A public school in Chicago doesn’t allow students to bring lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria:
Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.
“Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school,” Carmona said. “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception.”
Carmona said she created the policy six years ago after watching students bring “bottles of soda and flaming hot chips” on field trips for their lunch. Although she would not name any other schools that employ such practices, she said it was fairly common.
A Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman said she could not say how many schools prohibit packed lunches and that decision is left to the judgment of the principals.
An illegitimate usurpation of parental authority? Catholic moral theologian Jana Bennett isn’t so sure:
So the principal decided to take it upon herself to ban them except in cases of medical necessity. Granted that parents who object could likely find studies that support the opposite claims (as is usually the case when it comes to scientific studies), it is the principal in this case who has the authority to ban the lunches from her school. She’s apparently not alone in her decision to do so, but though the article treats that fact with some interest it is not really of interest according to the principle of subsidiarity. I’m particularly thinking of the following: “The principle of subsidiarity protects people from abuses by higher-level social authority and calls on these same authorities to help individuals and intermediate groups to fulfill their duties.” (Section 187, Compendium).
These days, there is a rather common cry that the “government” is taking over our lives when cases like this surface, especially since schools tend to be state-sponsored in one way or another. Education is such a prime example of this. Those who are running for office often decry the state of education and then try to push broad, sweeping bills through to show that “we mean what we say.” The No-Child Left Behind Act comes to mind.
Meanwhile, we non-politicians tend to see only the distinctions between federal and state levels, but much less so at local levels. But if we’re taking the principle of subsidiarity seriously, the feds and the state should be supporting local schools in all the ways it can, but stay out of decisions that schools themselves ought to be making – including whether it is appropriate to “teach to the test,” and how to measure their student populations’ successes. . . . We ought to trust each other more – especially the people on the ground.
Just as we ought to trust a principal to know her school and make a determination about lunches. She’s not being unfair or unjust; she’s giving students with very particular needs an out, but she’s also making a fairly-considered decision for her school.
Assuming you believe in subsidiarity (or as we neocalvinists call it, “sphere sovereignty”), do you think Bennett is right? Under subsidiarity, who should be responsible for making the determination about school lunches, parents or principals?
April 12th, 2011 | 9:22 am
Schools, even parish-run ones, have contracts with commercial suppliers. This has the taint of corporate interference–people who promote the consumption of high-sugar choices in drinks and snacks.
The principal would be on solid ground if her cafeteria employed a chef, minimized purchases of processed food, and urged the faculty and staff to decline questionable choices of their own–coffee, soda, sugar.
Yes, Americans, especially children should eat healthy. Ultimately, one can’t force people to make good choices–even kids.
My question: is there a single vending machine in the school? Even just one for teachers would raise the issue of hypocrisy, and rightly so.
April 12th, 2011 | 9:23 am
Just wondering – who picks up the bill for the lunches they provide?
April 12th, 2011 | 9:39 am
Parents, of course. But I’m sure that Bennett would agree.
Her point is that, in this particular case (the key to prudential moral action), we would hope that someone in touch with the local situation (the principal) would do what is best for the children. Right?
April 12th, 2011 | 9:51 am
I am going to go with parents on this one. While the principal may be able to get kids who are eating junkfood to eat well one meal a day, those same kids will still go home to eat Doritos and ice cream for dinner. Parents are responsible for putting food on their children’s plates. They have to be the one to ensure that it is wholesome food. I sympathize with the principal, but her solution may cause problems with parents who want to supervise what their children are eating due to special diets, like Kosher or vegetarianism. Giving the kids a packed lunch may be the parents’ way of ensuring kids only eat what their parents want them to eat. It is unfortunate that a few parents do not care, but negligent parenting is something our society has had to accept for a while. What are the alternatives?
April 12th, 2011 | 9:55 am
If the state has the power to force you to purchase health care, why not the power to force you to buy their school lunches?
I mean, it’s the state’s job to raise the kids. That’s what schools are for.
/sarc
April 12th, 2011 | 9:57 am
“We ought to trust each other more – especially the people on the ground.”
Doesn’t this rationale also apply to the principal vis-a-vis the parents? Can a principal assume exclusive responsibility for making certain decisions because he or she doesn’t approve of ["trust"] the decisions the parents ["the people on the ground"] are making? That doesn’t sound like a proper application of subsidiarity to me.
April 12th, 2011 | 9:58 am
I’m not sure subsidiarity is the most important concern. If parents are packing unhealthful lunches for their kids, I don’t see what would be wrong for schools to say, “When you’re in our care, you’re going to eat healthful food.” If parents were packing liquor and tobacco in their kids’ lunch boxes, certainly the schools wouldn’t say, “Your mom and dad know best!” Schools have broad rights to act in loco parentis. However, it sounds like the policy isn’t working.
The policy seems heavy handed and short sighted to me. And apparently wasteful. An ongoing program about good nutrition that involved the parents would seem to be preferable.
Subsidiarity seems to me a wise principle, but I don’t think it should be made into the Eleventh Commandment.
April 12th, 2011 | 10:01 am
[...] lunches brought from homeLos Angeles TimesAbout – News & Issues -Fox News -First Things (blog)all 80 news [...]
April 12th, 2011 | 11:02 am
People who are not free to make bad choices are not free.
April 12th, 2011 | 11:12 am
I went to Catholic grammar and high school in the sixties and early seventies, and was provided with a no choice hot lunch every day. So this is not new. Of course, my parents paid for it, and even then it was somewhat unusual for a high school to have it. (By the way, when we told the good sisters we’d like music during lunch, they happily supplied “Sing along with Mitch” Anybody remember him?)
April 12th, 2011 | 11:34 am
Sorry, but subsidiarity has two sides. One is the “localness” of the authority, the other is the nature of the intervention. In my book, no other adult gets to tell me or my husband what my kids are going to eat. Certainly they are not going to tell me that MY food isn’t good enough. This is about my children’s bodies, their health and well-being.
It is also true that middle-class values like being responsible for the care and feeding of one’s children are actively undermined by the usurpation of basic choices by those entrusted with the education of children.
This is the Peter Principle in action: I would bet a large portion of my patrimony that this same principle is a mediocrity where actual education is concerned. Food policing is easy; it’s the education part that’s hard.
April 12th, 2011 | 11:52 am
In terms of ‘theology’ or ‘philosophy’ or whatever you want to call it, it sounds fine to me. What difference is there between a school deciding to regulate the food it allows inside it and, say, requiring school uniforms?
The cries of “I decide what’s on my kid’s plate”….well it’s not quite your plate. The school isn’t telling you what to serve for dinner, it’s deciding what’s served inside itself. Likewise for uniforms it isn’t telling you what’s in your home closet, it’s deciding on what’s walking around inside its hallways. When you’re in someone else’s place, you abide by their rules. That’s more or less the end of the matter.
As for whether it’s a good policy? Beats me, seems like a very local decision and the principal should be more or less given a free hand to decide on the style and manner of her leadership. Maybe there’s something fishy going on here (such as a sweetheart deal with the food supplier) but barring evidence of that I think anyone who worries about the our right to gluttony being infringed upon is picking a pretty stupid thing to battle.
April 12th, 2011 | 11:59 am
In loco parentis is an old concept and classically applied to schools.
April 12th, 2011 | 12:05 pm
I’ll go ahead and make a further comment on my own post since I clarified some of this back at my own post as well: my concern here is less what parents are providing their kids in their lunches (though that is clearly the principal’s chief concern) and more what effect that food has on their education while they’re in that school. So on my view, the principle of subsidiarity is not working in relation to making judgements about the parents’ choices of foods (or at least, that’s the weaker argument in this case), but it does work insofar as the school’s ability to help students learn is affected. I think the principal has the right to make a rule about the food offered in her school, in the same way that some schools require uniforms or clothing rules (this is also a comment I made back at the website). Of course parents choose the foods their kids eat at home, and the clothes they wear. But in a school setting, the principal has the authority to govern the school as she sees fit, including, I think, food and clothing choices if they interfere with the school being able to provide a quality education. The principal has some studies to back up claims she might make about food affecting education. As I pointed out in my post, parents could probably come up with other studies saying an opposite thing and are then free to deal with that at home – but the point is that at the school,the principal has the authority to negotiate and choose these kinds of things, and should have that authority because she’s got a handle on the kids (all of them as a group) that attend that school, as well as a sense of the purpose of the school in a way is different from the parents’ purpose. Matt and David Nickol have me right here.
David Nickol’s point about whether it works or not is a separate issue – and another one the principal ought to be considering if she’s trying to do the “prudent moral action.”
April 12th, 2011 | 12:17 pm
Who pays for the lunches? In my public school district, cafeteria is an extra cost — and I would be extremely upset over being forced to pay for that — especially since my kids eat way healthier than any cafeteria food.
Also, it’s time for schools to go back to teaching the basics, instead of trying to force certain politically correct behaviors.
April 12th, 2011 | 12:20 pm
Sounds pretty sensible to me. Just take sugar by itself….. If I was running a school with a hundred or more kids I could see a problem if lots of them got hyped up on super-sugarly snacks and lunches. If parents do this at home then they have to deal with the problem but when they send them off to school someone else is dealing with it.
That being said I think the principal should show deference to the parent for whom this is a really important issue (for whatever reason, medical, religious or just because they have their own strongly held theories on diet). But barring that she should be allowed to try her policy and parents should respect it rather than grumble over a spurious right to junk food.
April 12th, 2011 | 12:22 pm
Principles of theology and subsidiarity aside, I’m curious as to what exactly the school is feeding these children. I have, shall I say, a bit of trouble believe mass-prepared cafeteria food is better than individually prepared lunches, even if those lunches include tortilla chips from time to time.
On the other hand, if they have the ladies who cooked in my high school . . . i went to high school in a small rural school district which had gotten a special grant and *everyone* got free hot lunch. Homemade rolls, butter set out on the tables. And those Italian women in the kitchen might not have made their own pasta, but they sure knew how to make a tasty meat sauce!
Kamilla
April 12th, 2011 | 12:28 pm
Look, when we’ve gotten to the point as a country where it’s even considered a fair point for debate whether the state can order your kids to eat food they provide for them, rather than what you do, it’s time to just turn out the lights and go home with regards the American Experiment. There should only be two proper responses to this lunacy: first, an open-mouthed gaping at the very idea, and second, a reaching for tar-and-feathers.
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
Oh well. It was a good run, but it’s all over now.
April 12th, 2011 | 12:30 pm
Kamilla
It is possible to have ‘mass prepared’ cafeteria food that is fresh, very healthy and very good. I would suspect that this would be the case….otherwise this principal is really setting herself up for humiliation by trying this policy if her cafeteria is your standard salty, cheesy ‘mystery meat’ cafeteria food.
April 12th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
As for the “medical excuse” exception, my kid would come to school with a note reading “Little Johnny is going to eat a lunch prepared for him by his parents. Along with the rest of his family, he is allergic to busy-body bureaucratic idiots who don’t know how to mind their own d**n business.”
April 12th, 2011 | 12:46 pm
Thank you, Kimilla, for posting such a good and true and beautiful example of what happens when real people do something wonderful with the materials they have at hand. The women you describe created an atmosphere and food itself that nourished body and soul. You have not forgotten that and rightfully so. The cooks may have sacrificed some years of highest biological functioning but I trust they were received and healed, body and soul, by God at their journey’s end. That is – is it not? – what we ultimately are hoping for for ourselves and for our children.
April 12th, 2011 | 1:00 pm
This is just one more way the state is trying to impose itself on us. Want to teach your kids sex education? Too bad. Don’t like the values being taught, or the exclusion of religion? Too bad. Don’t want every kid to be the same? Too bad, drink the Kool-aid.
_____
The following is also from Chicago Tribune article:
Fernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent lunch period at his elementary school.
“Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?” the seventh-grader shouted to his lunch mates in Spanish and English.
Dozens of hands flew in the air and fellow students shouted along: “We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!”
Fernando waved his hand over the crowd and asked a visiting reporter: “Do you see the situation?”
At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.
[...]Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district’s food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.
[...]At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. During a recent visit to the school, dozens of students took the lunch but threw most of it in the garbage uneaten. Though CPS has improved the nutritional quality of its meals this year, it also has seen a drop-off in meal participation among students, many of whom say the food tastes bad.
“Some of the kids don’t like the food they give at our school for lunch or breakfast,” said Little Village parent Erica Martinez. “So it would be a good idea if they could bring their lunch so they could at least eat something.”
_____
I like the nice, healthy, non-sugary dose of economic activity for the food provider. And if you really want to be terrified, go to the article and look at the picture of the enchilada.
April 12th, 2011 | 1:03 pm
Boonton, it’s not over the “right” to eat junk food. It’s over the right to raise your own kid. It’s over being required by law to purchase a particular food for your child, instead of having the freedom to determine for yourself what food you’d like to feed your family.
It’s also about whether feeding our kids is the schools’ primary purpose. I always thought the schools were here to teach our kids basic academic skills. Instead, I hear teachers saying, straight-faced, that they can’t even begin to really work on teaching the kids to read because the kids are coming to school with teeth that aren’t brushed, and so naturally they must play parent to other peoples’ kids. Who has time to break the cycle of poverty when there are teeth to be brushed?
Except this is not the schools’ job. This is what social workers are for. If the kids need to be fed better, why aren’t we targeting food stamp recipients, parents who are caught neglecting their kids, and so on, and sending them to skill development classes, so that they can learn how to better care for their children?
This blurring of boundaries is not harmless.
April 12th, 2011 | 1:17 pm
1. I agree that the principal has the right to regulate what is eaten in her school, on the same grounds that she has the right to compel students to wear school uniforms.
2. But having the right to do something doesn’t mean doing it is prudent. I don’t know how lunch is prepared at this specific school, but I’m pretty sure what we serve our kids is healthier and tastier than what an institutional cafeteria serves. It’s important to me that my kids not get accustomed to lots of sugar and fat (I wish I could get them to cut down on refined carbs too, but that’s been a bridge too far). I don’t think the American “food pyramid” is a wise guide to nutrition.
In the end, I would rather have the freedom to feed my children according to a standard that exceeds the institution’s in terms of healthfulness, even if that means risking that some kids’ parents will send them to school with a bag of Doritos and a Dr Pepper.
This dilemma illuminates why I find that even though I am a conservative, not a libertarian, I more and more default to libertarianism as the only way in a pluralistic society to conserve the things I value most.
April 12th, 2011 | 2:01 pm
I know this school and I think that around 80-90% of the students qualify for free or reduced school lunches. In fact, 85% of the students in CPS qualify for free or reduced lunches.
April 12th, 2011 | 2:42 pm
Jana, I’m glad you came over, because I didn’t want to register over there.
The reason that researchers keep stressing that certain things are associations, not causations, is that folks repeatedly don’t get that. As you don’t here. It is clear that you think nutrition, down to the individual meal level, does affect the ability of students to learn, and that is leaking into your thinking here.
There is much assertion, and some suspicion, but almost no evidence for this. Many people think this should all just sort of make sense as part of their grand theory of how children develop intellectually, but it has proved remarkably elusive to demonstrate.
April 12th, 2011 | 2:52 pm
“In loco parentis is an old concept and classically applied to schools.”
And in loco parentis, as classically understood, has meant that the school assumes the rights and responsibilities of parents insofar as the parents are not able to due to the kids being in the care of the school for part of each day.
Clearly, this doesn’t apply to forbidding packed lunches. Parents obviously are able to provide this, if they choose.
April 12th, 2011 | 3:35 pm
pentamom,
While I tend to think the school has gone too far in forcing students to eat in the cafeteria, I can think of any number of hypothetical cases in which the school should act in loco parentis when the parents exercise bad judgment. If parents packed lunch for a third grader and included beer or an energy drink with a high level of caffeine, I would not only expect the school to intervene, but would suspect they might be sued if they didn’t. If a child was coming to school and was obviously ill, yet his or her parents declined to get medical care for the child, I would expect the school to intervene. It seems clear there are many cases where a teacher or a school system should step in on behalf of the welfare of students if parents are negligent. So I don’t think a case can be made that the school system may never step in and do something that parents can or should do themselves. It seems only a matter of when.
April 12th, 2011 | 3:42 pm
Blake
Boonton, it’s not over the “right” to eat junk food. It’s over the right to raise your own kid. It’s over being required by law to purchase a particular food…
You aren’t required by law to purchase a particular food. You are required to abide by the rules of the school when you’re in the school. If the rules are that outside food can’t be brought in, well that’s not telling you what to feed your kid.
It’s also about whether feeding our kids is the schools’ primary purpose
That’s a cute but stupid statement. A few years ago in Taco Bell my wife saw a girl maybe 17 yrs old wearing a t-shirt that said “****sucker”. If she wore that to school I’d have no problem with a principal that ordering her home. I suppose you’d agree with me but your logic doesn’t. Your logic would say such a principal should only care if it could be proven the shirt somehow caused reading scores to slip and if it didn’t then he is imposing clothing decisions on the parents and he should just mind his own business.
Schools exist as institutions first and when entering an institution you do have to adapt somewhat to its culture and leadership. Yes since we are a diverse nation that has a lot of respect for individuality I agree schools should be generally accomodative of the various different desires of parents but that doesn’t alter the fact that school != your home…..even if you’re a taxpayer, a citizen, a voter etc. that doesn’t change the fact that when you’re in ‘someone else’s house’ you abide by their rules.
This blurring of boundaries is not harmless.
Actually setting up rules and standards is what is well within the boundaries of an institution. This is hardly anything new, do you think English boarding schools, for example, have social workers handling all non-academic related issues? One consquence of this is that some rules will be absurd. For example, almost all school uniforms are absurd in one way or another….but that’s the point of a uniform. If it didn’t look different from anything else it wouldn’t be a uniform and would only be, at best, a dress code.
R. Dreher’s point is much more valid. While the principal may be within her rights, the rule may not be prudent. But then we don’t really know since we aren’t being told much about her cafeteria, what types of food she has in it, the cost to the student and just how hard she is about enforcing the rule with those parents who really, really want to prepare their own lunches for their kids.
I disagree, though, that this is really non-libertarian. If you really think about it, it’s quite consistent with libertarianism….
Look at it like this. You as a parent have a responsibility to feed your kid. Suppose, for whatever reason, the town had a free soup kitchen that served dinner every night to whoever asks. But you’re a strict vegan and every dinner has meat! Well tough, you have to feed your kid if you don’t like the free meal then go buy your own but the state isn’t forcing you to feed meat to your kid. Well you have a responsibility to educate your kid. You have an option for a free public school. If you don’t like various aspects of the public school then do it yourself or hire another school to do it. But that’s that, unless the public school is really violating your rights in some real way (and no “I want my kid to go to school with a liter of Coke every day” is not such a right) then that’s that. If you don’t like it run for the school board, complain at the PTA meeting and so on.
Assistant Village Idiot
There is much assertion, and some suspicion, but almost no evidence for this. Many people think this should all just sort of make sense as part of their grand theory of how children develop intellectually, but it has proved remarkably elusive to demonstrate.
I agree but proving these things will almost always remain elusive. At a certain point an authority figure like a teacher, a principal or whatnot has to try something and see how it works. And to put it bluntly, when a decision is made it’s sometimes nothing more than sabatogue to oppose it simply for the sake of opposing it. For example, school uniforms aren’t my style and I think the evidence on them is probably mixed. If the principal was mulling that over I might voice skepticism but if it as adopted I would comply with the rule and not encourage kids to break it out of some non-existant ‘right’. Doing so isn’t really much of a favor to the kids anyway, when they get jobs just see how much that sort of thing will really fly.
Pentamom
Clearly, this doesn’t apply to forbidding packed lunches. Parents obviously are able to provide this, if they choose.
clearly this is NOT the case. Again consider 100 young kids being packed off to school with lots of sugar. The kids love the goodies from their parents, the school does not quite love hyperactive choas at 1 PM when all that sugar kicks in. Maybe you pack great lunches, maybe you don’t. Then again maybe your kid will learn just as well wearing his casual clothes rather than his uniform. None of that really makes a difference, sometimes rules are rules and respecting the rules is part of the lesson.
In loco parentis implies that parents defer some (not all of course) of their authority to the school. Since there’s different authorities here, there’s going to be differences. That too is another lesson. Sometimes you have an authority figure who will let you do X while the other will not. That too is a lesson….it’s no different than when your kid says “Jimmy’s mom let’s him stay up”. His mom is a different authority than you with different rules at different times.
IMO this may very well be a stupid rule but authorities can sometimes be stupid without violating the requirement that they be respected as authorities. The temptation is, with stupid rules, to try to find a way to assert that they have crossed a line. I think examples of crossing a line would entail schools that seek to punish students for things they do outside the school (like making critical posts about their school on facebook)….but here it really isn’t crossing a line.
April 12th, 2011 | 5:31 pm
Boonton, I meant parents *as a class are able to provide lunches for their kids.
This is not analogous to other in loco parentis situations, where, for example, parents as *a class* are not able to supervise their children’s behavior on the playground, because they are not there. The function of in loco parentis is to step in to oversee what the parents are absolutely unable to do because of their absence, not what they choose not to do or are not able to do up to some standard that the school sets without reference to the parents’ wishes.
And how is this not requiring them to purchase particular food for their kids, when they are requiring them to purchase the one and only lunch that they serve?
April 12th, 2011 | 6:10 pm
That’s a cute but stupid statement.
No, it’s really not.
If public schools don’t stop neglecting their actual mission, the public school system as we know it will crumble. It has already overwhelmingly lost the confidence of the parents. Now it is losing the support of the public.
I once knew a fourth grade teacher who actually knew how to teach. She was so good at “turning kids around” that the school system routinely sent her all the kids who were “at risk”. Every child in her class was a situation where, if she did not teach that kid, nobody else ever would.
She achieved miracles. How did she do it? Well, by focusing on what needed to be done. By prioritizing. She did not have the time or luxury to worry about things outside of her job description. She knew how to refer situations to the appropriate outside agency, if need be. She also didn’t have time to waste on alienating the community: she had too many kids, and she recognized that she needed parents as allies, so she didn’t play the usual teacher games – she got them to come in and volunteer (how else to handle that many kids, most of whom were unable to read even simple words?)
We have a choice: do we want schools that can and will teach our children, or do we want to squander all the resources (both physical resources like money, and also intangible resources like goodwill, confidence, and the relationships teachers do or don’t have with the parents and other adults in the community)?
There is a thing called opportunity cost. Every time a teacher prioritizes something like pushing a political agenda, micromanaging something that is technically not part of her job description, or just plain trying to take over some other person’s kids, that teacher is wasting the time and energy that was supposed to be spent teaching the basic literacy skills that will make the difference between whether this child grows up to be employable or not..
Plus, such a teacher is also alienating all the parents in the community who are good parents – the ones who do take good care of their children, who deserve better treatment.
April 12th, 2011 | 7:27 pm
Boonton, I meant parents *as a class are able to provide lunches for their kids.
That’s not relevant at all. The school is led by the principal and she has the freedom to use her authority to try to create a school that works. That may mean, for example, imposing uniforms or getting rid of uniforms. It may mean different hours, it may even mean something as silly as banning a color (which may be a factor if you have a gang problem). But using your logic all of this is out of the window. Uniforms? In the US at least even the poorest of parents seem to have kids who go about with cloths on so it’s not like the school needs to provide uniforms to prevent mass nudity among the poor.
This is not analogous to other in loco parentis situations, where, for example, parents as *a class* are not able to supervise their children’s behavior on the playground, because they are not there.
I notice you dodged the sugar issue. clearly while you can claim that teachers and principals have the authority to control hyperactive kids on the playground but there is a realtionship between the two. I think you’re missing my point here. The school as an insitution has a right to regulate what goes on inside it, that includes what you send there via your kids. Military and boarding schools go to the extreme with this where they try to create a shared mission by imposing uniforms, overnight sleeping and basically try to make the kids all be on the same page at the same time. Most public schools go nowhere near that route but in general I would defer to the right of the principal to try new things as well as old. If you don’t object to trying uniforms you can’t logically object to uniform menus.
You’re mistaking crossing a line of authority with a rule that might just be not very pragmatic.
And how is this not requiring them to purchase particular food for their kids, when they are requiring them to purchase the one and only lunch that they serve?
Fair point, maybe I should rephrase this. Yea the school can require that or skip lunch. They can also require you to buy a uniform, bring sneakers on gym day and so on. How far a school pushes this depends on the strategy that the school is employing. Most public schools won’t push this that far but since most people favor experimentation, charter schools and such I don’t think it’s a good idea to declare that this is ‘off the table’ unless you have a really good reason to take it off the table. Just being unusual or different from the way we remember it isn’t sufficient.
Blake
If public schools don’t stop neglecting their actual mission, the public school system as we know it will crumble. It has already overwhelmingly lost the confidence of the parents. Now it is losing the support of the public.
Yawn, this is a broken record. Public schools are almost entirely locally controlled. Americans are among the best educated in the world and have been for decades. For decades as well, we’ve been delcaring that public schools are crumbling, in crises, losing confidence. What this almost always means is that other people’s public schools are in crises. Most people like their local public schools and usually (but not always) places with very bad public schools tend to have lots of other problems.
The rest of your post is nice if you want to run for your local school board but doesn’t say much of substance, sorry it just doesn’t. Yea ok we should prioritize, look at opportunity cost, look at the sainted teacher who worked miracles etc. etc. etc. But we aren’t going to do any such thing. The person who does this is the principal and the others that run the schools. Measure them by their results but otherwise you manage by exception. You are the one micromanaging here, not them. If you tell a general to win a battle, you expect him to command his troops to win it. You don’t sit around questioning him on every little tactic that he feels is important to accomplish that goal. You don’t sit there and declare that training on this or that isn’t important, that he should offer his mean more leave or less, that his should be harder on discipline or softer. Provided he isn’t doing anything that’s over the line, you manage based on his macro results rather than his micro tactics.
To you lunch is an afterthought but for a school it’s a big deal. You have lots of kids who are mostly all together in free form socialization instead of being controlled by teachers in small classrooms. Depending on the circumstances, it’s quite possible brining in lots of outside food may in fact be disruptive. Or maybe relative uniformity in the menu does contribute somehow to some group solidarity that helps learning. It’s really not my business and it doesn’t cross a line, it’s a legitimate tactic that might or might not help and the principal should generally be free to try it.
April 12th, 2011 | 8:18 pm
Would nausea at the food offerings be a medical excuse?
April 12th, 2011 | 8:50 pm
I note that having a captive market, the food preparers have no reason to improve the palatability of their food.
April 12th, 2011 | 9:29 pm
Assistant Village Idiot –
“The reason that researchers keep stressing that certain things are associations, not causations, is that folks repeatedly don’t get that. As you don’t here. It is clear that you think nutrition, down to the individual meal level, does affect the ability of students to learn, and that is leaking into your thinking here.”
I don’t think I’m actually all that clear about a causal link between nutrition and ability of students to learn, though I’m flattered to think someone finds me “clear” (I work on clarity all the time…). Of course correlation is not causation (as I mentioned in the original post), but I think people often emphasize that point too much, to the point of avoiding making any kind of decision about even correlated things. Logically, causation requires correlation in order to be true; but we are not likely to ascertain any sources of “causation” with definitive certainty here, exactly because of the complexity of human relationships and behavior. I think strong associations may therefore be reasons (or claims, which was the word I used in the comment above) to try something out, as in the school lunch gig. I do not (nor did I imply) that such a rule will necessarily lead to better education, only that the principal has some bases for believing that forming a rule about school lunches might help. It may turn out not to be the case too – this is where the principle of subsidiarity is clearly connected to questions about prudential judgement and practical wisdom. Studies are not the only things the principal has to go on in her decision, in other words.
April 13th, 2011 | 7:12 am
I agree, studies are often difficult to find and very difficult to evaluate. The job cannot be done by just amassing together all the studies of ‘what works’. Esp. in education things that ‘work’ are almost certainly combinations of many things. A uniform in one school might work combined with a shared purpose and high group solidarity. The same uniform in another school might just be a source of tension and defiance. At some point the principal simply has to toss up her hands and say I’m going to try these things because my gut thinks it will work in this particular place and time.
Logically I think the lunch policy is no different than a uniform policy so if you’re ok with a school trying uniforms you should be ok with it trying the lunch thing. That’s not to say that either may be pragmatic in a particular school. When we first hear about the case many of us jump to the conclusion that it’s *more* extreme than a uniform requirement but it really isn’t. It just sounds unusual to us so we assume it must have crossed the line more than more common policies.
Finally, logically if you’re going to take the ‘just do academics and nothing else’ approach then your basically inviting anarchy. Under such a policy the girl with the obscene t-shirt I described above would have to be let alone unless you could prove she was somehow hurting test scores. Such a school could never actually get around to doing academics because a million non-academic distrctions would have to be allowed to roam free by principals and teachers required to ‘just talk about the subjects’.
April 13th, 2011 | 8:17 am
Brian @Brian
April 12th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
Brilliant!
By the way, the principle of in loco parentis seems to be selectively applied these days. What would happen if one of these kids went to a school counselor and asked him/her to help arrange an abortion without the parents’ knowledge?
April 13th, 2011 | 9:33 am
Yawn, this is a broken record. Public schools are almost entirely locally controlled.
I think the argument “this has been said before, this is said all the time” as an argument for why something is not valid has to win some sort of award for inadequate responses.
Let’s consider this:
1. By all measures, school performance is way below what is considered acceptable.
2. School performance has been labeled a crisis by both the left and the right
3. Parents are especially unhappy with school performance, to the point where people are making huge sacrifices to homeschool their kids
4. The schools are being artificially held up by a powerful teacher’s union, which is starting to lose its power.
5. teachers are whining about how helpless they are to actually do anything about the fact that the job they are actually paid to do isn’t getting done
6. schools are diverting resources away from academics to focus on whether the kids are parented correctly.
Do today’s teachers even know enough about logic to construct a syllogism?
April 13th, 2011 | 9:57 am
[...] no no no. Schools are accountable to parents, not the other way [...]
April 13th, 2011 | 9:58 am
[...] no no no. Schools are accountable to parents, not the other way [...]
April 13th, 2011 | 10:58 am
Re: Broken records.
1. ‘By all measures’ the electronic gadgets I have in my home are way below what’s considered acceptable. Electronic stores like Best Buy & PC Richards have a vested interest in calling me and almost everyone else ‘way behind’. The neat thing about industry created metrics is that the can always be changed…yet the fact remains I do things with electronics in my home that would have been unthinkable in 1995 let alone 1985, 75 or 65.
2. Agreement by left and right can signal that something is true, more likely it’s a signal that some line is *useful* to both the left and the right. Useful != true. Stuff that everone seems to agree on deserves special scrutiny since it means that the costs of agreement are probably very, very cheap so no one bothers to really examine what is being said.
Usually here most of the evidence that is presented doesn’t stand up all that much. International comparision test results are tossed around but it turns out foreign countries place great importance on the test while most US schools treat it as a zero stakes thing to just get done. SAT averages from decades ago are compared to today, ignoring the fact that different portions of the population took the test in the past relative to today.
Logically if education has been declining for the last 100 years then the more backwards in time you go the better educated we all must have been. That’s a bold statement when according to http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp we had an illiteracy rate of 20% in 1870 which took 30 years to fall to 10% and then another 30 years to fall to 5% and almost doesn’t exist where even the lowest ranking high school dropouts have no problem texting, tweating and facebooking their friends all day long on complicated cell phones.
3. A trivial portion of parents homeschool, of them only a portion do so for reasons that the local public school is bad academically.
4. This teacher’s union must indeed be quite powerful since schools are locally controlled and seem to follow the same model whether you’re talking about the most liberal of counties or the reddest counties of red states. Perhaps they should consider becoming a 3rd political party since they seem to have acheived a method of always winning that neither political party has ever come close to matching.
5. Most people complain about their job. Most people think they are smarter than the people who are running whatever it is they are working for. Most people think they would do much better if there were fewer distractions, less cumbersome rules, etc. etc. Yet amazingly stuff gets done which kind of implies that you have to take such statements with a grain of salt.
6. Maybe but this isn’t evidence of that. As was pointed out here, if anything this adds resources to the school since it likely means more kids buying lunch. If you measure the principal by performance on academic metrics then the principal who wastes time on spurious ideas that don’t contribute will be at a disadvantage compared to one who does. But your position appears to be one that you an a prioir just know what does and doesn’t work in a school and will micromanage from your throne.
“Do today’s teachers even know enough about logic to construct a syllogism?”
I’d probably say yes since most rational humans construct syllogisms every day in one form or another.
April 13th, 2011 | 3:45 pm
My children used to attend a magnet school where more than half the kids were on a free or reduced lunch plan. The food was awful — I really felt sorry for the kids who had to eat it. And yes, I tried several meals. Later, the entire district went to a “all children will eat breakfast at school” policy and when I protested, the district office told me I could feed my kids at home and then send them to a second breakfast at home! So much for the childhood obesity scare. Besides assuming part of my responsibility as a parent, the schools (by providing two out of three meals for kids — and many of these kids also receive “weekend backpacks” of food and free lunch all summer) actually take away parents’ incentive to provide for their children.
This school forbids parents from packing lunches. That’s very different from what some schools my children attended did — inform parents that lunches and snacks had to be healthy, and provide a list things they could not bring as well as suggestions for what they might pack. I didn’t have a problem with that. But to tell parents they cannot feed their children? It’s ridiculous.
April 14th, 2011 | 8:02 am
Nanny Sate? What “nanny state”?
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