"We need parents to engage ..."

Whenever people get together to talk about how to improve the education of our children, it isn't very long before someone says;

"We need to engage their parents."

There are a lot of aspects of a child's life that affect their participation in their education. And talking about aspects over which we have no control, is pointless.

Sure, lets do everything we reasonably can to engage parents, and every other thing we can do to improve a child's life outside of school.

But let us not seriously consider any plan, the success of which
depends on changing things that we cannot change.

We need, to the extent possible;
to provide everything a child needs to succeed at school,
at school,

because there will always be kids whose lives
hold no promise of ever meeting those needs.

This was brought home to me when I was chiding a student for not doing the homework that I had assigned. I found out later that the kid lived in a box on the back porch of his house.

Lets us not consider a plan that meets the need of children whose parents we can engage,
but does not address the needs of children who have no parents to engage.

We cannot focus only on reading and 'riting and 'rithmetic.

We cannot focus only on No Child Left Behind testing.

There is a very real possibility that path to success on NCLB
tests, and the path to addressing the real needs of children,
are diametrically opposite.

For me, I would rather graduate young adults who were decent human beings with decent values, and with a capacity to be effective and efficient lifelong learners,

than to graduate, or drop out, a bunch of burned out, disinterested, and unmotivated young adults with no real hope of amounting to anything;

even though they were once able to once pass a few tests
on reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic.