Want to fix schools? Fix families
Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1992, driven to run by her frustration with the decline of public schools. Now, after more than 10 years of trying to reform the education system, she has had something of an epiphany.
“All the programs in the world are meaningless unless kids are ready to learn when they enter the classroom,’ she said recently in her congressional office in Marin County. “We’re applying Band-Aids rather than going to the source.’
The source, she said, is the family.
Unfortunately, in 2004 American politics, children and families have the same status as integrity: sacred in stump speeches, irrelevant in legislation. But until the government commits actual resources toward helping parents put as much time and energy into their children as their jobs, the schools will always struggle.
Woolsey argues education is declining in large part because the workplace is still hostile to parents, and the government is still pretending that the problem will fix itself. Kids are heading off to school in the morning by themselves, downing a Sprite and handful of Oreos for breakfast. In the afternoon, they’re parked in front of their PlayStations in their empty homes. Their parents can’t leave work for school performances or teacher conferences.
The family dinner, once an anchor of childhood, is disappearing in the fumes of commuter traffic. So Woolsey is introducing legislation to the House this month called The Balancing Act. It calls for paid family leave for new parents, school events and family emergencies; increased availability of child care; financial incentives for better-qualified child-care workers; voluntary universal preschool; and breakfasts for all students, kindergarten through high school.
The bill has no chance of becoming law. Woolsey is the first to admit it.
“Will it get passed? No. Do we want to start talking about this so someday people will pay attention? Yes.’
Instead of figuring out how to make concrete, fundamental improvements to family life, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress are helping families by proposing a constitutional amendment to make sure gay couples can’t get married. And President Bush wants to put $1.5 billion into a nationwide drive to promote marriage by giving low-income couples training in interpersonal relations.
I’m guessing that if you asked actual low-income couples what would help their marriages, constitutional amendments about who can and cannot marry and training in interpersonal relations might not to leap from their lips. They are more likely to say they could use some relief from the stress of balancing work and family, from the worry of having to drop their infant off at the neighbor lady’s house because they can’t afford professional day care, from the strain and guilt of returning to work three weeks after giving birth because they need the paycheck.
Most parents are allowed, under the family leave act passed in 1993, to take unpaid time off when a child is born — at least those parents who work for companies with more than 50 employees.
But of women who have the option for family leave, 42 percent say they can’t afford to take it. Among women who can afford it, an increasing number are opting out of their careers altogether, unable to be good workers while also being good mothers.
Woolsey’s colleagues in Congress will dismiss her new bill as too expensive. How can we possibly fund paid leave and universal preschool and better child care when we’re already swimming in debt?
“Maybe you don’t go to war,’ Woolsey said. “Maybe you don’t give tax cuts. Look, when children and families become a priority, then it will happen.’
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].)