I don't think volunteering in schools, while nice, is going to accomplish anything in an education system that is based on wealth. I also don't think that anyone is realistically telling any individual parents not to provide their kids with enriching opportunities. I pay for my child to receive outside tutoring because he's not getting as much intervention in school as he needs to succeed in school. I do that knowing that the other kid in his reading group's parents might not be able to afford tutoring. But I also know that by staying at the school and pressuring it and the district to provide the necessary resources to support academic success, it helps more students than just my own.
I also find it really short sighted when posters act like other students aren't performing well because they are simply less intelligent. That's ridiculous. It's clear certain demographics are being left behind post-pandemic. And it's clear that smaller class sizes, more money, and more intense academic intervention starting at a young age will bring most students up to grade level. If middle and upper class parents and citizens came together and demanded equity in education, it would happen quickly. The truth is that, as StarBright suggested, there is little interest in raising up other people's children in any significant manner. Like ending segregation, sharing resources, changing the system.
What we can do is stop fleeing from poor school districts/schools to "good school" districts and participate in organizations and support community leaders that encourage other parents to do the same. I promise that there are organizations and academics in your area that have come up with very good ideas to create equity in education, if there was enough public support.
This is all great. And I'm all for it. But why do we let parents off the hook? I would wager that parenting has a greater influence on child education than all the other resources everyone else can provide. It doesn't cost anything to start reading to your children for 20 minutes everyday. Or spending a half hour when they are older helping them with their school work. Or not allowing screen time. I have a friend who was home schooled up through high school. He said he spent about an hour or two on school work daily. By high school he was self taught and his mom had very little involvement. He was done with high school and had a year's worth of college credits by the time his peers were juniors in high school. He went on to major in engineering and is very successful now. So it didn't take a lot of resources, just a stable home environment and supportive and encouraging parents.
This all ends up feeling like a very micro/macro conversation - The kids of people on this forum are probably going to be okay whether or not we pay for their college educations merely because we parents are
having these conversations
and we have resources. There was a study years ago that showed children whose parents entered them into the lottery for a great charter school were successful whether or not they won the lottery. This was attributed to having parents who cared enough (and had the resources!) to enter them into the lottery at all - these parents cared about education.
But at a societal level, do we just write off the children whose parents don't care about, or are too busy, to opt them into the lottery?
I read a great book by Dana Suskind earlier this year,
Parent Nation. She is also the doctor who wrote
30 Million Words several years ago, about the importance of reading and talking to kids when they are babies/toddlers. She got a crap ton of funding to take her program into low income and at-risk communities. And once she started running her program, she found that it wasn't a lack of desire, or even knowledge, that was keeping parents from optimal child rearing - but all sorts of systemic barriers such as lack of child care, lack of community, work scheduling, US incarceration policy, etc. And she also found that these barrier extend well into the middle class (not just low-income families).
At the micro level - sure, you can probably look at individual households and probably find ways that parents can be better. But at the macro level? It feels unjustified to lay it on the parents when so many things about our system throw up barriers to being good parents.