Why Investing In Long-Term Education (Not Just Test Scores) Matters For My Son And Your Kids
Last Saturday, my 10-year-old son and I were clearing out the back corner of our garage when he kicked a dusty cardboard box and pulled out my crumpled 4th grade science fair volcano. Baking soda crusted the flannel board sides, the handwritten label “Why Volcanic Eruptions Help Plants” was smudged, and I’d scribbled a big red C- in the corner myself after my teacher handed it back. “Why do you even keep this?” he asked, wiping garage dust on his jeans. “You got a bad grade.”
I told him I got the C because I skipped the 3-page research paper the assignment required. I was too focused on adding my own bit about how volcanic ash makes farm soil more fertile, the thing I’d gotten obsessed with after watching a documentary about Mount St. Helens. My teacher, Ms. Henderson, didn’t just send me home with the C. She stayed after school with me for four afternoons that week, helped me rework the project to add the required paper, and even entered it in the district fair, even though we were past the deadline. I didn’t win anything, and I never became a geologist, but that’s the first memory I have of someone caring more about what I was curious about than whether I followed the rules.
I’ve been volunteering in my son’s elementary school classroom one day a week for the last semester, and that memory comes back to me almost every time I walk through the front doors. Last month, I helped set up for parent-teacher conferences, and I overheard a mom pressing his third-grade teacher to add extra math homework for her son. “He needs to get ahead for middle school placement,” she said, and the teacher just nodded, even though I knew she already sends home 20 minutes of math a night and spends half her own paycheck on pencils and reading books for kids who can’t bring their own. After the mom left, the teacher leaned against the desk and said quietly that the boy spends 20 minutes every recess designing tree forts with his friends, working out how to shore up the walls against wind and split the work fairly. That’s the problem-solving that will matter more than any extra worksheet, she said, but she can’t tell that to parents who are worried about test scores and college applications.
That conversation got me thinking about what it actually means to invest in education, for my son and for the kids who will come after him. A lot of people hear “invest in education” and think of 529 college savings plans or fancy preschool tuitions or tutoring to boost test scores. But that’s investing in a kid’s resume, not their education. The education that sticks, the kind that helps people solve problems and care about things and adapt when the world changes, that’s the stuff that gets cut first when districts tighten budgets. It’s the art teacher, the school librarian, the after-school science club, the extra 10 minutes a teacher can spend talking about a kid’s random question if they don’t have 28 kids packed into a class.
It’s easy to feel like this is a problem for politicians or rich people to fix, but there are small, concrete things almost any parent or caregiver can do that add up. I started with small changes at home first. Instead of asking my son “how was school” or “what grade did you get on your test” when he gets in the car, I ask “what’s something you wondered about this week that you didn’t get to learn about?” Last week he said he wondered why ants don’t drown when it rains. We spent 40 minutes Sunday digging up a section of our backyard to find ant nests, turned an old pickle jar into a small ant farm, and looked up local ant species online. It didn’t count for any grade, it didn’t go on any application, but it’s the kind of thing he’ll remember, I think. That’s an investment that costs nothing but a little time.
Another thing I started doing is going to our local school board meetings. I used to think they were just boring, irrelevant events, but they decide 90% of the budget for our schools. Last year, the district proposed cutting our full-time school librarian position to pay for more standardized test prep workbooks. A group of 12 of us parents showed up, each talked for two minutes about what the librarian did for our kids. My son got up and talked about how she helped him find graphic novels about space when he hated reading and refused to pick up any book that didn’t have pictures. We kept the librarian. That didn’t take a lot of money, just a few hours of a Tuesday night once a quarter.
The third small thing I do is ask my son’s teacher what she actually needs, instead of just bringing a generic mug for Christmas. A few months ago, she said she needed extra pairs of socks and sweatpants for kids who forget theirs or have accidents at recess. I grabbed a bag of clean hand-me-downs from our closet and brought them in. Last semester, she needed an extra pair of hands to cut out paper for a project, and I went in an hour early. It’s small, but it takes something off her plate that she’d have to handle on her own time otherwise.
We taped my old volcano back together last Saturday, and my son put it on his bookshelf. He says he’s going to redo it for his science fair this year, add the soil section just like I did. I don’t know if he’ll get a good grade. I don’t know what kind of world he’ll be living in when he grows up, what problems he’ll have to solve, what work he’ll do. Our school still has a long list of unmet needs – we still don’t have enough teachers, the playground equipment is rotting, the art program only runs on donations from parents. Some months we win small fights, some months we lose. But I keep showing up. I do the small things, because education isn’t just for my son. It’s for the kid who can’t afford tutoring, for the kid who loves drawing more than math, for all the kids that come after him. That’s the investment that matters, right now.
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