SIMMONS: Education should start at home

It’s that time of year again, when attention turns to high school proms, caps and gowns, diplomas and other unforgettable Kodak moments.

Now picture rule-making politicians and hide-bound bureaucrats in Washington, where school reform is driven by one-size-fits-all policies that focus on the culture of our schools when we need to change the culture of our children first.

The tick-tock of that message occurs every 26 seconds.

That’s right, every 26 seconds a child in Any City USA drops out of school, And when they do, they become Americas weakest link in an academically demanding global economy.

Rep. Charles A. Rangel, the 80-year-old New York Democrat who dropped out of high school, fought in Korea and turned his educational life around afterward, should be a leading voice in the fight against the dropout epidemic.

He and his colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus should, for example, advocate parental and civic engagement by reminding the politicians and bureaucrats that learning begins at home.

Those same people also should disengage from the progressive line of thinking that the quality of unionized teachers determines whether a child learns. While theres no denying that teachers play a central role in a child’s academic life, there’s no place like home.

And that’s where the struggle against the dropout epidemic needs to begin.

See, we know why children drop out, we know when they most likely will drop out and we know who most likely will drop out.

We even know what happens after they drop out: In their lifetimes, dropouts lose hundreds of billions of dollars and our “Made in America” label becomes threadbare.

Think about that the next time you see a “Made in China” sticker.

This is not to suggest that the federal government doesnt have an important role to play in stemming dropout factories and raising graduation rates, but that won’t happen until debate gets out of the classrooms and into the village.

In other words, the problem isn’t House Speaker John A. Boehner, a champion of public school vouchers, or Michelle A. Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor accused in the Daily Kos of supporting the privatization of public schools. The problem is that the school reform debate in Washington is a lopsided debate, with pols, lobbyists and “educrats” fixated on changing administrative and teaching methods.

The joke’s on us.

Mr. Rangel dropped out years before white U.S. Supreme Court justices ordered schools to desegregate and decades before a liberal Democrat in the White House established the U.S. Department of Education.

“He went for a job, and Mr. Man said without an education you might as well be dead.”

The late James Brown, whose sounds and moves are respected by rock ’n’ rollers of all racial and ethnic stripes, rung the schoolhouse bells with those words in “Dont Be a Dropout” in 1966, the year Mr. Rangel won his first election as a New York lawmaker and Hispanic Caucus Chairman Charles A. Gonzalez, Texas Democrat, was still in college.

Well, while an untold number of dropouts are indeed dead, others might as well be because it is likely they will languish in prison or seek handouts because they cannot provide their own families with a hand up.

Like the racial achievement gap, dropout rates won’t decline merely because black and white children go to the same schools or poor children share classrooms with middle-class children.

Remember, one size never fits all.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.