Teachers as Babysitters

While teachers do have responsibility for your children for a good portion of the day and they get paid like they are babysitters, babysitting is not their responsibility. In much of the discourse of late, however, there is an unspoken assumption that teachers should be filling the role of parents. Particularly in classrooms with poorer students, teachers are expected (and mandated by law in a throwaway clause of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education legislation) to have all their students at a passing level regardless of their socioeconomic background. This is wrong because it distracts teachers from educating and can undermine learning for all kids in a classroom. Worse, it implies that a teacher in a privileged classroom—with kids who have both parents, three square meals, no gang or drug problems in their neighborhood, educated parents who understand how to support their children and have the leisure time to do so, and no trauma related to frankly scary neighborhoods and home-environments—is able to make the same impact with the same amount of work as kids in settings where some or all of these attributes are missing.

I would like to see policy makers take teachers at the best schools for one month and move them to the worst schools and have them deliver the exact same lesson plans they had delivered (each teacher would teach on different material so that the kids would not both be getting a second month of Shakespeare, for example). I would then like to see a pre- and post- test for all students in the test classrooms. My guess is that the students in the more well-to-do classrooms will likely gain more that the poorer classrooms from the exact same teaching of the exact same material (actually, the poorer kids would get a better version, as the teacher will have previously delivered the material and had a chance to work out the kinks). Further, I bet the kids in the well-to-do classes, if given teachers of far worse quality, would absorb the effects of bad teaching a lot better than poor kids would.

The Problem with Expecting Teachers to Overcome Poverty or Parental Absence

Because I think people may not get why subtly assuming teachers can babysit, I’d like to flesh out some of the impact I see with asking this of teachers:

1. Teachers in poorer classrooms will have higher absenteeism, which requires reducing the amount of time planning lessons in order to call parents, schedule make up exams and work, and engaging in classroom attendance activities/reporting. (The following talk about the strong link between poverty and absenteeism: Zhang 2007; this excellent study (pdf) shows that while 16% of 4th graders were absent 3 days or more per year in schools with 10% of students eligible for free lunch, a full 22% are absent three days in schools with 75% free lunch eligibility (less poverty, thus means higher attendance). The study also shows that students who are absent are more likely to suffer from a wide variety of psychological disorders—including suicide—and economic ramifications).


2. When kids come in malnourished, they are less likely to be able to concentrate or participate. This means teachers will have to spend more time reiterating concepts than necessary (if a kid doesn’t get it, then it IS necessary, let me be clear!). They will also likely be more disruptive or likely to distract fellow classmates, which means more time will be dedicated to classroom discipline.


3. When kids' parents are working or not around (many poorer children have single parents, are orphans, or are in the foster system), then nobody is there to keep a child focused on homework, help them through tough assignments, encourage them, etc. In this case, the child arrives less prepared to class, and the teacher is forced to spend more time on wasteful activities like reading with the class, doing homework as a group, or teaching a concept from scratch, which reduces the amount of interactive time that can be spent on engaging activities that yield much greater learning.


4. When parents are less educated, they are less likely to know how to support their child’s learning. Good teachers will spend more time helping these parents and their children to learn proper study habits, which drains the time available for lesson planning. Teachers SHOULD do this, but the point is that classes with more kids coming from low-education backgrounds will require more teacher effort on non-teaching tasks.


5. Kids in dangerous neighborhood may suffer from psychological issues that impede their ability to learn, may have loud (gunshots in the night, fighting in the street, etc) environments that prohibit study and homework, or may be more likely to have discipline problems.


6. Poorer kids have less access to the internet, libraries, cultural venues or money to take public transit, which limits the teacher’s ability to assign projects that will have a greater impact and allow children to engage in their own problem-solving or extra-curricular learning.


7. As a corollary, children in poorer households are less likely to have access to weekend, evening and holiday educational programming. Because children start to lose material they don’t use or refresh, the hard work of the teacher will be undone if it is not stimulated. A 2007 study of the effects of unscheduled school closures found that years with an “average amount of closures” (that is, five days) resulted in a 3% loss of learning for 3rd graders compared with years with no unscheduled closures. That’s just five days scattered through the year. Learning loss over the summer results in a loss of nearly 3 months of instruction if the child is not being engaged!

This is not a comprehensive list, but this gives you an idea of just how much all children suffer when teachers are expected to do the work of parents and to compensate for the deficiencies in the lives of their poorest students. Many good teachers also take on the psychological trauma of worrying about their students, which could affect their performance in the classroom.

Suggestions for Reducing the Babysitting Time Spent in Classrooms

Sadly, our education system cannot remedy the problem of poverty, but there are some things that our policy-makers and community leaders can do:

1. Increase school breakfast, lunch, and even dinner programs, as school feeding is associated with increased student achievement and performance.


2. Offer funding and incentives to teachers, parks, community organizations, or other volunteers to offer after-school, weekend, and holiday programming that helps children overcome learning loss related to gaps in learning.


3. Stop cutting library hours and make libraries more relevant to students. Chicago just decided to close nearly all of its libraries on Mondays. This affects me personally, as libraries provided a safe, climate-controlled environment in which I could learn and occupy myself positively while my mom was working that was away from the gangs on the street that often harassed me en route to/from my bus stop.


4. Education Boards should offer greater outreach to parents that actually reaches them on ways to better help their children learn and excel. This outreach should benefit from focus groups and town halls in poorer communities to ensure that parents are able to attend, understand what is being taught, and have their needs reflected.


5. Make parent teacher conference day a responsibility by making it a holiday and requiring that employers be flexible in scheduling to allow people to attend (akin to what we do now for voting day).

Act on it!

There is a lot that you can do to help teachers save more time for actual instruction, which include:

1. Tutor or mentor a child to help them develop better study habits, fill vacation/weekend time with learning, or transport them to places they’d otherwise be unable to access.


2. Volunteer in a classroom to help with classroom management and discipline so that a kid can focus on learning.


3. Support your public library and other efforts to help kids read!


4. Engage in tutoring or homework help to ensure that more kids arrive prepared and confident to learn.


5. If you know of a poor kid, send an extra lunch with your child and tell them to share or give it to their teacher. Be careful not to upset a kid or parent’s pride, but finding a way to feed a kid who goes without could go a long way.


6. If you employ parents, actively encourage them to make their schedule fit parent teacher conferences and homework help. Parents will probably work better because they won’t have to worry about their kid so much, and you will likely not lose any hours of work time.


7. Act as a crossing guard or set up a neighborhood watch to help kids travel to and from school as safely as possible.

Speak out!

What other problems does using a teacher as a babysitter pose? What other problems are associated with expecting teachers to perform as well in high-need environments?

What other solutions can you think of (either from the government or at the grassroots) that will support students and teachers in overcoming problems in their home environment that may impede their learning and reduce a teacher’s ability to adequately plan and teach?