Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Homeschooling - 4/22/2008

There’s a romantic tradition about home schooling. Those who support it like to rhapsodize that George Washington was home schooled, for example. Well, yes, he was.

However, he also didn’t need to be computer-literate, owned slaves to do his heavy lifting for him, and died from a throat abscess that one shot of simple antibiotics probably could have cured today.

We live in an increasingly diverse society with an ever-more technologically complex civilization.

Hillsdale College is about as conservative a liberal arts school as exists on the planet. But Hillsdale’s honors program director recently told the Detroit Free Press that the home schooled children he sees are typically badly deficient in science education.  [See Administrator Note Below]

That should be enough to tell you that something is wrong with this picture. Home schooling is a growing fad. If the national average holds for this state, as many as 68,000 Michigan kids may be being home schooled. 

There is now a bill before the legislature that would require people home schooling their kids to report this fact to their local school system. Frankly, I thought that was required already.

It certainly should be. Yet the home schoolers are screaming that this would violate their rights.

That’s nuts. This bill is necessary, and they should know better. For one thing, if we don’t know who is home schooling their kids, how can we know who is teaching their kids at home – and who are simply letting their kids run wild?

Actually, this bill doesn’t go far enough. We need a strong package of bills firmly regulating home schooling. They should prescribe a curriculum and require home schoolers to prove they are qualified to teach. We owe it to our kids and ourselves.

We need to accept the fact that this is no longer the wild frontier, and our kids need higher learning to survive.

If I announced I was going to “home doctor” my family and take my son’s appendix out on the kitchen table, the cops would be there pretty fast. Educational malpractice should be illegal as well.

Schools have facilities and laboratories nearly impossible to duplicate at home. Education also involves hard-to-quantify things like social interaction. You learn from each other, not just from facts and exercises.

Now, there may be rare cases where homeschooling makes sense and a parent is fully qualified. It also has to be said the failures of many of our public schools has made homeschooling much more attractive. But the solution for bad public schools is to fix them.

And yes, homeschooling is necessary. But as a supplement, not a substitute. Mom and Dad need to take part in homeschooling every night. They need to take a vigorous part in their kids’ homework.

They should also get involved with their school. More and more, we are evolving into a place where two kids the same age have wildly different educational experiences.

That’s a prescription for eventually losing our identity as a people and a nation. And if that doesn’t scare you more than internet porn, you clearly need more education.            

ADMINISTRATOR NOTE:  After the publication of this essay, Mr. Lessenberry posted a clarification stating the following:  "First of all, there WAS something I said in my essay that I would like to amend.  I quoted a recent Free Press story as saying that Hillsdale College’s honors program director recently told the Detroit Free Press that the home schooled children he sees are deficient in science education. In fact the man who said that, David Stewart, actually said it in 2002.  I do not think that is ancient history, nor do I think the situation is likely to have radically changed since then. But I would not have used the word “recent” if I had to do it over.  Mr. Stewart is also no longer the honors director, and I apologize for that error. What I actually did was take that statement from another article. Here is what that article said. “David Stewart, director of Hillsdale College’s honors program, told the Detroit Free Press that home schooled children are typically deficient in science education: ’I can generally count on them for having almost no science and virtually no lab science.”"

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Interview: David Plank - 4/22/08

State Representative Joan Bauer, a Democrat from Lansing, is sponsoring a bill that would require all home-schooled students to submit their names, addresses and ages to their local school district. Opponents to the legislation argue that that’s an infringement of home-schoolers’ rights. David Plank is an education policy expert. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Student Loans - 2/19/08

When I was going to college back in the 1970s, it was sometime before I realized what I really wanted to do.

Well, actually I wanted to be among the idle rich, but that didn’t seem to be a viable option. What I didn’t want to do was come out of school owing a vast debt. So I prolonged my education, took time off to work and save money so I could pay as I went. I’m not sure that I would do it that way again. Actually, I am not sure if I could do so today, even if I wanted to. Education costs more now, and there aren’t as many good paying summer jobs, or jobs at all, for that matter.

But what I do know is that we need a far better educated workforce in this state. You are essentially doomed to poverty if your education stops when you leave high school, unless you marry money or become a major league baseball player. Our society needs to help young people get an education, by any means necessary. That’s especially true for Michigan, where the number of young adults with higher education has fallen below the national average.

Our national income has also slipped below the national average, and there is nothing coincidental about those two facts.

The suspension of the MI-LOAN program may not seem important, but it will have a ripple effect. The hundreds of students who were counting on getting those loans will have to get the money from somewhere. Not many are likely to drop out of school, but a few might. And I am not utterly convinced that MI-LOAN is only an isolated local phenomenon.

The U.S. government is projecting a record $400 billion deficit this year, and a recession would make the deficit even bigger. What that means is that the government will suck up a lot of the money that’s available for borrowing. That leaves only so much to go around.

Our system of funding higher education is convoluted, confusing and often haphazard. Some people know how to work the system, or have parents who do.

Others come up with the short end of the stick.

It seems to me that our state government, in collaboration with the universities, should help identify worthy students and help educate them about all their various financial options, including loans. I think Michigan needs a rigorous supplemental loan program that is based not only on ability to pay, but on likelihood of contribution to society.

And I think we should offer such loans at low interest rates. If loan money is scarce, we ought to give priority to those who seem to have it figured out, who have a clear sense of direction as to what they want to do. We also shouldn’t limit these loans to traditional college students. Higher-end vocational students also should be able to qualify. Whatever the short-term cost to the state would be more than made up by what we got back in the end.

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Interview: Mark Delorey - 2/19/08

For eighteen years the Michigan Alternative Student Loan Program, or MI Loan, has helped students partially fund their education. But, last week the state suspended the program.  Mark Delorey is Director of Financial Aid at Western Michigan University.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about what the loss will mean to students.

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Essay: Dropout Dilemmas - 2/5/08

Here’s the first big problem that has to be faced before anyone can decide what to do about the high school dropout rate.

We don’t really know what the dropout rate truly is. We know that more urban kids drop out than suburban kids. We know that more black kids drop out than white. More Hispanic kids drop out than black kids, and Native Americans drop out most of all.

Many school districts fudge their data, however, and the numbers from Detroit are notoriously untrustworthy.

The Christian Science Monitor a couple years ago reported that Detroit had a graduation rate of less than 22 percent. Those numbers were immediately and angrily challenged by Detroit school officials.

But their method of accounting is notoriously not transparent either. The eventual graduation rate for Detroit students is almost certainly higher than that. Some students take longer than four years to finish school.

Indications are that the records also don’t account for some students who have moved out of the district.

Yet it seems indisputable that many Detroit students, probably more than half, never graduate from high school at all. Nationwide, and, I suspect, statewide, about a third drop out.

What I don’t know, and what I worry about, is what becomes of them after that. Time was when a high school dropout could join the army, or get a job bending metal at the Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck. But the army takes very few of them now.

Dodge Main is gone, and other auto plants are laying people off. If they ever start hiring again, they say they are going to want workers with at least two years of college. Now a few dropouts eventually get it together and go back to school and go on to college. A somewhat larger percentage earn a GED.

Yet what about the rest? I fear we are turning out what Karl Marx used to call the vast reserve army of the unemployed.

Nobody is going to hire these people for any but the most low-paying dead-end jobs. They have no marketable skills. Legal skills, that is. They aren’t media savvy; with rare exceptions, they don’t know how to get on camera and tell their stories.

Many will be driven to a life of crime; others will lead lives of quiet desperation, a desperation which eventually may not be so quiet. Think Detroit, Michigan in July, 1967.

Ryan Olson, who is in charge of education policy at the Mackinac Center is a highly educated man. He has a doctorate in Greek and Latin from Oxford, which is about as fancy an education as you can get. But he also went to Michigan public schools.

Dr. Olson is opposed to extending the dropout age in those schools to 18, in part because “we’d end up spending more on teachers, classes, lunches and transportation.” Well, that’s right, we would.

But I think that if we don’t spend that money now, we’ll eventually wind up paying far more.

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Interview: Ryan Olson - 2/5/08

In her State of the State address last week, Governor Jennifer Granholm asked lawmakers to raise the high school drop-out age to eighteen. Currently, students are allowed to drop out at sixteen. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy opposes the governor’s idea. Dr. Ryan Olson is the Mackinac Center’s director of education policy. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Head Start - 11/19/07

What was then called Operation Head Start was started as an experimental eight-week summer program in 1965. It was seen at first as a small battlefield in President Lyndon Johnson’s great War on Poverty. We knew, even then, that by the time a disadvantaged child reaches school, it is often too late.

So someone had the idea of reaching out to preschool children from low-income homes. Head Start would seek to touch these kids on every level. It would try and make sure they were fed and stimulated and felt cared about. It was popular right from the start.

So much so that succeeding administrations, many not at all friendly to anti-poverty programs, found it impossible to kill Head Start, which has now reached more than 22 million children.

What it does is help kids who don’t get the kind of help at home that kids with educated, middle-class parents often do. It gives them a head start not only academically, but socially and emotionally.

I learned how important this was when I bumped into a class of tiny Head Start students touring Detroit’s Heidelberg project. I chatted with them, for some reason, about horses. Some of them knew what a horse was, but my impression was that most did not.

They were all about four. The night before, Nora, my goddaughter, also four, had quizzed me about different types of horses, and been highly annoyed that I didn’t know enough about the breed of horses in her favorite movie. I also had learned that many children in Detroit start kindergarten not knowing their primary colors.

I asked Nora what color a wall hanging was. I would have called it purple. “It’s not purple,” she said. “It’s mauve.” It’s not that Nora is not a child prodigy. The difference is her parents.

They read to her, and she went to preschool. Head Start now enjoys widespread bipartisan support. House Minority Leader John Boehner is a staunch Bush conservative from Ohio. But he strongly supported the Head Start bill. “For low-income children, having some kind of early-childhood development is critically important,” he noted.

In the end, Head Start passed almost unanimously. Tim Walberg was the only Michigan congressman to vote against it. I like that this bill puts new focus on concentrating on disadvantaged children right from birth. If a child’s mind and emotional needs are neglected, even age three is often too late.

Head Start, by the way, is commonly seen as one of the few successes to come out of the War on Poverty. The conventional wisdom, or what you hear on Fox TV, is that it was a disastrous failure that wasted money and swelled the bureaucracy.

But consider this: The national poverty level was 19 percent when the war on poverty was launched.

Ten years later, it was down to 11 percent. Maybe, just maybe we should take the blinders off and look what else might have been done right, back when we believed that we as a nation could do better.

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Interview: Dale Kildee - 11/19/07

Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty is usually said to have failed. But its key program aimed at preschool children, Operation Head Start, remains very popular. Congress just reauthorized it by an overwhelming margin. The bill’s main author was Congressman Dale Kildee He’s a Democrat who has represented the Flint area for thirty years. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about the changes his bill makes to the program.

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Essay: Higher Education - 9/13/07

The other day I was talking to one of our better state legislators. She showed me a pile of letters from citizens outraged by any thought of a tax increase. Most of them displayed vast ignorance about the nature and depth of our problems.

That didn’t surprise me, because most of the media has been concentrating on far more important things, such as whether Britney Spears should still be showing off her body.

Those who were able to tear themselves away from that trash long enough to write their lawmakers said things like “you idiots should just cut your salaries by ten percent instead of raising taxes.”

The truth is that the legislature could abolish itself and all its expenses without making much dent in the deficit problem. One woman said she and her husband had both lost their jobs. “You better now raise the income tax because we can’t afford it,” she wrote.

Evidently she doesn’t quite get that if you have no income you pay no income tax. I myself got a letter from a woman who has some sort of lower-level white collar job at Chrysler.

She bitterly lashed out against the idea of any tax increases. There wasn’t enough money to go around now, she said. She told me she was the single mother of a young son, and wanted to be able to give him a good life. I wrote back and asked, “what are you thinking?”

Unless we return taxes to some sort of rational level, we are speedily going to damage the state’s colleges and universities. If you indeed want your son to have a good life, it is probably going to be dependent on him getting into one of them and doing well at school.

Do you think you can take your son by the hand at age eighteen and lead him down to Dodge Main to get a good paying job on the assembly line? Those jobs don’t exist anymore.

If you have to make the choice, you might want to think about whether your son’s long-term happiness would be better served by investing in education, or another game for his Play station.

Our ancestors, the immigrants who tumbled off the boats at Ellis Island, were often smarter than we were about this stuff. They knew that hard work, sacrifice and most of all, education was their kids’ best hope for a bright future.

For years, Michigan was an exception. We are paying a price for that now. We have a population less educated than the national average. A smaller percentage of our kids go to college. Our universities are forced to charge more tuition.

Three years ago, a special commission found that Michigan’s only hope for the future is investing heavily in higher education, and extending it as widely as possible. What is sad is that some people still don’ t get that. What is even sadder is that some of them are in the legislature. This is a very critical time.

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Interview: Michael Boulos - 9/13/07

Michigan’s continuing budget crisis has been hardest perhaps on the institutions charged with creating the state’s future colleges and universities. They now have to try and budget without any idea how much money they can count on. Michael Boulos is head of the Michigan state universities’ president’s council.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him. 

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