HOW-TO: KIDS EDUCATION
“The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve” by Peg Tyre (Henry Holt)
Like most parents I know, I spend as much time worrying about my kids’ educations as I do making sure my offspring are clean and well fed. Peg Tyre, also the author of “The Trouble With Boys,” would like to equip parents with the know-how to judge our kids’ classrooms better.
She knows we’re confused, fretful and uncertain about how to identify a good school. What should we look for at the preschool, elementary-school and middle-school levels? Is it so bad to teach to the test? What do a school’s test scores mean? How much training should teachers have and what kind? These are all reasonable questions. Tyre, to her credit, takes them seriously. She puts the culture of standardized tests into perspective and explains the limits of what those tests tell us.
If this book were an elementary school, though, it would land on the “needs improvement” list. Tyre recaps research on how kids learn to read and do math, and how teachers’ training often falls short, and I did learn a few things. But I wanted more detail and fewer generalizations of the “researchers say” variety.
For instance, Tyre mentions work done in the 1990s that, as she summarizes it, led to this startling conclusion: “Good teachers matter more than just about anything else in education.” This insight may be useful to parents who need their instincts validated, but it will surprise no one who has ever been near a classroom. Tyre is right to push us to ask questions about how our schools run and how they evaluate the people who teach our kids. She’s right, too, that serious parental involvement is “an important hallmark” of a good school. Bake sales alone will not transform a so-so school into an educational powerhouse.
And if we get involved and ask questions and Johnny still can’t read? We don’t have to blame ourselves. Just blame his teachers.
