Eager to cheat
By: Deborah Hansen
Tags: Failure, Schools, Children, Parents

Failing not allowed

The little boy slid a despairing look at me as his mother stood behind us where he and I sat for our weekly tutoring sessions. My heart ached for him as she ranted on, her voice getting louder and more strident, the angry words falling over him like jagged rocks as he hunched his shoulders in a vain hope to protect himself as they cut into his soul.

Apparently he had shown up at home after school with a worksheet that was less than perfect — it was 80% if I recall — and the resultant phone call to the teacher outlined a scenario in which he had finished early and didn’t check his work.

He’s 10. With all A’s and B’s on his last report card.

So, when the scandal broke last year about wealthy parents paying to get their kids into elite colleges, I wasn’t surprised. I have despaired for years about the damage being done to children by well-meaning or perhaps merely misguided parents AND educators, drowning in a society with its sights set on goals with little merit. I taught in the local public schools for 15 years (longer than most principals, I discovered) and now tutor children privately.

For parents, this mindset seems to begin with anguish over which pre-school their child will get into, complete with personal interviews and administrators sniffing like a hound dog for potential deep pockets. The longer I tutor, the younger the ages I am called upon to help, with kindergarten teachers sending home notes about 5-year-olds who are “failing” in October of their first year of formal schooling. Parents are frantic to get the kids back on track before the poor children have even had time — or enough instruction — to locate the rails. It is heartbreaking and pointless from the standpoint of educational theory on one hand and from basic humanity on the other.

Failure and cleaning up after ourselves is part of the learning process. If parents throw pillows down in front of their kids with every step they take, the children receive some powerful messages and none of those are helpful to them. One message we communicate when we try to soften life’s blows is that someone will always be there to provide that service. Another is that they simply cannot make any missteps; learning from one’s mistakes is not an option to these parents. Not their children. The bar of achievement is so high it’s lost in the stratosphere; kids learn quickly that no matter what they do, it won’t be enough. There is no room for the messiness of learning.

My daughter is now in her mid-30’s, fulfilling her dream of living in a Central American country, with a successful Internet-based business of her own to support that lifestyle. I do not recall ever hovering over her to make sure she did her homework. If she happened to leave her homework on the kitchen table, it stayed there until she came home to reclaim it that night; it never occurred to me to leave my job to take it to her at school. She played sports, but she also knew that her grades came first. As her parent, I believed — and still do — that she had to find her way, complete with accepting the consequences of her choices. If her grades slipped, off came the athletic shoes, because I had set those ground rules from the beginning. And she knew I meant it. I didn’t “help” her with her science projects, which teachers often accept as the student’s work even though they know otherwise. This is one way that educators have become complicit in adding layers to the onion of cheating, especially now that many school districts compensate teachers based on student “achievement.”

An irony I have witnessed as an educator, though, is the willingness of parents to “hover” over their children for every assignment, every test, every report, and, yes, pay for access to a particular college, yet the refusal to spend any quality time with them otherwise. I often go into the homes of parents who obviously don’t lack for money and I don’t see one piece of reading material. No books, no magazines, no newspapers. When I inquire about the reading habits of the parents, I either get empty explanations about how busy they are as they run off to their wine club, or they tell me they read on their hand-held devices. My question is this: how do your children know what you are doing on that device? Especially when you are focused on it every minute of every day, including during mealtime? It is possible to use devices to read as a family and discuss good literature or other material, but is that what is happening? Literacy is taught but it’s also strengthened when shared. And who better to do the sharing than the most important people in the lives of kids: their parents or other adult role models? But how often does that actually happen?

So, we have parents in this country who have the means and see nothing wrong with buying space in a particular college for their child. The issue of the ethics of such an action, at least from the perspective of those directly involved, hasn’t been mentioned in any of the reports. Like so much in our society at the moment, the boundary between right and wrong has become so smeared as to be nearly invisible as a line at all. It’s merely one big messy spot on the rug, with no boundaries at all.

If we step back just a bit, though, and look beyond that mess, we see more irony. The parents involved in this duplicity on behalf of their children apparently don’t know (or care about) the following:

Only about 30% of Americans have a college degree from any college, much less a prestigious institution like those involved in the “pay to sit in that coveted seat” plan.

The majority of employers do not ask about GPA or what college you went to. I found this to be true, as do most job-seekers today. On job applications, I inserted the name of my college and the date of the specific degree I earned. Only a few interviewers over the course of my entire career ever asked what my GPA was, much less demanded I prove it.

In view of this, what is really going on? It seems it isn’t about the end result, is it? It’s about getting in at all.

Which takes us full circle. If parents prepare their children well from the beginning, there is no need to buy a seat in the classroom; the kids can earn it themselves. Helicopter parents aren’t doing their kids any favors. In fact, they are trussing up the wings of their children and preventing them from becoming self-reliant and capable adults.

Is that what we want for our society?

The ripples of this scandal touch on some other related topics. The lack of vocational training in this country for those young people who aren’t equipped or interested in a college education, as well as the lack of respect for vocations in general. The empty argument that our kids must be able to “compete with the rest of the world” by being given every opportunity (even illegal and dishonest ones) when as a society we show disdain and a lack of appreciation for the rest of the world in so many ways. The fact that 21% of the US ADULT population reads below the 5th-grade level and 19% of high school graduates can’t read, so perhaps the grownups in the room need to spend a bit more time on themselves and their own literacy in order to honestly help their children. The ripples spread throughout our society.

Those I ache for in this sad story are the young people who didn’t know their parents were writing huge checks to complicit coaches and admissions reps. They thought they got into that pricey college on their own merit. And those kids who did know? We reap what we sow as role models, and the cycle of dishonesty will continue as they mature and have families of their own.

I imagine there are some families for which the tension at home is thick enough to suffocate in right about now. But we have serious decisions to make as a society, issues that may seem unimportant to many of us, those without children at home any more or those who never had to worry about this at all. In reality, though, the questions — and answers — define life for all of us in this country, both in positive and negative ways.

Who do we want to be as a people? What do we value and want for our children?

And what are we willing to do to get those things?