[pigsty]

My parents were straight D/F students and never helped me with classes at all. I would’ve appreciated help that would’ve let me go farther, but that’s at a point well past algebra.

Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.

[macspoofing]

Today we are graduating an unacceptably large numbers of functional illiterate kids from high school. If a kid graduates high school and they are functionally illiterate, that illustrates neglect by parents over many years. It has nothing to do with the academic background of said parents or whether they themselves can read or write. It has nothing to do with the state of public education, or the quality of teachers - the public system is good enough to teach literacy over 15 years of schooling. The quality of the public system may be important for the last mile of education (where you’re trying to provide kids a richer educational experience), but our bar for success is much much lower.

Put another way, you cannot convince me that the parents are not at fault when a kid can’t read or write after 15 years of education (after having sampled many many teachers and teaching styles, including summer school and remedial education, during that time).

[pigsty]

The kid is the one in class choosing not to read. Parents can be destructive influences on kids, but kids also do have free will and destructive influences amongst their peers who they choose to associate with.

It’s a compounding problem and each time we assign blame to one (1) thing, we’re leaving other causes untreated and not making the problem better at all.

[staunton]

Would you say that "if a child doesn't want to learn how to read, that's fine, their choice"?

[pigsty]

I’d say ask find out why they’re saying they don’t want to read and address all those causes.

There are plenty of kids with great parents who are surrounded by awful peers at school and media that glorifies being uneducated. Then you leave 2 bad kids in a class of good kids, and you’ll get endless distractions that cause the others to give up and resent school. You address just one cause and you have countless others. You need to go after a load of issues and it’s honestly more complicated than we want to admit.

[LeanderK]

If you pin every responsibility to the parents you are just leaving unlucky kids behind. Having someone to blame is not helping kids succeed without much support from the parents. Of course someone will always succeed despite the odds, but the odds are still stacked agains the poor kid. It just entrenches wealth and slows down social mobility.