Value Added

Value added assessment is the in-vogue expression for the latest in assessing students, teachers, and schools. It asks the question, "If you can't measure the value that has been added by the teacher or school, then how can you expect to improve or reform education?" But this is a dangerous route for the education establishment to take, because once value is measured both the bad and good news is difficult to act on. Management practices, vested interests, and just plain bad ideas all converge to shoot the messenger. Much better to ignore value added and build an assessment system that makes reform impossible but creates a fiction that it is being attempted. Hello, state assessment!

Most parents know how to add value to the education of their own children. By interacting positively with their children, parents can immediately measure the desired effects. When reform is impossible, the only clear alternative for the parent is to take the child out of the system. Only that will protect the children and ultimately result in true reform--bringing down the system by taking away what it needs to function--children.

But parents are struggling in an economic environment where they have to provide for their families and that usually means they must leave their children with someone else while they go off to work. When it is strangers or even worse, a dysfunctional system run by strangers, what is a parent to do?

For the lucky parents, the answer is grandparents. Grandparents who are healthy, motivated, and understand how critically important their role can be in helping to educate their grandchildren while parents are away at work. And once this vocation is undertaken, what rewards!