Family Pledge: Raising Life-long Learners and Good Citizens

By James L. Casale, Ph.D.

Dr. James L. Casale, both a state and national award-winning educator, has authored his second parenting guide. Family Pledge is unique in that it consists of 40 individual essays that can be read in any order. Choose a topic that interests you and read that first. Select How to Say No and Mean It, or A Holocaust Survivor’s Lesson to His Grandchild, or Empty Lots and Building Forts.
These and many more essays and are designed to inform, encourage and inspire parents to accept their solemn responsibility to act as their child’s first teachers and role models. Raising life-long learners and good citizens require a loyal and devoted commitment to establish a culture of learning at home. The key components are acquiring accurate information, creating a family mission statement, and devising a plan of action that all family members adhere to.
As with his first book, Wise Up and Be the Solution, readers will enjoy a jargon-free, no-nonsense, parent-friendly journey filled with practical suggestions and important information.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James L. Casale, Ph.D.
• Release date: Jan 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370445455

James L. Casale, Ph.D.

I am a state and national award-winning educator. I was the Florida Teacher of the of the Year and a National School of Excellence Principal at Purchase School in Harrison, New York. My passion is to encourage, inspire, inform, and engage parents to accept their solemn responsibility as their child's first teachers and role models.To that end, I have written hundreds of essays and three books. The first book; Wise Up and Be the Solution, was positively reviewed by KIRKUS Reviews and received five-star reviews on Amazon. It was later acquired by Skyhorse Publishing with an additional 4000 words, a new cover, and against my wishes, a slight change in the subtitle.My second parenting book became available in October 2017. Family Pledge: How to Raise Lifelong Learners and Good Citizens, consists of 40 essays that guide parents toward better parenting and offers much to think about regarding strategies and beliefs, It has garnered five-star reviews on Amazon and from independent reviewers.My third book debuted in 2020 and was also highly praised by KIRKUS Reviews. The Five Parenting Commandments guide Christain parents toward establishing a culture of learning and character development in their home.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

While the world stage is burdened with conflicts, misunderstandings, disrespect, and a lack of dialogue, parents can make a difference starting with themselves and their families.

—Pope Francis

Parenting is not brain surgery, quantum physics, or rocket science; it’s harder. No matter your profession, area of expertise, or socio-economic status, you will struggle as a parent. Maybe, comedian, Jim Gaffigan said it best, "Most of the time I feel totally unqualified to be a parent. I call those times being awake.¹" He’s not far off. By the way, you will definitely need a sense of humor if you expect to survive the parenting journey. Fasten your seatbelt. Go to church. Keep smiling. Pray.

The purpose of this book is to inspire, encourage, engage, and inform parents that it is your sacred responsibility to become your child’s first teachers and role models. There are enough parenting books to fill Yankee Stadium. Many are specific to particular topics like discipline, getting along with your kids, the terrible twos, or teaching reading. This book is different. Besides being jargon free and parent friendly, it offers practical and common-sense advice and strategies that will help establish a culture of learning in your home and guide all household members to accept the notion that becoming men and women of character, a Christian ideal, should rank the highest on everybody’s to do list. Christians may have an advantage if they include their faith, active involvement in their church, and an abundance of prayers.

The idea for this book was lodged into my brain in 2015. That year, my first book, Wise Up and Be the Solution: How to Establish a Culture of Learning at Home and Make Your Child a Success in School was acquired by a traditional publishing company and reissued. They paid me an advance. I was elated even though I knew James Patterson would have received much more.

However, I gave up the rights to my book and my elation soon turned to disappointment. The publisher did three things that spawned this book. First and foremost, my only reference to God in the entire book was removed. Second, the subtitle was changed to substitute the word, make, for the word, guide. If your parenting style is dominated by making your kids do stuff, it will be a rough ride. The new cover, a stock photo, should have included dad along with mom and a child. I fought hard for all three but lost on every account. I’m Sicilian. I didn’t forget.

I was determined to write a parenting book that referenced my Lord and Savior, the Virgin Mother, the saints, the popes, the bible and any other Christian or Jew who has something inspiring to say that may help parents be more effective.

The Research Is Clear; It’s the Quality of the Family

After more than fifty years in public education, I am totally and unequivocally convinced that the most important determiner of a child’s success in school and life is the quality of the family. Parents must step up and accept their solemn responsibility to be the ones your children look up to, admire, respect, and want to emulate.

The 1966 Coleman Report, one of the largest sociological studies of its kind at that time was commissioned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 within the context of Equality of Educational Opportunity. This massive study of 650,000 students and more than 80,000 schools concluded that student achievement, even among disadvantaged students and students of color, was not the result of school resources, best practices, or expenditures per pupil, but that the best predictor of school success was the quality of the family. These findings were extremely controversial because the notion that schools needed more resources and money to be effective ruled the day. Fifty plus years later, that same notion still persists. In my lifetime (no shortage of years) billions of dollars have been spent on improving the public schools. Yet, the United States is twenty first in the overall world rankings and remains in the middle of the pack in reading, math, and science scores.

South Korea remains consistently high among the nations of the world for their education system because their students are high achievers in reading, math, and science. When President Obama visited the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the topic of education was on the agenda. When Obama asked the South Korean president what his biggest problem was in South Korea’s education system, the reply was that the parents were too demanding.

Parents in high ranking countries like South Korea, Japan. Finland and Denmark are proactive. They don’t rely on the schools to raise their children. They emphasize education in their households and follow through to make sure their children are studying and learning. This is not happening in the United States.

In the United States, hosting back to school night and conducting the ritualized parent conferences seem to be the extent of school outreach to parents. However, teacher and administrator complaints about parent apathy, negligence, and ignorance continue to flow like the Lava Falls Rapids on the Colorado River. The background and experiences that children bring to school far outweigh the school’s efforts to educate your child. The Gates Foundation seemed unaware of how important the home culture is when they invested in identifying teacher effectiveness rather than parent effectiveness.

In 2018, the results of a RAND report titled Improving Teaching Effectiveness were released. The RAND report detailed a seven-year study funded by Bill Gates and three large school districts. More than a half-billion dollars was spent trying to identify teacher effectiveness. The hypothesis stated that if teacher effectiveness could be identified, it could then be taught to all teachers, which would lead to student achievement and better schools. The study failed to achieve its goal. It was flawed from the very beginning because (1) the participants believed that high standardized test scores were correlated with superior teaching, and (2) the parent equation i.e., the experiences knowledge, family culture, and attitudes about learning and education that children brought to school were not considered. I guess the researchers didn’t read the Coleman report.

Robert Pianta, Dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, examined the RAND report and came to this conclusion:

"On nearly every single outcome that we assess, public schools have a marginal impact that is really small relative to the impact of families. The things we worry about in terms of the state of our country are more a function of the families the kids are growing up in than the school."²

Robert Pianta gets it. Presidents of the United States, governors, legislators, state boards of education, school superintendents, and local boards of education are either unaware, misinformed, or refuse to abandon the status quo and the popular notion that more resources, more money, lower class sizes, more staff development, massive testing and national standards are the answers to school improvement. They’re not. The most important part of the education equation is loving, caring, well-informed parents who believe that education, life-long learning, and Christian values that support character and virtue trump all else.

Public Schools Are Mediocre at Best

I’m being kind. Most do the best they can under handicapping circumstances such as misguided and uninformed politicians and their political appointees, boards of education who may be well intentioned but are usually not knowledgeable, the paucity of highly effective teachers, a heterogeneous school population, and the obstructionist unions who will strike at the mere notion that their turf is being violated and that tenure- a job for life-is a not a God-given right. Add uniformed and apathetic parents to the mix and you get the picture.

The intrusive federal government piles on the woes of the public schools by waving dollars in front of governors and legislators to accept the fed’s latest version of ideas for school improvement. The dollars are accepted with the gusto of a free gourmet meal. These gifts from the United States Department of Education are not free. They come with a long list of requirements that are not thoughtfully scrutinized by state education or local officials. The lure of more dollars is irresistible to those who continue to believe that more resources compute to better schools. The devil is in the details.

Two recent examples of federal and state initiatives that interfered rather than promoted better schools are the NCLB, No Child Left Behind Act (2002) enacted during president George W. Bush’s administration and supported by a bipartisan cadre of other misguided politicians and Common Core (2009) proposed by various states and buttressed by the federal government during the Obama administration.

The former required massive testing at every grade level resulting in what I call, testing boot camps³. As a fifth-grade teacher in 2010 in a Florida school, I had to plan for six weeks of test preparation instead of teaching my students and following the state mandated curriculum. This political debacle occurring under governor Jeb Bush, his appointees, and the Florida Legislature, also included ranking schools with an A, B, C, D, or F and holding teachers accountable for test results; two unenlightened consequences that met stiff resistance from parents and unions.

The latter, Common Core, attempted to mandate national education standards for all 50 states along with rigorous testing. Several states backed away from this initiative to develop their own standards and almost half the states refused to use Common Core testing. These two initiatives were more like needless invasions into a system that needed more parent outreach and involvement and less government interference. Parents took the lead themselves by flocking to charter schools and seeking vouchers for private schools.

The proliferation of charter school options and a voucher system using tax payer dollars that permit parents to seek public school alternatives by enrolling their kids in private schools are testaments to the dissatisfaction of parents who