Replace Common Core with Family Dinner -

by John Horvat II

It is no secret that the American educational system is in disarray. In response, big government just loves to come up with multi-billion dollar, 10,000 page programs to fix the system. This results in programs like the Common Core that aims to make students “career and college ready.

There are easier ways to deal with the problem.

Researcher Jane Waldfogel has shown that “(even after controlling for many other factors) family dining is a powerful predictor of how children will fare as they develop. ‘Youths who ate dinner with their parents at least five times a week,’ she writes, ‘did better across a range of outcomes: they are less likely to smoke, to drink, to have used marijuana, to have been in a serious fight, to have had sex…or to have been suspended from school, and they had higher grad point averages and were more likely to say they planned to go to college’” (Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2015, p. 122).

That is to say the moral formation of the family can provide the framework for students to flourish. If the goal is to make children “career and college ready,” why not encouraged parents to eat dinner together as a family? That is a system that works. It’s not a government program. It doesn’t cost the taxpayers anything. It is so much easier and results in more children planning to go on to college. Why not replace Common Core with the family dinner?

Replace Common Core with Family Dinner -