Meeting the Needs of the Whole Child Is Society's Job — Not Just Schools
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that schools have been asked to meet needs that belong to families, communities, healthcare systems, and social services.
Key Takeaways
- Schools can't do everything - The whole child requires support from many institutions, not just the school
- Mission creep hurts the core mission - Every non-academic responsibility added to schools takes resources from teaching and learning
- Society must do its part - Expecting schools to be the sole safety net for children is unfair and unsustainable
Transcript
think if we want society to respect the educational work that we're here to do, if we want society to respect us as education professionals, we have to stop accepting the implication that just because kids are at school a lot, school should be a one-stop shop where they can get every service they need, right?
We have to stop pretending to be behavior specialists and psychologists and nutritionists and physicians.
Obviously, we cannot do everything.
And we know we're not here to be childcare.
Like I saw a tweet today that said that schools should offer hours of operation and hours of childcare that are more compatible with families' work schedules.
And of course, nevermind the fact that lots of families have all different work schedules.
We can't be open 24 hours a day.
Fundamentally, like we're here to be educators and the scope creep that I've been talking about and the idea that we're supposed to meet the needs of the whole child, not that that is a societal obligation or a parent obligation, but specifically an educator obligation I have to say, how is that possible when we're here to fulfill our educational obligation?
Like, we cannot do everything and do one thing well.
I think we have a choice of how many things to take on.
And if we take on education, we can do education well.
I'm not convinced.
We have tried to take on everything.
everything else as a profession.
We've tried to take on the needs of the whole child, and I'm not convinced we've been able to do a good job of that.
I am not convinced that it has been a good thing, a net positive for us to try to take on all those other missions.
And one example that I gave recently was feeding kids.
Now, it's not popular to say anything against feeding kids, and I certainly think we should continue feeding kids when they're at school.
It just makes sense But I think when we try to take on that mission and do what we can, it turns out, I think, to be a bad thing for society because we can't do it well, right?
Like we can feed kids breakfast and lunch when they're at school, but they're only at school half the time anyway.
And if we have kids who are like only eating at school, something else is deeply wrong.
And we need better societal level solutions to that.
As I said in my videos about the school lunch program, it's just not that good a solution to the problem of childhood hunger.
We should keep feeding kids at school.
Absolutely.
But it's not that good a solution.
We need to recognize that it's not that good a solution.
So we've got to keep our professional mission focused.
If we want to do things well, we've got to be really clear about what that mission is.
We're not behavioral specialists.
We're not childcare.
We're not here to feed your kids.
We're here to educate your kids.
We'll feed them while they're here.
But I just think we've got to get back to what we're ultimately here for if we want our profession to be respected and if we want to be effective at it.
Let me know what you think.