The French Connection part 2 - Parents and Community

Aired Tuesday, February 28, 2006

By Liam Moriarty

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Anchor Lead: The United States and France share egalitarian values, but their different cultural roots have given shape to different approaches to public education. Today, in part two of our KPLU Learning Curve special, The French Connection, Liam Moriarty looks at how both countries are responding to challenges from immigration and changes in the role of the family.

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At Beacon Hill Elementary in Seattle, first-graders gather at low tables, writing about a recent field trip. Ruby Sawada leans over one student and coaches him on his spelling.

SAWADA: How do you spell field? Can you sound it out with me? There you go. Good job.

This student is Sawada's son, Colby. But throughout the hour-long class, she circulates from table to table, helping one student, then another. Sawada is one of more than 60 parents at Beacon Hill who regularly volunteer their time in the classroom. A generation ago, moms and dads were rarely seen in school except during annual Parents' Nights or to attend plays or concerts. But Principal Susie Murphy says -- in many American schools -- the wall between school life and home life is coming down.

MURPHY: The schools have come to see childrens' education like a three-legged stool. And one of the legs is the teacher, one one leg is the student and one leg is the parent or family.

Hortencia Santana also helps in her childrens' classes at Beacon Hill. She says parents like her can give students the kind of personalized attention teachers can't.

SANTANA: A lot of these kids did not have preschool, and it's really hard for a teacher to really work with a classroom full of 22 kids when some are very high up and some are very low.

At a school such as Beacon Hill -- with many immigrant families that don't speak English -- the need is especially great. So, how do parents fit into the picture at French schools?

GREG WURZBURG: That's quite different.

Greg Wurzburg analyzes education issues with a prominent international think tank in Paris. He's also a parent whose three sons have all gone to French public schools.

WURZBURG: In France, there's a sense that what goes on in the classroom, pedagogy, is a matter of professional judgment of the teachers.

That history of professional autonomy has contributed to an atmosphere where many French parents don't feel there's a place for them at their children's schools.

ANDREE MCGIFFIN: At 4:30 in the afternoon you see the mothers, most of the time, waiting on the sidewalk by the school for the children to leave.

Andree McGiffin heads the French-American School of Puget Sound on Mercer Island. She says some French schools are now starting to reach out to families, especially in immigrant communities where French isn't the language spoken at home.

MCGIFFIN: It's important that the family be part of that, help the child integrate and also for the teachers to really know what are the children doing at home.

That shift comes in part from an extensive national debate on the future of schooling in France that included 21-thousand public meetings. It's also part of the soul-searching done following the riots in many French suburbs last fall. Images of disaffected immigrant youths torching thousands of cars raised questions about whether the school system was failing its traditional role of moving people up the social and economic ladder.

MCGIFFIN:: It was a way for the lower classes to be promoted to be educated and then go into professions. And so there was a very rigorous curriculum.

That's fostered a demanding scholastic culture that's traditionally taken pride in getting the cream to rise to the top.

WURZBURG: It's a system that still discriminates between good and bad performance. And I think if you can stay with a system like that, it's rewarding.

But that system also can give short shrift to those who don't make the grade. French officials grew alarmed when large numbers of students began failing the test that separates the university-bound from those headed for vocational training. Wurzburg says France's highly-standardized schools have often left little room for different learning styles.

WURZBURG: If I had a child who wasn't a great student I think I'd rather have him in the American system. The American system is a lot more forgiving.

Of course, some blame that more forgiving American tendency for the country's slipping academic performance. Now, the U-S drive for demanding higher standards is coinciding with a French drive to humanize their often-rigid schools. Andree McGiffin sees the two approaches meeting in the middle.

MCGIFFIN: The French education being more open, more possibly less authoritarian, more child-oriented, and the American schools seeing that they needed to make an effort in academics.

The challenge for both countries is to equip their children with intellectual rigor -- AND creative flexibility. Ultimately, it's people who can understand and use knowledge -- and adapt to changing circumstances -- who will best engage in their communities and contribute to making a better society.