is thinking for yourself and having the capability to analyze situations in ways that others cannot. It’s doing what is right REGARDLESS of what the people around you are doing. Leadership is standing up against a costly, ineffective school program and asking for BOOKS so my children can learn.

The chamber of commerce and school system have come together and paid so that each child can have a FranklinCovey planner. If I have to sign my child’s homework planner to make her accountable in sixth grade, I’ve already failed her. I have seven years left to help her before she leaves us for college. I have five years before she can leave my house in a car. Her homework at this age is not my responsibility, nor are her goals and progress towards them. Those are hers to own and do with as she wishes; my job is only to support her and provide the necessary tools for her to learn. However, she isn’t of the age where she can advocate for her own education, so I implore you, instead of a planner, would you please consider buying her science, math, and social studies books?