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First of all, let me say that I have tremendous respect and admiration for individuals who serve as foster parents to children in need of a home. I’ve known some of these individuals and am in awe of their dedication, commitment and love. Thanks to each of you for what you do for children in need of a home.

This blog post is NOT about foster parents or children in foster care. It is using the notion of foster care as a metaphor. With that said . . .

I had the privilege this week to work with a wonderful group of courageous administrators. They get it. They understand that the world is changing radically and that school will need to change significantly if the children in their district are going to succeed.

Like many districts, they are anxious for suggestions and ideas that would help them in their quest. As I worked with them, one notion kept coming back to me more and more clearly. It struck hard when we watched a short comedy sketch of a teacher who had seen programs come and go for 25 years. The elementary teacher in the sketch had seen “open classrooms and back to basics, whole language, hooked on phonics, higher standards, no standards, you do your thing, but don’t do THAT thing, assertive discipline, no discipline, student-based education, outcome-based education, mastery learning, master teachers, merit pay, mentoring programs, peer coaching (gasping for breath) “I’ve done it ALL!” watch?v=ged6hKZOTqw It’s a great sketch from a great group. What struck me as missing was the mention of the learners. Too often school is a place where adults plan and institute programs and then wait to see how children will respond.

Perhaps at the heart of the problem is that we seem to treat children in school as if they were foster children. They come to us with teacher and student understanding that this arrangement is going to be temporary (usually 4.5 months or a year at most). We will “house” them for a certain period and then they will move on. While they are with us, we will open the drawers in our room and clothe them with the lessons that we have developed over years of caring for other foster children. We don’t need to take time to find what their individual interests are. By gosh they will “wear” what we pull out and better be grateful for it! If one child can’t quite fit into the shoes we pull from the closet, the best we can do is either stuff the toes with Kleenex (aka accommodations) or cut the end off the shoes (gifted and talented). Either way, by gosh, the kid is going to wear the shoes that we have decided (or been told) are the right ones for them to wear.

After a very short time, every child in this system of “foster care” learns that our response to them is conditional. If they obey, we reward them, with A’s, or praise and passing grades, so that they can leave us. If they are disobedient and don’t live up to our expectations, they are punished with low grades and labeled as failures and we push them out the door. We make them do tedious tasks over and over again, often with little relevance to anything else going on in their lives and then we are mystified when they try to run away, or drop out. These children are not slow learners, we are.
However caring the adults in the System, this System of “foster care” for learners is set up to breed mistrust. Every year we see children, who for one reason or another are passed on without the skills necessary for them to succeed. Every teacher has seen this, and every child who has passed with a D- knows this, as do parents and everyone else. At the other end of the spectrum are children that we force to spend more time than necessary at certain tasks or in a certain class. If a child could learn all that they need to know as a fourth grader by February, why on earth do we hold them back just because the paper on the wall says the teacher isn’t finished yet? How can anyone trust a System or the individuals in it when they know they will dutifully put children in situations where they cannot succeed, or hold them back from achieving what they could? Even those who are deemed to be prepared develop protective shells to some degree because they know what’s going on with others. Every parent who pays college tuition for a child’s “remedial”(non credit bearing) college class knows what is going on and knows that they cannot fully trust the system. Everyone knows that we look at students as “foster children”. We escape the needed long-term commitment to success because children in foster care will soon be “gone”.

This system of foster parenting and foster homes must be changed as the first step for any school or district or state that truly wants to see children be successful. Each child must know s/he belongs, and each must know that without a shadow of doubt. The truest adage is “A child won’t care how much you know until she knows how much you care.” It’s about developing relationships of deep and sacred trust. In French, there is a wonderful verb “apprivoiser” which means “to create bonds”. It is a two-way process of mutual bonding that is the super-glue of any successful relationship. It’s a glue almost always missing in our current system of schooling.

There are steps that courageous teachers, schools and districts can take to break away from this system of “foster” care. Attempting to tackle “solutions” before tackling this fundamental issue of committing to each individual child, will turn any evidence of “success” into an illusion.
I’ll talk about some of the procedures for “adoption” another time.