On September 25, 1957, 300 United States Army troops escorted nine black children to Central High School in Little Rock after unruly white crowds had forced them to withdraw.

In 1976, the shooting of a 13-year-old sparked a children’s uprising against apartheid that spread across the country to Cape Town, where students from a mixed-race high school, Salt River, marched in solidarity with black schoolchildren.

September 15, 2009, Seattle schools plan to lower the passing grade from C to D, partly match the rest of the state’s districts and partly to keep their funding by keeping kids in school.

On September 24, 2009, thousands of South African children peacefully marched to City Hall demanding better schools, libraries and librarians.

September 2009 a debate at Answers.com is hosting a wiki debate on the value of homework. (Read it and weep at the language skills that dominate the anti-homework crowd who are your future employees.)

Finally, I just received an email (thanks Sunie!) with this picture and comments on the spelling of “bokay.” Many florists use this spelling in their marketing, but one of the comments made me cringe, “I thought is was spelled bowkay” and the writer seemed serious.

I wonder what would happen if

• school became a right that could only be earned by the child’s effort, not by the parent’s efforts or their money;
• student performance, not attendance, was the criterion for funding;
• being a ‘tough’ teacher by demanding performance was encouraged;
• kids had to work at whatever menial job they could find when they chose not to perform in school

None of this will ever happen, but it is interesting conjecture.

What do you think?

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Most of you know that I write a feature every Thursday called Leadership’s Future; it’s the outgrowth of articles written by CandidProf, who guested regularly last year, and is written around education, kids, parents and Millennials.

The trouble is that I find far more articles than I can write about, so today I’m giving you links to the best of them. I hope you take the small amount of time necessary to click through and read them, because they are important to y/our future.

First is a question that has been asked for decades and still has no real agreement. Do advanced degrees in education make for a better teacher or just a higher paycheck? But below the surface of this question lurks a larger problem—what happens when the schools conferring the degree has a second rate, or worse, program?

Next is an article about “effortful control” in toddlers and the value of guilt, or what the kids call “a sinking feeling in the tummy,” with a link to the actual study. The researcher also spells out the substantial difference between guilt, doing something bad, and shame, being a bad person—guilt is productive, shame is destructive.

Third is Boston Public Schools has reinstituted their Parent Academy after killing it earlier this year in the midst of budget cuts. Call it a parent engagement project and they are sweeping the country. The one in Boston cost between $50-100K, a cheap price for getting parents actively and positively involved in their kids education.

Last is an update on an article that CandidProf wrote last year regarding the dismal graduation statistics resulting from tying funding to college recruiting. Now the results are starting to show. “The United States does a good job enrolling teenagers in college, but only half of students who enroll end up with a bachelor’s degree.” Only Italy has a worse record; pretty sad. Be sure to read the comments for a number of interesting views.

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What’s going on? This post is a call for your thoughts.

I simply don’t understand what today’s parents are thinking—assuming they are thinking at all.

18 years ago Wanda Holloway tried to hire a hit man to improve her 13 year old daughter’s chances of making the cheer-leading squad.

More recently Lori Drew helped her teenage daughter fake a MySpace page that drove another teen to suicide.

Parents launch efforts to destroy teachers who don’t hand out ‘As’; they scream at referees and umpires when they disagree with a call; they threaten coaches who don’t allow their kids to play enough.

On one hand they enable their kids to avoid all responsibility and on the other castigate them for not living up to whatever parental dreams they are trying to realize.

I know that it’s not all parents; and this isn’t a new rant, but it’s one to which I keep coming back.

And it came back with a vengeance, in fact you might say my outrage cup runneth over, when I read that Senator John Ensign’s parents paid off his mistress.

“The wealthy parents of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) gave $96,000 last year to the staffer who was then his mistress and to her family, his attorney said yesterday.

The gifts to Cynthia L. Hampton and her family were given “out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time,” according to the lawyer, Paul Coggins.”

Ensign’s parents aren’t Gen-Xers and probably not Boomers, so this problem isn’t new.

You read stories about helicopter parents all the time, but when does it end?

How can anyone expect a person to make good choices when their mistakes (and worse) are ‘handled’ for them by their parents?

What do you think about Ensign’s parents’ actions? Obviously, pay-offs aren’t in the same class as murder; are they better or equal with bullying?

I don’t have any answers, but we’d better find some—and fast!

An open discussion is a place to start so let’s hear your thoughts.

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Are kids learning anything from the economic meltdown?

Parents seem to be doing everything possible to avoid exposing their little darlings to a dose of reality.

Quotes in a December post highlighted parental efforts to fill Christmas wish lists and shelter their kids from the tanking economy.

A letter to Malcolm Berko asking for financial advice is another example of the lengths to which parents are willing to go, here is the key part.

“…Our son will graduate high school this May and we don’t have the savings to send him to the University of Florida, his chosen school where his two best buddies attend. Our combined 401(k) savings plans are worth $67,000 and they too took a big hit in the market. So we are thinking either of taking a mortgage on our home (we built it without borrowing money), cosigning a note at the credit union or cashing in our 401(k) plans for his college money. Or I could take a part-time consulting job…”

Berko doesn’t suffer fools gladly and has no compunction about saying what he thinks (I highly recommend his column). I’ve shortened his response, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

“I’d be more concerned about adding money to your retirement savings plan than helping your son pay for frat parties, beer, sex and drugs at the University of Florida…I suspect he really wants to party with his buddies, and UF is a great party school.

Here’s my advice: Tell your son to join the armed services where he’ll mature in a hurry…Or your kid can live at home, attend a community college…and take a part-time job at McDonald’s. If he does well in community college, he can easily find the financial support to earn a bachelor’s or a master’s degree.”

One reason the Great Depression made a great impression was that kids weren’t sheltered from its effects. And although this isn’t a depression the principle is the same.

Saddest of all, preventing kids from experiencing and dealing with reality now cripples them in the future. They have a

• harder time in college;
• more difficulties when they start working and
• more problems in relationships and marriage.

Succeeding in life requires knowing what to do and how to deal with things when they don’t go your way and are outside of your control.

But as long as parents keep shielding kids from the ups and downs of reality and are available to intervene and make [whatever] better then there’s no reason for kids to learn how to do it themselves, which will be a big disadvantage for them in the future.

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I came across the kind of commentary that so angers me. The post was about how to recognize leadership traits in children.

Of course, parents should encourage their children to grow, but this type of thing furthers the myth of what to look for in those who become ‘leaders’, while those without these traits are destined for a lesser role in life.

“…raise your child to be a winner, a leader and a success rather than another member of the dull rat race.”

The ‘leader’ to which the post and follow-up links refer is the person out front with the big pay package, as opposed to plain, hard-working solid citizens—I guess they’re the afore mentioned dull members.

Leadership isn’t a set of skills, it’s how you think and live.

And while it may be your pleasure to see your children excel, it’s your parental leadership responsibility to help them do it.

5 ways for parents to lead

1. Teach your children to love reading books. Books offer every person a world of hard knowledge and imagination stimulants.
2. Don’t make things easy for them, especially in school. A poor grade merits neither a rant at the kid or the teacher, rather it requires your effort to understand the difficulty—tough homework isn’t it—and assistance to find ways to improve.
3. Don’t fight your kids’ battles. People grow by overcoming difficulties, so be supportive and available to help, but don’t do it for them. Obviously, the exception is bullying, which should never be tolerated.
4. Set age/maturity appropriate boundaries within which decisions are up to them without interference or advice; this gives kids the luxury of making mistakes and learning from them.
5. Don’t live vicariously through your children. Their hopes, dreams, fears and worries should be of their own making, not foisted on them, whether actively or passively.

By the way, if you follow the links in the post I mentioned you’ll find it’s a sales pitch for a Christian leadership course.

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Make no mistake, this is a rant.

Last year I wrote Being “special” can ruin your children’s lives; yesterday at Small Business Boomers Jean ranted about Millennials’ atrocious writing skills, a subject I’ve bemoaned here multiple times—and not just Millennials!.

Today, at Leadership Turn, CandidProf, a regular on Thursday, talks about education now and what he foresees as a result of additional schools adopting rules similar to those enacted by the Dallas School System.

Previous complaining about the results of today’s education pales to insignificant when considering the long-term results of what Dallas has done.

Consider,

• “…the new rules require teachers to accept late work and prevent them from penalizing students for missed deadlines. Homework grades that would drag down a student’s overall average will be thrown out.
• District records state that the changes are part of a switch to “effort-based” grading and are designed to give students multiple opportunities to demonstrate that they’ve mastered class material.
• Requiring teachers to contact parents instead of awarding zeros is designed to increase home-school communications…
• Retests and deadline extensions are meant to motivate students to do better after initial failure.”

In other words there are no penalties for not doing the work and the tests don’t count since students can take the exact same test over and over until they get a good grade and their previous efforts are deleted from their records.

As to the over-worked/under-paid teachers, do you think that many will take the time to call every parent whose child’s homework isn’t turned in on time. 20+ kids in the class times an average 15 minute call talking to a parent who is more likely to heap abuse on the teacher while defending their perfect child.

It’s not worth it, so the kids will pass.

Pass on to college not only unable, but also unwilling to learn—forcing colleges to dumb down their classes, too.

According to Denise Collier, the district’s chief academic officer “The purpose behind it is to ensure fair and credible evaluation of learning – from grade to grade and school to school.”

Fair to whom?

The students who work hard or the ones who consider teachers lucky that their classroom is graced with their presence.

Fair to the teachers who get those students the following year, and the year after and the year after that…

Even previous graduates think it’s stupid, “Babying the rules so that [students] have almost unlimited chances to pass, that’s unreal,” said Joshua Perry, a 2007 graduate of Skyline High School. “In the real world, you don’t get a whole lot of chances or other ways to make something up.”

But it’s after college that you, my dear readers, come into play.

Because these are the same kids you will be forced to hire and rely on to move your company forward.

And if that doesn’t scare the hell out of you let me know what drugs you’re on and I’ll get some, because it sure scares it out of me.

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The last half of CandidProf’s post yesterday made me queasy, especially when he said, “In the city where I live, the local suburban school district had a case of a mathematics teacher who was noted for being far tougher than other teachers.  The parents of the students in this teacher’s class complained that their kids were working too hard.  The teacher gave far too much homework.  Too many of her students did not pass.  Eventually she was fired.”

In many cases these are the same parents who babble on about their strong ethical/religious (take your choice of which) principals and moral superiority and are oh-so-quick with their judgments of others.

They are the same ones who scream at the coach for not letting their child play; condemn the teacher when their child’s grades aren’t up to their expectations; complain that the boss is incompetent when their child is fired for poor performance.

Supposedly it’s parents’ responsibility to lead their children by providing a value structure, encouraging/supporting their growth and doing all those other leadership things about which we’re constantly reading.

I say supposedly because based on the very visible results very few are actually doing it.

The bad old times when the assumption was that the child is always wrong have been replaced with the assumption that everybody is wrong except the child—as long as the child is theirs and the family is of an acceptable social level with enough economic power to insist.

I’m not saying the old way was good, but it did produce stronger character than having every bump in the road smoothed out for you.

But, then, the children long ago stopped taking their direction from adults, preferring the advice and ‘wisdom’ of their peers.

The problem is that advice sans judgment; a false belief that whatever they screw up their parents can/will fix; or a strong ‘the rules apply to everybody but me’ attitude can have serious reprecussions.

So where exactly are we headed?

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