An Open Letter to Parents
Do you want to know why there’s a teacher shortage? Why, this year, in Nebraska alone, there are approximately a thousand open positions in education, why the number of post-secondary education majors is plummeting? I think any teacher, para, bus driver, administrator, lunch lady, or secretary would give you the same answer: a lack of parenting. We have so many students in our school systems who come from broken homes, from absentee parents, from hostile environments, from neglect, and on the opposite side of that coin, from coddling, from “yes” parents, from ipad houses, from parents who want to be their child’s “best friend” or live vicariously through them. And when parents don’t parent , they raise children who are an entirely new breed of difficult, who are entitled, who don’t understand the concept of respect, who have never been held to rules or standards before and rebel against them in classrooms, kids who have never been told “no,” kids who have been constantly handed a scre