Listening to the heated rhetoric about teachers, schools, funding and life in the United States and abroad, I am astonished at the paucity of solid research that informs this debate. Finland, we are told, ranks at the very top of the educational stats. Has anyone ever been to Finland, I wonder? What does a country with one of the highest literacy rates in the world, where 99% of the citizens are middle class, and the same religion, no diversity of race or ethnic background (with the singular exception of the Romany people – Gypsies) correlate to the US?
And why do we persist in believing that the reason children fail in school is all about the teachers? It remains today that the single best predictor of academic success is predicated on the educational level of their mother. Not their school, not their school’s teachers. In truth, the funamental fault line is what transpires in the home. It is the families.
And, what is wrong with us that we don’t look at the FIRST and most important teachers a child has – their parents? And that we aren’t examining the FIRST and most important school a child attends, which we call HOME?
