I’d work for headrights, though.

I think this is linked to the deep historical resistance to paying women at all for their work. Trevor Burnard and I made that point in an essay we published a few years ago: although many New World societies recognized their desperate need for European women’s labor, they all refused to offer women migrants the same incentives that male labor was offered (headrights, grants of land, etc.) It’s as if colonial proprietors–or school districts and educrats–expect women to show up for work anyway, and they’re completely flummoxed if the women refuse to show. They act as if women don’t respond to financial incentives or are immune to economics.

Ptolemy should have just told Galileo that “there’s research that shows” that the sun really, really does go around the earth. Why waste time on the graphs and appendices? Heck, it’s a waste of money to pay anybody anything to teach, when for merely repealing a few amendments, we could make them do it for free.

When I say “social policy,” I in fact mean social policy, or, to be more precise, I mean “social policies.” These include policies relating to early childhood development, social support for families and caregivers (i.e., generous parental leave, child care, etc.), housing, transportation, environmental policies. I assuredly do not mean that all the responsibility for ameliorating deleterious social and economic conditions should be left to schools. That is an absurd idea, and is indeed a manifestation of the problem.

If I was channeling my CPP this evening, I would unquestionably have a multitude of four-letter words (well, more like six-letter) to indicate how I feel about this perverse state of affairs. But my sense of social policy is assuredly not limited to expecting schools to resolve the widespread accumulation of disadvantage among the most marginalized groups.

@Daniel, but that’s how we got in this mess. Schools became the centerpiece for delivering services to kids (and their families) because it was the one place you could find them. The unintended consequence of this is that it may have caused parent disengagement from the schools primary function of education process and more of a focus on school as service delivery mechanism. (Which is not to say that I think the school lunch/breakfast program was a bad idea, but it’s success unleashed a lot of other bad programs that diluted schools’ core missions.

In wiftier fields like History you have to actually say things like: “…as Woody Holton has argued, ‘most of the Revolution-era state constitutions preserved the colonial policy of denying citizens the right to run for office unless they owned a certain amount of property…,’(Holton, _Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution_ (New York, Hill and Wang, 2007, at 170 [quotation], et. seq., and the notes found there).” Maybe us humanists should think about this new and punchier form of citation: viz., there’s research that shows, so give it up, baby…

Parental involvement is fine and not to be discounted, but it can happen in the home and other places too. Too many different lines (and categories) of authority figures tripping over each other and entangling in the hallways and music rooms might prove self-cancelling.

A lot of parents in this story–and in many other schools–see a lot of barriers between themselves and involvement in their children’s educations: language, lack of educational attainment on the parents’ parts, intimidation, etc. I think the programs detailed in this article sound fantastic. Anything schools can do to get the parents in the door, comfortable with teachers and staff, and eager to make the school into a space for community advancement and development is more than OK by me.