I can't disagree with you on parental involvement. It's an absolute necessity for a child to grow up to their full potential.

My wife's a dynamic teacher in a school district where that parental involvement's not so simple. First, half the homes in the district she teaches in have but a single parent and that parent works many jobs to pay the bills. There transportation is shoddy and unreliable. The area is primarily Hispanic so the language of choice at home is usually Spanish.

The primary religion of course in Hispanic communities is the Catholic Church and of course they so gratiously frown on birth control so the families often have 4 or 5 children. Often the older have to grow up fast to become the primary care provider for the other children.

Yet she tells me wonderful stories of those children and says she sees the same potential in many of them that she sees if she visits my son's classes at the more affluent school in our own neighbord. Of course language, reading, and writing come slowly to them. They don't have the same environment once they leave the classroom as our children do. Their family outings aren't to museums and concerts but instead to wrestling matches and baseball games if they get out at all. They don't take trips across the country or to Europe and Asia.

Anyway, I'm getting off an a tangent that I could write on for hours and it's getting late. Bottom line though is that not all families can put the committment you and I do into our children. It's easy to judge them as irresponsible and lose compassion but ultimate that lost compassion belongs to the innocent children that have no choices.

Art