Families Last – The BLOB Is Trump Again In BC Education
(by Tunya Audain 20110815, comment to Report Card blog by Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver
Sun Education Reporter on “Conflict 101: Fall studies in B.C. public schools 20110812)
Oh, the cruelty of the welfare state! The more it says it helps families the more it disempowers
and disables. As some of us parents in the 70s used to say – “The helping hand has struck
again!”. I’m now a grandparent and I’ve seen 40 years of steady erosion of parent effectiveness
in education to the point that we, consumers, have been rendered practically “brain dead” and
unresponsive when yet another attack is mounted against the integrity and sovereignty of the
family by the system – the BLOB (Bloated Learning Organized Bureaucracy).
The granting, by the Labour Relations Board, of permission for public school teachers to
withdraw 30 services deemed to be administrative come this fall during the BCTF “strike” is
questionable. One of the articles deals with preparing and distributing report cards to parents and guardians. In the world of union shakedowns, 30 demands is not unheard of, but I think the
essential teacher function was deliberately slipped in. Report cards are an essential teacher
function, not administrative!
In Canada it is, ultimately, the parents who are responsible for their children’s education. For
those parents who are unable or unwilling to educate or buy education services – and since
education is compulsory – there is the government back-up, social safety-net service of public
schools. To underscore the importance of an educated citizenry government schools have been
deemed an “essential service” – not to be terminated by employee work stoppages.
Why am I such a voice in the wilderness on this? Why is no one else protesting, calling “Foul”,
or asserting that it is totally ILLEGAL to withhold educational achievement report cards from
parents and guardians? How can a parent monitor progress or advocate for better services or
withdraw to another school without this information?
I don’t see anyone from the stakeholder groups – those who gain their income from this vast,
bloated system – speaking out against this travesty. Even the government subsidized parents’
group, BCCPAC, isn’t shaking up the sandbox where all these alphabet soups play in –
BCSTA, BCPVP, BCSSA, BCPSEA, etc. Neither will the teacher training universities speak out
against the deprivation of this essential parent tool. How can parents be instrumental in their
children’s educational progress without this measure?
The “Victory!” of excluding parents from a meaningful role in public schools damages civil
society. Thus it becomes easy for even some members of the press to have a lop-sided view of
how children are raised in our communities. Today’s opinion piece by Shelly Fralic in the Sun
amply exhibits this myopic view when she totally blames parents for the riots in Vancouver and
England. See today’s Sun “Parents bear responsibility for the recreational rioter”
Fralic flagellates herself and other parents for “bad parenting”. She quotes the British Prime
Minister, David Cameron, who sums up the problem in one word – “irresponsibility . . . it’s a
lack of proper parenting, a lack of proper upbringing, a lack of proper ethics, a lack of proper
morals, that is what we need to change.”
Ms. Fralic – please look up classical conditioning. Two generations of parents have basically
had their natural instincts disrupted and in many cases extinguished by the “hands off” policies
and behaviors of the public schools. Listen when parents talk about “symbolic” use of parents,
that is, parent advisory councils that are kept busy fund-raising, bullying policies which are
superficial and unresponsive to parent concerns, incompetent teachers still in the classrooms, etc.
Ms. Fralic – upbringing is not only what parents do, it also happens in the schools and
community. Parents have been rendered useless and inept in the public schools. Parents have
been habituated to being deferential and obsequious to school people. How would you feel if
you were treated as a nuisance in your child’s school?
I hate to see parents beaten down and defeated. I deplore seeing the building block of society, the
family, diminished and crushed. Why is our welfare state so perverted that it serves the interests
of the bloated producers not the consumers in the monopoly school system? Parents without
choice and without a handle on performance are indeed reduced to “absent” or AWOL status.
Professor John E Coons in support of school choice has this to say: “It's a shame that there are
no social science studies on the effect of choicelessness on the family. If you are stripped of
power—kept out of the decision-making loop—you are likely to experience degeneration of your own capacity to be effective, because you have nothing to do. If you don't have any responsibilities, you get flabby. And what we have are flabby families …”
Will anyone please mount a defense for the maligned and excluded parents in light of Fralic’s blind-eye?
Will anyone else share my outrage about the illegal withholding of report cards to parents come the new school year”?
Please see today’s three letters to the editor, Sun,” BCTF job action rankles readers”
