Honest Abe
Inspired by the King of American rhetoric, the President who ended slavery, I present one option by which we might free our own children.
My history classes just finished a study of the Civil War. We read and annotated Lincoln’s House Divided Speech at Peoria, an excerpt of “On the Constitution and the Union”, the Emancipation Proclamation, his Address to the Republican Convention, the First and Second Inaugurals and the Gettysburg Address, of course.
If you know Lincoln, REALLY know Lincoln — you know he was one cagey operator. I’m more a DiLorenzo Lincolnian than a Meacham Lincolnian, but nobody denies the impact of old Abe. He was self-educated, well-read, and politically savvy. It’s your turn to flex those same muscles, for the sake of your kid. Introducing: Honest Abe, strategy one of four1 dealing with teacher ideologues.
I would like to note here that of my four strategies, this one plays pretty tightly to the school game. It’s time-intensive, but less risky than the other three plays I offer if you’re bound and determined to see your kid off to a four-year college straight out of high school. While I’m giving you a game plan that can be effective, I hope it doesn’t work too well: we need as many of the governed as possible denying consent to turn public education around.
Teachers work 185 to the typical worker’s 240 days. Yes, the job is hard, but the lack of accountability baked into the system through tenure and, now, equity- and skills-based grading mean every teacher can minimize her workload. Modern K12 policies make effective teaching difficult. The move away from content knowledge and toward mastery-based learning render classrooms more chaotic. Skill levels in the classroom vary widely. Behavior standards are rarely enforced in a way that disincentivizes future offenses. The typical teacher is surviving, not thriving, and she is stressed.
Since tenured teachers have little incentive to work toward excellence, especially given the headwinds under which they labor, they’re not going home and studying Paolo Freire every night in order to better implement the praxis of critical pedagogy in their classrooms. In fact, you can safely bet the beliefs they share aren’t based on rigorous study. Rather, they’re often the residue of other people’s strongly held beliefs “learned” during their easy-major, attendance-optional college years, nudges from social media, and suggestions from their employers. That’s good news. It means you’re taking the fight to people who aren’t that committed to it — they’re far, far more committed to keeping that 185-day work year and the perquisites that come with it.
Still, you’ll have to significantly increase your involvement in your child’s education if you want to ensure your family’s beliefs and values supersede any attempts at indoctrination from activist teachers or from District-mandated classroom protocols and curricula.
Please note: if you don’t have a great relationship with your child (or full custody), this path will be difficult. You’ll need to discuss her classes every day. While any talking and teaching from you is better than none, if you can’t check in daily, there will be things she doesn’t tell you that will catch you by surprise and could blow up on both of you later.
The main goal of this strategy is to get you to teach your kid. That’s a crappy ask in the face of tax rates that, in some locations, are north of 40%, but you can’t send your kid to Rome 36 weeks a year for 13 years (17+ with college) and expect that she won’t return a Roman.
Beginning of the Year
On the first day of junior high/high school, your child will receive a course description or syllabus from the teacher. The teacher will go over it in class. No student will have any questions because most kids have learned that these pieces of paper are totally meaningless.
When your kid gets home that day, gather all the syllabi and review them with her. Read through each syllabus, paying special attention to any parts about essays and projects. Annotate it. Then take a picture of any notes or questions you wrote about the document.
Most teachers require students to return to school with the syllabus signed, or a tear off sheet with a signature line. On whatever paper is returned to the teacher, write two questions:
“Where can I find the rubrics for essays and projects?” and
“Are essay rewrites/test retakes available to students?”
This is your Get Out of Jail Free card. Most activist teachers are also believers in Grading for Equity, so they generally allow late work, retakes, and alternate ways of knowing (LOL) in their classrooms — it’s another method to virtue signal their ideology without actually having to study it.
If the curriculum or teaching practices mandated by the District are at issue rather than the instructor, it puts you in an even better position because NO principal wants a whiny, yell-y parent in their office very often. You, my friend, will become that parent, but you will start out reasonably; you’ve got to build up to ugly Mom/Dad.
Do not sign the syllabus. On the signature line, write “I have a few questions. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.” Highlight it. Snap a picture of it with your phone. Return it, without your signature. If the teacher doesn’t notice your signature is missing (95% chance of that happening) and never reaches out to you, despite your written request, you can make that known to the principal at a later meeting.
The Introduction
In that first or second week of school, send a short, friendly email to the teacher to let her know that your family’s goal is to ensure your child has the best odds of acceptance to the most competitive in-state universities. You’ll be working with your kid every day after school on all assignments and reviewing them all to check on the quality of your kid’s learning, so you’ll need copies of the rubrics (also sometimes called scoring guides) the teacher uses to grade essays and projects. Most schools have agreed-upon rubrics they are supposed to release to students before the work is graded. The Common Core recommends these rubrics. Unless she’s a brand new teacher, the teacher should have rubrics already. If she says she grades holistically, leave it for now, but save the email.
If she sends rubrics, thank her and let her know how your kid is excited to begin learning from her. If she doesn’t send them to you, wait until a paper is assigned and request them again, reminding her of your family goal.
In taking this small step, you’re going to make the teacher more cautious. She’s not going to know where you fall politically. This may be enough of a disincentive to prevent a teacher who’s not fully committed to any ideology from assigning any truly objectionable, one-sided drivel. You could be doing a favor for every kid in every class (I used to teach 5 periods of 35+ kids) that teacher runs. It may make her hesitate to push hard on any issue in class discussions. It may push her to look critically at her essay prompts and project directions to ensure that they aren’t political. When she grades your kid’s work, she’s going to do so very carefully because she knows you’re engaged and watching. Importantly, it may make her hesitate to hand out anything that pushes any doctrine hard without also offering an honest treatment of the other side.
But in the case of teachers who are “Just Following Orders” or who are committed ideologues, you can’t stop here.
Checking In
Here’s the part most families struggle with: the daily check-in. It’s also the part where you could have the most fun and will likely have the biggest payoff. It’s this strategy’s Spoonful of Sugar.
Find a time and place to ask your kid about the topics covered in class every day — this is easy if you’re checking her planner.
Get your kid a planner and make it a clear expectation that she record her assignments and their due dates every day, in every class. That should be the ONLY academic habit you sweat. If you can get your kid to make a habit of writing down assignments so she doesn’t have to remember them, she’ll have a much easier time getting through school — and succeeding in life. If she fails to record assignments, restrict whatever “fun” you can until she successfully records her assignments the following school day, then immediately lift the restriction. Be explicit about why taking away fun as a result of failure to record her work is a natural consequence. Often, our disorganization results in missed opportunities and/or a much harder, less-fun life. Tell her you’re doing this because task organization is one of the best skills a human can develop. (If you want to read more about why this is such a crucial habit, I strongly recommend Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen.)
As you go through her planner, you’ll want her to pull the assignments and readings out of her backpack. You may also need a computer to check assignments teachers post to Google Classroom or the school’s Learning Management System (LMS). The planner and her assignments/readings will drive your nightly conversation. You may get access to the teachers’ Daily Agendas this way, maybe not, but as you review with your child, you’ll have the opportunity to talk through things with her.
While we want to raise independent children and wish we could be shed of ever dealing with schoolwork again, this is where the rubber meets the road. The daily check-in has two goals:
It gives you a clear view into the content (and quality) of your child’s education, and
It will open up conversations with your kid, giving you the opportunity to strengthen your relationship and teach her why your family values are what they are while you get to know what and how she thinks.
Though your child has been in school for many years now you may discover that she doesn’t know much. I’m not saying that she’s not smart, I’m saying she hasn’t been asked to really learn anything. She will know how to get work done. She will know what to do with Google Suite for Education and Padlet and YouTube. She will know not to press the teacher too hard. She will know how to keep her head down and avoid bullies (probably — although that’s getting tougher.)
She may not know much about science, history, or literature unless she is an independent reader. Even then I’ve noticed that many student readers are mired in escapist fantasy, sci fi, or graphic novels that don’t ask much of them intellectually.
This is a complex topic, but in my experience, when kids don’t know much, they lack the neural hooks to which new information can be connected. If kids know little about the American Revolution, understanding of the Articles of Confederation, then the split between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists and the Constitution and the causes of the Civil War is hard-won. If they don’t understand the earth’s movement through space, they won’t understand seasons, they won’t understand wind, they won’t understand the progression of day to night, they won’t understand gravitational force, etc. Everything hinges upon prior learning. If students don’t have much information in their heads to make connections between different topics and disciplines, they’re attempting to build an education on an off-balance Jenga tower with no supporting structure. Given the incentives in place in schools, it is the rare child who can recall facts from a course taken (and earned an A in) the previous year.
A dad concerned about his kids’ schooling in a big metro nearby reached out following Paul Rossi’s interview of me for the Terra Firma teaching alliance. In the video, I recommended parents pick up a used copy of What Your ___ Grader Needs to Know (depending on grade level) by E.D. Hirsch. The books are compendia of basic facts and cultural knowledge, sometimes referred to as cultural capital, that build a solid foundation for learning at higher levels and, crucially, citizenship. This man flipped through the book and became deeply dismayed. He told me, “My gifted daughter knows very little of this and my son knows almost nothing.”
You shouldn’t have to do this, but you’re going to have to tutor your kid in what used to be common knowledge. The shift to child-centered learning and the emphasis on discovery, inquiry, and skills-based/mastery-based learning mean that curricula are weakened to be more inclusive in the (very) mixed-ability classroom. Because of social promotion, the system has no accountability for ensuring students have even basic knowledge. Classroom teachers often provide little factual information, sticking to simple texts or straight lecture to teach reading, writing, and math skills. Teaching facts is passé.
So when your kid says, “I don’t get this,” default to the most common explanation: she needs more background knowledge on the topic. This is a great time to find videos and watch them together, then help her work through her homework.
She’ll want you to leave her alone to do it herself. And here’s where this can get uncomfortable and where you may have to do some serious parenting. If you allow your child to do it all by herself when she lacks an adequate knowledge-base, she’s going to do one of three things:
ask a friend to give her the answers,
look the answers up online to copy-paste (there is no application here, so we can’t call this learning), or
do it terribly, knowing odds are that the teacher won’t actually read her work.
She’s going to be seriously annoyed that you don’t trust her to do the work. She’s probably going to fight you. (Start this process as early as possible; that way your kid will see it as what it is and should be: parenting.) She’s going to tell you the teacher doesn’t care, that it doesn’t matter, that it’s just a worksheet.
And she’s right about all of that.
But if you follow the Honest Abe strategy, you ensure your kid gets a real education where you are her most important teacher — which you are anyway, it’s just a question of what she learns from you (who has an enormous stake in her long-term success) versus what she takes away from people who will most likely forget her as soon as she leaves at the end of the year.
Do Your Homework, Mom
If your child has assigned readings for class, ask to see the hard copies. If they’re digital, she can send you screenshots of Google Classroom and/or links to the material. Read the books your kid is reading. Read the articles she brings home. Read the textbook with her. Caveat: most teachers at this point don’t really require reading, even if they assign it. (I explain why here, but the gist of it is that so many kids won’t — possibly because they can’t — read, teachers have given up and use slide decks to “cover” the reading rather than ask students to complete assignments assessing their understanding of the texts.)
In terms of defending your family’s beliefs, reading what your child is assigned is the most important step, but keep in mind that readings she brings home will not reflect everything said in class. The readings, though, are an important indicator of which way the class is leaning. Conservative families seem more aware of this, but liberal-progressive families: you need to supervise too. I would be remiss if I failed to mention the teachers who use their classroom to proselytize from the right as well. I’ve seen this in multiple workplaces; one of my ex-colleagues got fired for it — and it’s hard to fire a teacher in California, so you know she’d moved far beyond the pale.
Something to Talk About
Now the real work begins — but it should become fun as you discover who your child is becoming and share how you learned to be who you are.
After you review her assignments, readings, handouts, slide decks, etc., ask her how she perceives what she’s reading. Question gently. If she gets angry or frustrated, genteelly change the subject or move on. Go for a walk and talk. Prepare a meal together and talk. Ask her to help set the table and talk. Sit at the dinner table and talk. As she gets used to talking about what she’s learning, she’ll lean into both the dialogue with you and her learning on the whole. You’ll be her primary teacher of productive dialogue. Either way, she will cherish this time—if not now, eventually. Regardless of the feelings she expresses initially, persist. This is parenting. Despite claims to the contrary, your child needs you to teach her with all the fidelity you can muster.
These conversations may alert you to the fact that your kid isn’t a good reader. You can help with this. Read aloud to her. Wherever you can, offer background information. If you don’t know much about a topic, seek out people who do. YouTube is great for this; many of the top minds in all fields are accessible free here. Your public library is a wonderful source of support too — but you really have to make reading a priority. Outside a learning disability, comprehension difficulties in older children arise from a lack of background knowledge, i.e., vocabulary. Most teachers cannot effectively deal with this in a class of 35, but you can do it one-on-one.
As you dig into the material from her school, come up with questions together about what she’s studying. Two kinds of questions are paramount in education: clarifying and deepening questions. Any areas of confusion should be noted as you read. Annotate readings. If you have time, seek out answers, but a lot of the value of questioning is in the exercise of critically assessing your own areas of weakness. The ability to pinpoint what you don’t know and where you need more information is the crux of an education — it’s wholly dependent on the learner’s ability to recognize and then her willingness to seek out answers that aren’t readily available.
As you read, remember that the conversation isn’t just between you and your kid, you’re conversing with the author too. If your kid wonders how a writer came to a conclusion, note it. If she has a tangentially related question, write it down for later examination. That right there — the ability to make connections to something completely different, is where the human brain shines. The more interconnections between different ideas and topics, the deeper the learning. If you can dig into those connections, comparing and contrasting two ideas or two concepts your child sees as related, examining how they connect and the underlying strength of their connection, the easier it will be for your child to remember. And that’s a huge bonus because the more you know, the more you can know. The better her recall, the stronger the foundation for future learning across all disciplines.
Deepening questions are the kind that add nuance to understanding. They question why the author chose certain words. They question the author’s premises. They question the arguments and rhetoric of the writer. They include areas of curiosity and wonder and allow for additional research into dissenting work. One of the major issues with public education is that, because of our mixed ability classrooms, there is rarely a spare moment for deeper questions or tangential discussions. You may not always have the time to encourage your kid to question critically and do additional reading on a topic, but when you have it, take the opportunity. If learning is supposed to happen at scale, it’s schooling. When you individualize learning, it becomes education.
Regardless of whether your child feels comfortable asking her teacher the questions you generate at home, the valuing her curiosity and helping her develop the skill of crafting excellent questions is an end unto itself, one lost in the modern schoolhouse. Citizenship demands these abilities. If you’ve read any of my other essays or follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I believe modern K12 is designed to prevent real citizenship. As if there wasn’t enough on your shoulders, mom and dad, the fate of our nation depends on your ability to crate the conditions and help your child develop the skills conducive to a real education; they are no longer present in American schools.
What I’m about to say comes from a place of care and with all due respect: if you aren’t invested enough to discuss what your kid is reading, then you’ve already lost. Most teachers sermonize in class not because they’re committed ideologues, but because they have minutes to fill and aren’t familiar enough with the complexities of their content to discourse intelligently on them. They don’t plan lessons well, if at all. To be fair, frequent classroom interruptions, the ubiquity of cell phones, the total lack of administrative support for teachers when it comes to classroom discipline, and worst of all, the misguided initiative to put a laptop or tablet into the hands of every student all day as their primary instructional tool preclude drilling down into any subject. (Note: there is no better evidence that District leadership knows absolutely nothing about child development than the 1:1 device policy.) You must consider what is being presented to your child and consider how it could be weaponized against your family’s values and beliefs.
Preventing Punitive Grading
You may not have to deal with unfair grading in the modern middle or high school. It is the rare teacher who assigns writing. Teachers usually lean on multiple-choice tests or individualized projects which usually end up taking the form of thrown-together-at-the-last-minute slide-deck presentations that are softly graded because they take up a week of time for which the teacher would otherwise have to prepare lessons.
Grading for equity has gained primacy in many classrooms, so even if your child fails an exam, she almost certainly can retake it or do some other assignment to bring her grade up. Your child might write three papers in her English class (one per quarter, with the last one cancelled because they’ve “run out of time”), but the odds are good that she’ll never be asked to write a real essay outside of English. If she is, there’s a very good chance it will only be graded cursorily.
With that major (and infuriating) proviso out of the way, let’s talk about how you might prevent a teacher from punishing your kid for Wrongthink on an assignment with room for subjective grading, such as an analytical or argument essay.
When your child gets her first essay assignment (which you’ll know if you’re checking her planner, keeping up with Google Classroom, and periodically going over the online gradebook with her in order to stay on top of any major upcoming assignments or tests) make sure you two go over the directions and the rubric/scoring guide for the assignment. If the essay has been assigned, but no rubric/scoring guide has been provided, reach out to the teacher and ask for it, letting her know that you’ll be working with your child to help her produce her best work over time.
Break down the essay or project directions into manageable parts and help her draft a response honest about her thoughts and ideas and true to her values. Essays are a high-value assignment. The process of writing forces the learner to deal with areas of weak understanding — without addressing them, the paper will generally be trash. Essays done well force a kid to learn recursively. Students write what they think, recognize their thoughts aren’t that great, then review the material and revise their writing until they’ve fleshed their ideas out. Wrestling with material gives a learner ownership of it. If your kids aren’t writing, they’re probably not learning very deeply.
Hopefully, all the essay prompts your child receives are normal, simply asking her to argue for a position regarding a topic about which she’s learned. This will make your support of her writing a truly educational venture, where you point out areas that need more explanation or nuance and help her with her English mechanics, usage, and grammar.
However, if the prompt is biased toward a particular reading of the text or an ideology, ask your child to respectfully ask the teacher if she can write to a closely related, but more neutral prompt. For example, a prompt like “After reading the attached article detailing how Atticus Finch is an artifact of white supremacy, explain how the author came to that conclusion using evidence from the novel” could be modified to “Using evidence from the attached critical essay, to what extent do you support the author’s argument that Atticus Finch is an artifact of white supremacy? Be sure to include evidence from the novel and the provided essay in your analysis.” You and your child must come up with the alternate prompt.2 Most teachers will respond positively to requests for a modified prompt if you can present them with a Yes/No binary. Remember: in a mastery-based classroom, assessment should be based on demonstration of skill, not the fidelity with which a student regurgitates the teacher’s beliefs.
When your child requests this modification, she should be honest about why. She should briefly explain that to write this paper in strict accordance with the prompt, she would be forced to argue a position with which she disagrees, which would be dishonest. You may have to reach middle ground here by having your child offer to make the argument as requested (steelman it), then add counterarguments. This will force your child to do more work than her peers — but that’s great training in thinking and argumentation.
Even when you’ve done the work to make getting to yes easier for the teacher, there are no guarantees. I had a colleague who was an excellent teacher, but so committed to social justice that those themes dominated every assignment in her AP English class. Their final research paper for the course, one that composed a huge chunk of the overall grade, was mandated to be on a social justice movement. Students were pointed in the direction of Black Lives Matter, Transgender rights, Reparations, Defund the Police, and the like. One of my students asked if she could write about human trafficking. The teacher told her no; she had to stick with one of the suggested areas of research. Could this child have followed her teacher’s directions while holding true to her beliefs by fairly dealing with the problematic aspects of those movements? Sure. Would she have been punished? I don’t know. She was too afraid of what it would happen to her grade if she fought the teacher.
In a case like this, it may be time to schedule a conversation with the school principal about the First Amendment and coerced speech. Be courageous. Keep in mind that you may end up protecting multiple students, not just your own. However, you run a risk here. Your action may subject your child to repercussions you won’t see and are nearly impossible to prove. This could take the form of different treatment in class, it could mean your child is publicly shamed by the teacher, and/or it may mean some of her classmates turn on her. It will almost certainly mean that other teachers will be told your family is annoying, crazy, backward, or any other number of pejoratives I’ve heard in department meetings. Such gossip may change how other teachers respond to your child as well. Of course, your kiddo may never report anything like this to you for fear you’ll return to the principal’s office and make it worse. Understand that it’s fair for her to assume that it will get worse; she’s spent a significant portion of her life watching teachers get away with bad behavior. Disciplining teachers is a nearly impossible process in states with strong tenure protections and powerful teachers’ unions. If you escalate your complaints far enough, the principal may be willing to transfer your kid out of one teacher’s class, but nothing will happen to the teacher, your kid will be marked, and the next teacher might not be any better.
One of the costs of running Honest Abe is that your child may stop sharing what’s going on at school. She may beg you to just let her do what the teacher wants so she can melt into the background like all the other apathetic, compliant kids. She will say none of this matters, the teacher doesn’t even read it, and all she’s doing is putting herself in the line of fire. She may make the argument too many parents do: all that matters is your grade. You can just go along to get along. All of this is more true than any teacher wants to admit and all kids know it. While I think many teachers don’t care all that much about what any child believes (especially not after the school year is over), if you’re going up against a committed ideologue, there will be consequences for dissent. Hopefully, it’s nothing worse than a teacher being bratty in class, but you should keep in mind that, every day you send her in, she’s the one who has to carry that load. Some kids can pull it, others buckle under the pressure. There’s only so much you can do. If the principal and teacher band together, your family will be at their mercy for as long as you remain at that site.
If your child is unlucky enough to land in the classroom of an ideologue but gets past the minefield of asking for an adjusted prompt and writes her paper, carefully check that it addresses all parts of the prompt and addresses all the criteria on the rubric. You should have an idea of where your kid will land, score-wise. Yes, you will be doing the teacher’s job here. Get over it. She’s unbelievably lucky you’re willing to — your kid’s paper will be one of the few good ones she reads that isn’t cribbed wholesale off a website or drafted by AI.
You know who’s even luckier? Your kid.
Turn in the paper. Wait for the grade. (Note: this could take weeks.) If the grade is lower than you thought it should be given careful review of the prompt and rubric, your child should ask when she can turn in a rewrite based on the teacher’s feedback. If the paper comes back without comments, send your child in to ask for specific advice about how the paper could be improved. Your child should record all the teacher’s suggestions.
Some teachers will resist such a meeting. If the teacher opines that she can’t meet before school, at lunch, or after school, give back the graded essay and ask the teacher to add more specific comments about where she could improve when she has a moment. Since most school districts have adopted the principles of equitable grading, the teacher should be open to a rewrite. If she’s not, push back. The jargon you want to employ here is: “My kid genuinely wants to improve. Isn’t the important thing her growth rather than the timeline?” Go back to your original question about retakes/rewrites from the syllabus and remind the teacher that you asked about this but never received an answer. Ask your daughter if the teacher has allowed rewrites for other students. Record all of this so that you can present it to the principal if the teacher won’t accept a revision.
And here’s where things get easy for you, but are also fraudulent. In this situation, many teachers will ease up on their criticism of your child’s work. They will give back a few halfhearted comments and return the paper to your child. You will help her revise and she will be a better writer because of the work you do together. She will return the paper and will almost certainly get the higher grade. After that tête-à-tête your kid will always get high grades on her essays. The teacher will have learned that it’s more work for her to push her nonsense on your kid than it would be to keep the class plain vanilla. She may never actually read your kid’s papers again, bestowing the A or B right off the bat, knowing if she does she won’t have to deal with your stubborn kid or correspond with that kid's annoying, troglodyte parent. Besides, there are plenty of other kids she can influence.
In our current environment, that’s a win for your family, but only partially. You must maintain the daily check-ins so its your high standard your kid works to meet. Otherwise, you might inadvertently make it easier for the teacher to accept even less from your child.
If you choose Honest Abe, you’ll be running this play every school day, all year long. This will bring enormous, lifelong benefits to your child and your relationship, but it requires heavy lifting and you can’t back off of it. Some teachers seem normal at the beginning of the year, but are mad as hatters by March. If you think everything’s hunky-dory in November, you may be surprised to find out what’s happening in April if you wait until then to look again.
No, you didn’t sign up for this job, and you pay a lot in taxes for someone else to manage it, but you’ve got to supervise — too much is at stake for you to leave it to people who have repeatedly revealed utter contempt for parents. If you can muscle through, your kid will have a better education than all her peers. While many parents check on grades and check that homework is completed, few take the time to talk through their family’s beliefs and their own reasons for thinking the way they do vis a vis the things their child is exposed to at school. If all you’re concerned about are grades, the easiest way for your child to get good ones is to parrot back exactly what the teachers wants. All this trains is compliance. Going the Honest Abe route means your kid thinks about who she is, knows what she believes and why, learns to stand up for those beliefs, and sees that standing up has costs, but the courageous always win.
Besides — you can always ask for a rewrite under Grading for Equity policies.
The Takeaway
Honest Abe TL;DR:
Check your kid’s planner, Google Classroom account, and the teacher’s online gradebook every day.
Read everything your kid reads. You may need to help with her comprehension by reading out loud to her, explaining what words mean, teaching her relevant background information, and/or looking things up together.
Talk to her about everything. Ask her what she thinks. Tell her what you think and why.
Come up with questions about the material, both clarifying and deepening.
When given an ideologically-driven assignments, encourage your child to be honest about her beliefs, requesting minor modifications of assignments that don’t force her into a position she doesn’t really hold. Go to bat for her with the principal and fight for your child’s First Amendment rights, but know that you may not win. Encourage her to stand strong for what she believes.
Use Equitable Grading Practices to hoist them with their own petard. If the teacher grades your kid down, push for a rewrite after you exact feedback on how your kid could improve her skills. Skill-based/mastery-based learning should leave room for diversity of thought.
Honest Abe is meant to keep teachers and your kid honest. As you may realize, given the current dysfunction inherent in the American school system, this adds hours of work on top of an already long school/work day. It also can’t control for all the things your child may hear from the teacher, things the teacher may never put into print.
So I’m going to ask you to ask yourself a really important question: why are you sending your child into a building for 8 hours of “learning” knowing you may very well have to unravel a lot of it when she gets home?
What’s preventing you from completely taking charge of your child’s education? Or, better yet, letting her take control of it? Education without autonomy is schooling. The primary results of schooling are conformity and compliance which demolish the seeds of human greatness.
Case in point: I work at a great school with great curriculum and high standards for all students. One of my best students this year is unenrolling to return to homeschool. He has great grades, warm friendships, and is well-liked by his teachers and peers. When I asked him why he was leaving, he told me. “A lot of the school day is wasted time,” he said. “I haven’t learned nearly as much as I used to at home, so I have less time to pursue the things I’m really interested in learning that this school can’t teach me.”
Homeschool doesn’t have to mean sitting around a table for seven hours a day slogging through six classes of material and filling out worksheets. Grandma or another trusted adult can supervise reading and drawing and handwriting practice and play during the day while she teaches them to cook, clean up after themselves, and gives lots of grandma hugs (my abuelita was a master of all of this); parents can do the conversing and review of what their child has produced in the evening when they return home from work. Alternatively, learning can be concentrated on the weekends. For older kids, homeschool can mainly take the form of independent reading, talking about the reading, then writing about what was learned — the form education has taken for children for hundreds of years, usually aided by a single teacher or a parent. It can mean online math lessons and reading books across multiple disciplines to gain expertise in one topic. It can mean long walks in nature, sketchpads at the ready, observations noted. It opens up the day for volunteering, vocational training, entrepreneurship, play, and other experiences your child cannot access in the conventional K12 school day. More importantly, when your child’s education is under your family’s direction, she is never at the mercy of someone who can use the coercive power of grades to advance a favored narrative.
School provides an illusion of safe daily childcare with a bonus of learning. The problem is the education system has become so corrupt, we can’t trust that schools and teachers will leave parenting to parents: the people with actual skin in the game. I believe it is my moral duty to closely supervise the education of my own children. I removed my kids from “Distinguished” public schools that were wasting their time and habituating them to nonstop iPad use. I took a huge pay cut and we rejiggered our budget to move them into a school with teachers I know and trust and a curriculum that far surpasses what was available in our local schools — and I still review their schoolwork nightly. I spend time teaching them why we honor tradition, why the Western canon has enormous value to us all, why virtue matters, that we have a responsibility to preserve liberty and steward the planet for those who come after us, and that there are no shortcuts to greatness.
Few parents can do what I did, but all parents could remove children from the power of people who do not have their children’s best interests at heart, people who do not hesitate to openly denigrate families whose values differ from theirs. It takes hard work and sacrifice, but it absolutely can be done. At this point, if you want the same freedoms for your children that you enjoyed, I believe this work must be done.
Our duty is to our children. With the internet and/or a public library, you have everything it takes to teach your child; don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Remember: school trained you to do and believe as you’re told by the people in charge, just like it’s trying to train your kids. That might be the biggest fraud of all: the lie that someone else would do a better job teaching your children than you. Without the casual acceptance of that lie, ideologues would have no traction in American classrooms.
And my next strategy, is meant to do what all good American Rebels should consider it their patriotic duty to do: further undermine the stolen authority of self-appointed nobility. Coming soon: the Mockingbird.
If you’ve made it this far and don’t have the desire to curse me and my posterity, please hit the like button. This makes my posts more visible to other parents who don’t understand how much worse things have become since they left school. The system actively robs American children of their full potential in order to serve mediocre adults and maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.
I was going to go with four strategies, but I’m not sure I can make the Sisyphus Gambit work. I might make it an offshoot of the Mockingbird.
If you need help with this, DM me @educatedandfree on Twitter.
This is amazing. I'm a lifelong educator and I agree with every word. Tip No. 2 in the Takeaway section is also profound and wide-ranging: "Talk to [your child] about everything. Ask her what she thinks. Tell her what you think and why." This is key, not only to your child's education but getting to know your child, and having a real relationship with her. It's true for all members of the family, for that matter. How rarely this this happens, both in classrooms and families!