Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

As expected, I was attacked for my written support of afterschool programs. I was called someone in the “edutocracy” with a “vested interest.”  Parents and other advocates for children should expect to be attacked, not by all people, but by some. When attacked, ask yourself: How can this attack help me make my point?  Who is my real audience? Is it the attacker or people who will focus on the merits of arguments? Usually it’s the latter. Here’s my response to the attack on my motivation:

February 19, 2010, 2:12PM

In Dagesq’s comment about my comment, he referred to me as someone in the “edutocracy” who has a “vested interest” in afterschool programs. In a sense, he’s right. As someone who has devoted my professional life to helping children and their families, I do have a vested interest in seeing to it that children who need quality afterschool programs—programs that help society, save money, and help children succeed in school—get them.

If children do not get good afterschool programs, if they wander the streets because their parents must work to feed and house them, if they don’t get the academic help they need, many of them will get into trouble, serious trouble. This creates enormous costs for society: social, emotional, and economic. Economically, for example, retaining children costs districts hundreds of millions of dollars annually and street gangs and juvenile delinquency depress property values and accelerate costs for courts and prisons. Thus, I have a vested interest—as a father and grandfather and teacher and someone who drives a 9-year old car and lives in a row home—in preventing this. And one of the best and cheapest ways of preventing such devastation to people and neighborhoods is to give children the afterschool services they need.

Howard Margolis, Ed.D.
Professor Emeritus of Special Education, CUNY
www.reading2008.com

You can read everything about the need for afterschool programs and the attack on them at www.nj.com. Chapter 8 of Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds, is devoted to Solving Conflicts.

Howard Margolis © Reading2008 & Beyond   www.reading2008.com