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I’ve been going on and on about Educon 2.0 and the wonderful school, Science Leadership Academy (SLA), that hosted the event. What was so remarkable about the school was the amount of devotion the students had to school and their education. These fourteen year olds had such a tremendous ownership of the school, of their individual and group performance on projects-even if they didn’t get the grades they wanted, they knew what they had to do to perform better the next time. What makes a group of young kids from some of the city’s worst neighborhoods do this? What makes them come to school early and leave late? What makes 94% of all parents show up to parent-teacher conferences when most public schools average 35% attendance?

Community and trust.

Just so you don’t get the impression that SLA is some special anomaly, please watch the video from the New York Times. A former Army Captain, a Hasidic Jew who also speaks Spanish, took over one of the toughest and most dangerous schools in the Bronx. Now, all of a sudden, test scores are going up. Violence is down. The school is a community. How did this “miracle” occur? The kids were asked this question, and they talk about trusting this new principal. That he inspires them to make better, more constructive choices. That they want to have something more intheir lives, and he is starting to give them the tools they need to make this happen.

Whether you’re talking parenting or education, the secret sauce is trust and community. When you trust someone- if your kids really trust you and respect you, they will go above and beyond for you. If they can’t trust you- if you make them live in a police state, you’ll get more rebellion, subtle and overt, than you’ll ever get if you just learn to trust and respect your kids.

Now kids have to earn trust and privileges, but you have to be willing to let then take risks, see if they are ready for different levels of responsibility, and more often than not, they will be more ready than you think. It requires a leap of faith to give up the fear of mistakes, of disappointments- to allow kids to take graduated risks and learn from any bumps in the road. But in the end, this is what will make the biggest difference in their lives-knowing that you have faith in them.

The irony in life is that we expect kids to have blind faith in us in our roles as parents, and you and I both know there’s times we’re making this up as we go along. There’s no hard manual or written rule book for your household. We expect blind faith in parents, teachers, and religion, to set values and guidelines, yet we aren’t willing to return the favor and to trust our kids. We don’t always have faith in them. And there’s plenty of reasons why, including the fact that they don’t always have the experience necessary to make the best decisions, nor the brain hardware to preview all the possible down-side consequences of any particular course of action. (But it seemed like a good idea at the time…..)

What these two schools are finding out, and the lessons we need to take away from them as parents, is that Trust Matters. Even with some of the toughest, harden, difficult kids around, these school succeed because they expect and accept nothing less than their student’s best efforts. The teachers give the kids their best, including letting them know they care about their job, each and every day. They are building trust and relationships with the students, and as a result, the kids give their best in return.

You can’t play this game without going all in. It’s risky. But if you don’t take that first step and trust your child, how will they ever trust you in return?

by Whitney Hoffman

[tags]kids, children, students, school, education, reform, community, trust, effort, dedication[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by diebmx, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved