5.4.9 Responsibility of Community

I want to finish up today with the schools responsibility to the community. Here, the schools responsibility to the community is, as far as I am concerned, a really big deal. It's one of the things schools don't do very well. I will emphasize again and again the fact that there is a real problem when the community feels that the schools are liberal and the community is conservative. Schools are typically viewed as being more liberal than the communities they serve. I think that's absolutely wrong. The ideal is that the school should reflect as accurately as possible the values of the community. Now, those values of the community extend over a wide range. And so the schools values should extend over a wide range. But any parent that sends their kid to school should have the condfidence that the values of their kids are going to be respected as much as the values of any other kids. That's the job of the school. The school has no right and no place to be subversive. The worst example of that is I once saw a course in a college catalog entitled "How to teach controversial issues so nobody notices". Now that's a course on how to sneak up on your community. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. Immoral. You see the school shouldn't sneak up on anybody for anything. Now there's going to be lots of times when there's disagreements, where the recommendations compete with each other but these should be upfront, head on, everybody should know what the rules are, everybody should know how the school is dealing with this and why. It's really important that the schools be seen as servants of the community.
And anybody whose personal values are such that they cannot go along with the community values, they should be outta there. Because there are lots of times when my values will be different than the communities values but if I am a school teacher my responsibility is to do the very best job I can to reflect those community values. I am entitled to my values, I am entitled to tell the students what my values are but my job is to soldier in terms of the community values. That's the job I accept when I become a teacher. Really important. The community needs feedback. We're going to be talking about feedback today, that's our major topic of discussion but the community needs to both give and receive feedback. The community has to do a better job of telling the schools what to do and communities don't tell schools very well what to do. Communities speak with forked tongue in terms of not having their act together, in terms of what they're expecting of schools and they change their minds without notice. The major swings we talked about, the community on the one hand wants the school to be concerned with the whole child and on the other hand wants to go back to the basics and so we swing wildly between the whole child and back to the basics. The fact of the matter is that if kids are hungry, they don't learn so you have to be concerned with the whole child. But then it is a matter of balance and it's a matter of the perception of balance. The schools have to be concerned about service to the community. That's a very important thing to be serving the community and the problem of communication is always there. Service and communication. We've talked about the support of community values and let me emphasize one more time that the schools should be a place of future orientation. What I mean by future orientation
is that schools should help the community anticipate what lies ahead. Right now communities are not very good at that and schools are not very good at that. This is one of the reasons that a futures' orientation is one of the issues that I've identified as being one of the major issues in this class. I think that the successful teacher is one that is ahead of the curve and helps the kids of the community get ahead of the curve. We should be helping the community anticipate everything from the need for roads and new hospitals, or whatever, but the schools should be places that are dealing with future concerns. Well, so much for our tour of school administration.

	What is the ideal concept when it comes to schools working with communities?	Answer Here
	Hunter High School is located in a very bad section of Chicago, Illinois. As a result of their surroundings, many of the students bring outside problems with them to Mrs. Adam's classroom when they come to school. How can Mrs. Adam and the rest of the faculty and administration attempt to provide some sort of relief for some of these problems outside their school building that affects their students adversely, and how should the community react to any intervention by the school on its student body's behalf?	Answer Here