Charlotte Rainey Green has written two books on parenting & education.
Charlotte Rainey Green wants to talk about the elephant. Green, principal of Woodrow Cummins Elementary School in Conway, has written a book she calls “edgy” that discusses parenting styles and the achievement gap between black students and white students.
“You can’t have a healthy community with the elephant in the room,” Green said, sitting, legs crossed, in a chair in her office. “I want to talk about the elephant because I believe we’re a society that can get it out of the room.
As a whole, black students score lower on achievement tests than their white peers.
“A healthy community says, ‘What can we do?’” she said.
Green, who has a doctorate in educational leadership, said she spent two years doing research on achievement gaps and parenting styles for her dissertation, which prompted her to write Because I Said So.
“It created a passion in me I didn’t have before, a passion regarding families,” she said.
The way parents interact with their children can affect academics, Green said.
The three main parenting styles are permissive, authoritarian and authoritative, she said.
The permissive style of parenting doesn’t set rules because parents want to be friends with their children, and the authoritative approach uses logic to explain why a child shouldn’t do something,Green said. The authoritarian style tells children to mind “because I said so.” Position trumps all.
Green and her husband, Victor, have two children: Caleb, 17, and David, 8.
She grew up in Cleveland, Ark., the 13th of 15 children.
“I was raised ‘you don’t ask why,’” she said. “One brother always stayed in trouble. He got spankings all the time. If Dad would say, ‘That’s the end of it,’ he would always have to say something.”
Historically, African-American parents have raised their children in the authoritarian style, she said.
“I think that has been a contributor to the African-American achievement gap,” Green said.
“Roll back to civil rights,” she said. “It was a culture where logic was not necessarily king. There’s no logic to “You drink out of this water fountain - not this one,’” she said.
In that time period, questioning the rules could put a black person in “harm’s way,” she said.
To question authority was “viewed as not knowing your place.”
Children who are raised in the authoritarian style and aren’t allowed to question or discuss issues with parents may clam up in the classroom, she said.
“Think of the lack of vocabulary words you’re going to have with authoritarian as opposed to authoritative,” she said. “It was an aha moment.
“Good instruction in the classroom is going to promote this dialogue. Some African-American children are going to deem that disrespectful. Some African-American children are going to pull back.”
Green did an anonymous survey of parents at back-to school nights in the Conway district and found that most children who were at the below-basic performance level received authoritarian or permissive parenting. All parents who had permissive parenting styles had children who scored below basic.
The students, both black and white, who scored the highest on the state-mandated tests had parents who had authoritative parenting skills.
She said it’s important that teachers understand the parenting styles of their students’ parents.
“You can’t jump to conclusions that every black student was raised in an authoritarian home,” she said.
And, “authoritarian is not bad. Authoritarian parenting is needed, but if that’s all you do, when is your child going to engage in conversation? What are they going to do when you’re not there?”
Most parents use all three styles at some point, Green said.
“I’m not going to say a day I come in, and I’m just dog tired, I haven’t done some permissive qualities,” she said, laughing.
“Do I think this is the only answer? No. We have to look for the why. I want my book to start dialogue. The purpose of my book is to start conversation.”
Most of the feedback from the book, which was released in August, has been positive, Green said, but not all.
A woman in Texas emailed Green and said the achievement gap “just singles out African-Americans.”
Green pointed out that she is an African-American mother and an educator, “interested in all children doing well.”
“You can’t argue with data - we’re not making this up,” she said.
Green said she believes the majority of parents want the best for their children, too.
“I’ve been an educator for 12 years - I can count on my hand the number of parents who really did not desire to give their children their best,” she said.
Green started as an elementary-school teacher in Conway and Pulaski County, then became principal of a charter school in Conway, which has since closed.
See more here: http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2011/dec/18/charlotte-rainey-green-20111218/?print
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