If my memory serves me correctly, back in the 1960s there was an ordinance or other legal requirement that parents send their children to school, the only problem back them was that it was only enforced in the white areas of Memphis.
The reality is that the only way to turn the Memphis public school population around is to have all the known tools needed to get the job done in the toolbox. We can fund the schools to the maximum, keep the schools open 12 months a year, reduce classroom teacher ratios to 10:1, and even put qualified teachers in every classroom – but if the parents don’t care, and the kids don’t show up, then it all for nothing.
Parents should be prosecuted, using the same logic that allows the police to prosecute a negligent parent that would leave their child in a car in the summer. Wouldn’t a parent be arrested if a child was found to be malnourished from neglect? A child that isn’t in school and learning a peer level is malnourished intellectually, and that parent is guilty of neglect.
How else are we to motivate the parents of the children at risk other than punitive action? I find it hard to believe that any parents of school age children would have any problem with such a public policy, and I would suspect that anyone against it probably wants the status quo to remain for a reason: They don’t want to get up in the morning, fix lunch for their kid, take him to school, help them with their homework – in other words, act like a parent should act.
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