For Part 1, go here.

So I have a theory. New Mexico is always in the bottom 5 in education rankings, and it is not because they have poor teachers. How does a state so beautiful with amazing weather (most of the time) attract the worst of the worst? I do not think they do. Why is North Dakota always in the top ten (usually higher than that)? All the good teachers want to spend 6 months of the year bundled up requiring block heaters and remote starters for their cars? Probably not.

My theory is (maybe this is not a theory at all and I just have not read it anywhere) that teachers have little to do with the academic achievements of their students. I am not saying they have NOTHING to do with it, but to blame the teachers for educational rankings is not where the answers lie. I believe it lies with the parents and the homes. Parents in New Mexico do not have high academic expectations for their children. They not only teach their children values that have nothing to do with educational success (but have a lot to do with materialism and vanity–much time and money goes into these things), but send them to school and expect the teachers to give their children A’s and B’s for mediocre performance. I fear they might be teaching their children that educational success is not important and that “bookworms” like my daughter are social misfits. This is something I cannot prove, but the evidence would support my theory.

Private schools and homeschooling are prominent here due to the low educational rankings. I doubt that every stellar teacher is in a private school here. But I am guessing there are more stellar parents of private school students here. This is not about parents who have more money, but about the way they choose to spend it.

So why isn’t my private school like that? Another theory here. Because it does not cost enough. It is subsidized by my church and a few other churches. If I am a member of one of those churches, I have a significantly reduced tuition expense. (People who come from the community have a higher rate, and I must admit most of those kids are better to deal with than the many of the ones from the churches. Although sometimes the ones from the community are using our school as a reform school, so that is a different scenario.) Not only do most of our students get a significantly reduced rate, the majority (I would say about 3/4) get tuition assistance (roughly half of the reduced rate) from the church. So the majority of the students from my church are barely paying anything to send their children to this private school. Furthermore, of those receiving additional assistance, none of them attend church regularly.This post is not about my opinion of this policy, but more how I think it supports my theory. (And I am certainly not making statements here about church attendance and related behavior. I could do a whole post on things I have seen to make make me understand why many hate Christianity and Christians, though I am a Christian. My point here is that these “church members” are not attending church and are getting their school tuition heavily subsidized. I am not among the those with additional tuition assistance. Also, I am not completely opposed to tuition assistance, but I grew up believing that Christian education requires sacrifice, and that is how I still approach it. Our family does not have piles of money that the others do not have; we just spend our money differently. We would not be able to justify asking for tuition assistance so we could live a more extravagant lifestyle. )

So what are teachers to do when they have a classroom full of students that are for the most part completely not motivated, and neither are their parents? There is no room here to address that, but I will in an upcoming post. It just seems to me that when taking off school for a manicure does not exactly send the best message to one’s kids about academic importance. It also seems that when a child barely does the minimum to get through a class because s/he is spending his/her time socializing, watching television or whatever, and the parents get irate that an “A” or “B” was not received in every class and fight the teachers as well as tell the child how poorly s/he is being treated, that the general attitude will result in poor educational rankings. Just a theory.


Many of your comments on these posts have been that you want to see where all of this goes before you comment. You are probably the wise ones. I appreciate all the nice comments I have received, but I fear the ones who have told me what a great parent I am will gasp from shock and think I am not a fit parent when I get to the end of this mess.

These posts take a lot of time and energy that I do not have (especially in the holiday season) to write, but they are timely for us, and I need to get through them. I will attempt the next installment which I think might have to do with school awards next Tuesday/Wednesday. (Time permitting, and often when I start writing, the topic changes, so we shall see.)