Teacher World

Have you heard of the World of Children Award? This very prestigious award honors individuals who in some way are working to improve the lives of vulnerable children throughout the world. The World of Children Award is the only global recognition and funding non-profit that recognizes this type of effort, and it has been doing so for 14 years.

This award, which has been acclaimed the “Nobel Prize for children” by the media, is an annual event which rewards honorees with a cash grant of as much as $50,000 to be used for the recipients’ programs. Leading philanthropic organizations have hailed this organization for its intensive research and meticulous selection of leaders of health and humanitarian projects across the world.

The co-founders of the World of Children Award, Harry Leibowitz and Kay Isaacson-Leibowitz, retired senior executives from Procter & Gamble and Victoria’s Secret, have helped award more than $4.3 million in grants and program support to 90 honorees since 1998. The recipients of these cash grants and support have been responsible for programs which serve children in more than 100 countries.

After a very rigorous selection process which seeks to identify child advocates who have been most effective in their endeavors, seven outstanding individuals have earned this prestigious award for 2011 due to their work to dramatically transform the lives of children worldwide. These new recipients of the World of Children Awards will be honored on November 2 in New York City.

Of these seven honorees, Harry Leibowitz said, “We are humbled by the efforts undertaken by these amazing people and it is our great pleasure to recognize and reward their work on behalf of the world’s vulnerable children.”

And Stephanie March, actress and World of Children Award’s Celebrity Ambassador, said, “World of Children honorees are compelling reminders that one person has tremendous power to positively impact society. These fine honorees have committed their entire lives to helping the world’s most vulnerable children through ingenious and effective solutions that cannot and should not be ignored.”

Although there are seven honorees, I wish to draw your attention to one. Meet Tatiana Grossman, a 16-year old from Palto Alto, California. Tatiana told Alina Cho from CNN, that she has always been an avid reader, and after learning at the age of 12, that 75 percent of children in some African countries had no access to books and, therefore, were unable to read, decided to take matters into her own hands.

She told Cho that she set up a table outside the children’s library in her community where she conducted a solo book drive. Her goal? To get enough books to send to these children so they could learn to read. Ten days later, she had 3,500 books which were sent to Africa to help the people there set up three libraries.

Over time, working with the African Library Project and many generous donors, Tatiana has collected thousands of books which have been used to establish libraries which serve 115 schools and villages. Through her work, she has influenced African government literacy policy, and Tatiana went on to found her own nonprofit organization called Spread the Words. According to the website, the primary focus of Spread the Words is to inspire other children to also spread the words and to work with adults “to find a low-cost way to bring digital textbooks into underfunded classrooms overseas.”

To accomplish this goal, Tatiana is currently consulting with Silicon Valley engineers and digital content providers in order to make the latest in digital classroom technology available to African classrooms and to provide free digital teaching materials.

I encourage you to visit the Spread the Words website to learn more about all that this amazing girl has accomplished at such a young age. Who knows, you may decide to join her in these exciting endeavors!

Alina Cho ended her interview with Tatiana with some surprising news. Tatiana thought she was going to be receiving a cash grant from the World of Children Award for $25,000 to continue her programs, but Cho told her that due to the generosity of both donors and the board, she would actually be receiving $30,000!

Cho asked her what she planned to do with the money, and an amazed Tatiana replied, “I was intending to spend it on my digital projector initiative which, as I said before was, I’m going to load material onto it and send it to classrooms all over Africa, and now I can afford many more. Right now, I just have money for one, and with this money I can use around fifty actually. It’s wonderful!”

And so are you, Tatiana. So are you.

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CNN recently did an article on when parents should get involved in their children’s problems. This is what their expert advice is on some common situations children, and their parents face. I found the ones that deal with school issues to be very well-stated and would love to pass this advice along to all of your parents out there who wonder, “Should I intervene, or not?”

The first topic they wrote about is should you get involved if your child has an unreasonable amount of homework to do. Jan Busey, an elementary teacher from Asheville, North Carolina advised that parents first make sure that their child is actually working when they are supposed to rather than playing with a pet or daydreaming.

She said that if they find that they are honestly doing their job but are still overwhelmed, they should make an appointment with their child’s teacher, but to come prepared. “Set goals for your child to complete an assignment, then assess at the end of that time,” says Busey. “And write down specific challenges. The more you can show that you’ve tried to deal with the issue at home, the more receptive a teacher will be to your concerns.”

She also suggests that if the child is improving with the structure you have created, you probably don’t need to meet with the teacher; just continue doing what you’re doing.

Next, should you get involved when another child is bullying your child on the playground? Stacy DeBroff, author of The Mom Book, recommends that you don’t get involved right away, unless you are afraid that your child is not safe. Instead, DeBroff says, “If you’re there, watch closely and give your child a chance to solve the problem on her own.”

But, what about bullying that occurs on the school playground? She recommends the same approach, saying that it’s better to equip your child with the skills he needs to stay safe, empowering him with the determination to handle the situation on his own.

DeBroff suggests that parents rehearse appropriate responses to the bullying with their child. So, if your child has a sense of humor, responding in humor might be her best option, or, if a more assertive response is appropriate, have her practice a strong “Cut it out” then have her walk away.

Michele Borba, an educational psychologist from Palm Springs, California, and author of The Big Book of Parenting Solutions, said, “Have her practice standing up straight, chest out, like she’s wearing a bulletproof vest that taunts bounce right off of.”

Reconsider your approach if the bullying continues and your child is feeling threatened. That is when you get involved by calmly removing your child from the playground with a viable excuse, like snack time, rather than trying to talk to her in front of the bully, which will only embarrass her further.

If the bullying is happening at school, contact the teacher and let them know what is happening. From a teacher’s perspective, I will tell you that many times bullying incidents occur when the teacher is not around, and is therefore oblivious to the bullying. So, inform the teacher, and ask them to keep an eye out for further episodes. The article states that most schools take bullying seriously, which is true. Most states, 39 to be exact, have adopted laws addressing bullying, so teachers should know what to do to handle incidents at school.

What do you do when your child’s teacher gave your child a lower grade than he thinks he deserves? Jan Busey recommends that parents should only get involved if their child is willing to take part in the conversation with the teacher. “If you believe your child’s points are valid, say you’ll make an appointment with the teacher but that he’ll have to make the case.”

Now, I love this part; Busey says to leave it up to your child to ask the teacher why she gave him the grade she did. “Hearing the feedback from the teacher will help him fine-tune future assignments,” says Busey. And helping your child to list his reasons for disagreeing with the grade ahead of time teaches him how to approach future disagreements in a constructive manner.

But CNN says (and I strongly agree) to reconsider going in to talk to the teacher if your child commonly misreads or incorrectly copies down instructions, and make sure you have all of the details before jumping to possibly incorrect conclusions. As the article states, “A stellar report on blue whales is less so if the task was to write about smaller mammals of the sea.”

Finally, what do you do when your child learned a not-so-nice word from a classmate? Don’t try to contact the classmate’s mother; it takes more effort than it’s worth. Busey says, “I was actually glad when my children used those words — at home, anyway. It gave me the chance to explain what they mean and how they make other people feel.”

The article recommends that you reconsider if it becomes a regular problem when your child plays with this particular classmate, and he is breaking rules with this classmate regularly. Now it’s time to talk to the parents, but do so with the understanding that they may not even be aware of what is happening themselves. Ask them to keep tabs on what the kids are doing, or have the classmate come to your house where you can see for yourself what is going on.

I concentrated my blog on the aspects of this article that pertained to school, but if you are interested in the rest of the advice that CNN had to offer parents, feel free to follow this link.

I would like to wrap this blog up however, by giving you some examples CNN gave of stories teachers told about just how far meddling parents may go:

–”I had one sixth-grade parent who would e-mail me the night before tests, asking for a copy of the test to ‘help’ her child.”
– “One mother brought her child to school late every Friday so she would conveniently miss the math flash-card tests, which made the girl nervous.”
– “A parent changed the relay order for a swim meet on my computer while I was out coaching. She wanted her kid to swim backstroke, not butterfly.”
– “One father called me after an uninvited child showed up at his daughter’s slumber party, asking me to penalize the student. I told him teachers don’t police slumber parties.”

You sure as heck don’t want to be one of these parents!

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Some of you have probably heard about R.E.A.D., but for those of you who haven’t, I would like to share a heart-warming story which will do more for children than just warm their hearts.

Reading Education Assistance Dogs or R.E.A.D. is a program which utilizes dogs to help struggling children become better readers. The premise is so simple that it could have been devised by a child.

Kids love dogs, and they love spending time with them because they make them feel safe, protected, and loved. Many young, aspiring readers feel judged or intimidated by classmates and adults when they have to read out loud to them. But it isn’t scary to read to dogs. They don’t make fun or judge you when you stumble over words, they don’t get impatient with you, and they never laugh at you or correct you when you mess up. Dogs are great listeners, and that can make all the difference in the world to shy or slow readers.

That is exactly what R.E.A.D. is all about; having kids who struggle with reading spend quality time reading to and “teaching’ a dog. How perfectly simple is that?

According to Kathy Klotz, executive director of Intermountain Therapy Animals, which runs R.E.A.D., there is an unexpected benefit to kids reading to dogs; they learn to be confident with their reading.

“A factor that we never planned for, that turned out to be really important, is that the child feels like they’re letting the dog understand the story,” she says. “They get to be the teacher, the storyteller, the one who knows more than the dog for a change. …They just blossom when they get to be the one who knows more than the dog.”

Correspondent Ryan Smith, in an ongoing series called “The Power of Words” with CNN’s Robin Meade explained, “All across the country, specially-trained therapy dogs are helping kids improve their literacy skills.”

Smith’s report centered on Ernie, a 103 pound dog that has been “reading” with kids in the Atlanta Speech School for five years helping children conquer their reading disabilities. Because reading to a dog puts kids at ease, they can practice their fluency without the fear and pressure of reading in front of the class.

One little girl said, “I love reading to Ernie, and I think it’s a big privilege.”

The children know that they aren’t really teaching dogs, like Ernie, but the feeling that they know more than the dog and can share what they know with them is powerful. Klotz says once they became aware of this sense of power, volunteers began to actively encourage the idea of children teaching the dogs they read to.

How does this work? “One of the things you do in the program is you always speak for the dog,” Klotz explained. “Like if [the child] doesn’t know a word, the dog doesn’t know the word either. And then they’re not alone, and they can look it up in the dictionary together.”

The volunteer may also say that the dog doesn’t know what a certain word means, and ask them to explain what it means to the dog. Instead of the child responding to the adult, they are teaching the dog, making them more comfortable with their response.

Ernie’s owner said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Ernie has touched 300-400 kids’ lives. “

One little boy said of Ernie, “Whenever I read to him, I think of him like, as a normal person.” In fact, the kids love him so much that some of them even wrote a book about him called, Ernie Goes to School, and on the cover, it shows him in a T-shirt that reads, “Got Books.”

Ernie’s owner gave parents who might be concerned about their child’s reading skills this tip: let your child read to the family dog, if you have one. If you don’t have a family dog, I am providing this link to help you find R.E.A.D. programs in your area. If you have a dog that would be perfect for this program, follow this link as well.

This is a wonderfully, creative and comfortable way to help children who are struggling with reading to gain fluency and confidence. It is well-worth the time spent when you consider the positive rewards.

Look for future blogs regarding the “Power of Words” series on CNN.

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A recent report conducted by the Council of State Governments Justice Center and Texas A&M University’s Public Policy Research Institute has some pretty surprising things to say about harsh discipline in schools, whether that discipline is a reflection of the students in a school or those in charge of the school, and whether harsh discipline is effective.

The report was based on a study conducted statewide on almost a million Texas children, and the results were published on July 19. This first of its kind study, analyzed 6.6 million records examining every seventh-grader in Texas from 2000 to 2002, keeping track of them for the next six or more years. It matched juvenile justice records with education data to provide a broad picture.

One of the first disturbing facts the study revealed was that, of those students who were studied, almost 60% had been disciplined sometime from seventh grade and up in one of the following ways: through in-school and/or out-of-school suspension, expulsion, or forced participation in disciplinary alternative programs or juvenile justice alternative programs.

Now, 60% baffles me! We suspend or expel upon rare occasions in our district, and this is equally true in the districts around us. Bear in mind, this was a statewide study, so its high suspension/expulsion rate may or may not reflect your state’s rate.

In fact, in an interview of CNN education contributor, Steve Perry by Ali Velshi from American Morning, Velshi asked if this percentage was in line with national numbers. Perry responded, “No, and what’s important though is that when schools suspend at such a high rate, it’s a very clear example that the adults don’t have control of the building. What they tend to do is they tend to lean on the justice system, whether it be through security officers in the school or police officers in the school, to take care of what should be happening in the classroom.”

On the other hand, Perry did state that suspensions are a necessary part of school policy, which he admitted to using himself when a student’s behavior warranted it.

The study further showed that kids who were suspended or expelled had a greater risk of being retained, dropping out, or ending up in the juvenile justice system. Additionally, 23% of those who had been suspended at least once eventually did have contact with the juvenile justice system, while only 2% of those who had never been suspended were involved in the juvenile justice system.

This data seemed to support what has been called the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Russell Skiba, an Indiana University professor who has studied discipline issues for 15 years, said this study has helped to document that pipeline. In fact, according to Skiba, “The more you’re involved in discipline at the school level, the greater you risk involvement at the criminal justice level.”

Interestingly, the research could not cite specific reasons for differences between schools in Texas in regards to their use of discipline; for example, were some schools better at classroom management, more tolerant of students who misbehaved, or were they using alternative approaches to discipline. Eighty variables, such as attendance, race, economics, and teacher salary and experience, were analyzed, however, “The research showed that while some high-poverty schools suspended students at unexpectedly high rates, others with strikingly similar characteristics did not. The same discipline gap was clear for prosperous, suburban schools and small, rural schools; some were harsh, and others with nearly identical qualities were not.”

“It’s a really important finding,” said Skiba. “It says it’s not totally about what kids and communities bring but it’s a choice that schools make.”

The study broke down the ethnicity of male students who were suspended during the years of this study and found that 83% of those suspended were African American, 74% were Hispanic, and 59% were White. And the numbers are lower in every category for female students.

Perry agreed that he sees these statistics in schools everywhere, and said, “In many cases, we are too quick to criminalize the behavior of boys as opposed to the behavior of girls, and especially when those boys are boys of color.”

Perry also cited differences in the way students from middle class families and those from lower class families have been taught in their homes to conform to authority as a factor in these statistics. Additionally he stated that middle class parents are more likely to come in and advocate on behalf of their children as opposed to lower class parents, therefore reducing the number of suspensions of middle class students.

Matt Cregor of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund said, “The numbers are heartbreaking. What we’re seeing in Texas is no different than what we are seeing nationally. We’re not going to close the so-called achievement gap or end this graduation or dropout crisis until we take a hard look at the numbers like these and the practices and policies that created them.”

And chairman of the state Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee, Senator John Whitmore (D) said that this report validated his fear that school discipline needs fixing. While advocating safety, he nonetheless feels that too many kids are being suspended for what he refers to as “typical teenage lapses.”

“It’s just become the easiest thing to do,” Whitmore said. “It’s easier than working with kids.”

Michael D. Thompson, co-author of the report said, “With so many kids being disciplined repeatedly, one has to ask whether this is working the way everyone wants it to.”

I must confess that there have been times when teachers in my building, me included, have grumbled over what we perceive to be a too lenient approach in disciplining students in our classrooms. This report has me wondering whether we should be looking at more effective consequences which would be less detrimental to those students’ academic progress.

It is a fact that some students with behavioral issues have already served multiple suspensions by the time they reach fifth grade, and rather than the suspension resulting in a change in behavior, usually the vicious cycle continues throughout their academic career.

I have known some of these who tried alternative schools, and some who eventually dropped out. Are we doing everything we can for these students?

While our statistics of suspension and expulsion are nowhere near those expressed in this study of Texas schools, it is sobering nonetheless and worthy of serious reflection.

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I read this story from CNN about an amazing teacher who has been extremely successful and loves what she does, but has left the teaching profession nonetheless. Let me share her story, because it speaks to the issue of how our society undervalues teachers while at the same time, expecting more and more of them with every passing year.

Linda DeRegnaucourt teaches AP calculus at Palm Bay High School in Brevard County, Florida. She has been teaching for 13 years and has earned recognition over that time for the excellent work she has done. After her first year of teaching, she received an award for “Rookie Teacher of the Year,” then later “Teacher of the Year,” and has gotten 100% passage of the AP calculus exam for the past seven years. (Not an easy task!)

She loves teaching, and has a great rapport with her students. So, why won’t she be in her classroom in August? Quite simply, she can’t afford to be. After 13 years of teaching, Linda makes only $38,000 a year, which after taxes leaves her with about $2,400 a month. Her salary is less than it was in the past when teachers earned larger supplements for additional certifications; now a thing of the past.

Linda told CNN, “When you start taking out rent, utilities, car payments, there’s nothing left. It’s demoralizing to you. You wonder why you put all this energy in, and, yes, the kids appreciate you, and the kids love you for it, but, at the end of the day, I still have to pay my bills.”

Linda was divorced two years ago, so is now living on a single income. She owned rental properties to supplement her income, but due to the hit Florida’s real estate market has taken over the past few years, instead of adding to her income these properties have caused more financial strain for Linda. After five years without a raise, and no sign of teaching salaries increasing in the near future, she has made the difficult decision to leave the job she is so good at in order to go back to school to become a nurse, where she will earn, on average, about $62,000 a year.

“I hate to have to leave it,” DeRegnaucourt said. “I really thought I was going to be that teacher, 65 years old and retiring from the education field. That’s not going to happen.”

When Linda was asked by a CNN reporter how hard it was to make the decision to leave, she tearfully replied, “It’s heartbreaking!” At this point, she broke down and could not go on, and my heart broke for her as well.

Some of you are probably thinking, “Okay, so one teacher is leaving the profession, so what? You’re writing a whole blog about this one teacher?”

Well, actually, it’s not just one teacher and it’s becoming increasingly more challenging to keep good teachers in the classroom according to a 2010 report by McKinsey & Company called “Closing the Talent Gap.” Here are the statistics: In the U.S., the average starting teaching salaries are $39,000, and these salaries tend to rise with years of experience to $54,000 on average. According to this report, teachers’ salaries can’t compete with other careers causing an average teacher turnover rate of 14% every year, or 20% at “high-needs” high schools, and 46% of teachers leave within the first five years of teaching.

Additional information from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development from 2007 compared teacher salaries in the United States with teacher salaries from other countries, and its findings are eye opening. The U.S. ranks 20th out of 29 for starting salaries and 23rd out of 29 for teacher salaries after 15 years. Does it come as a big surprise that so many young teachers are bailing?

CNN interviewed Ninive Calegari, the founder of “The Teacher Salary Project,” who said, “When you look at high achieving countries, their turnover rates are 3% or lower. So they work very, very hard to not only attract teachers that they suspect are going to be successful, but they work incredibly hard to train them, and then they do whatever it takes to retain them. And we don’t do that.”

“Five years ago, ten years ago, kids would ask me, should they become teachers? I was like, ‘Oh, God, yes, I love what I do,’” Linda said. “Now, I tell my kids, ‘You’re really, really bright. Why don’t you think about going into (this or that?) They have the potential to be doctors, lawyers, nurses, CEOs and scientists. Why would I recommend to my kids, who I absolutely love, to struggle for years?”

When asked by CNN what Linda hoped her students would take away from their time in her classes, she said, “I want them to get a love not of mathematics, just knowledge, just learning. I want them to always remember how anything was possible.” Can we afford to lose teachers like this?

Can a teacher survive on a teacher’s salary when they are the sole supporter of a household, especially with kids? Unlikely. I have experienced divorce as well, and rather than get out of teaching, I have had to supplement my income ever since. I have always had at least one extra job to bring in the income that I cannot make in my chosen profession. For the past three years, I have carried two extra jobs on top of teaching and all of the extra work that teaching requires in the evenings and on weekends. It isn’t an easy life, and my husband would be the first to say that I am always working, leaving us very little time to spend together.

Am I the exception? No, most of the teachers I work with who have families have a second job outside of school or take on supplemental contracts through the school district in order to make ends meet.

Young people just starting out are probably less willing to have to work so hard to earn what just comes naturally in other professions. And so, they leave, and we lose potentially awesome teachers every year in the United States. Is it possible that if the United States put the same priority on keeping good teachers that other countries do, we might see the higher achievement levels that these countries do as well?

Maybe it’s not rocket science trying to figure out what’s wrong with our education system in the United States. Maybe a lot of it is just paying good teachers (and not just based on test scores but on daily excellent work) what they deserve, thus retaining those good teachers and building stronger schools.

At the end of the CNN interview, Linda regretfully said, “I’m not saying they may not find an amazing teacher to replace me, who also motivates the kids, who also inspires the kids, who also loves the kids. But, what if they don’t?”

And what if school systems everywhere that are losing good teachers every year don’t? What happens to our kids then?

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For more than a decade, Newsweek has been ranking the top public high schools in America. This year, they tried something new, asking a panel of experts which include Wendy Kopp of Teach For America, Tom Vander Ark of Open Education Solutions, and Linda Darling who is a Stanford professor of education as well as the founder of the School Redesign Network, to come up with the criteria to judge a school’s success at producing college-ready and life-ready students. Using their model, each school is judged on six components: graduation rate (25%), college matriculation rate (25%), AP tests taken per graduate (25%), average SAT/ACT scores (10%), average AP/IB/AICE scores (10%), and AP courses offered (5%).

Based on this newer rating system, the Dallas Science and Engineering Magnet School was ranked as America’s Best High School. American Morning live on CNN interviewed its principal, Jovan Wells, asking her first to explain what made her school so successful. She said, “I guess the secret is a combination of several different things. But the one thing that stands out of course is you have to have great teachers, and teachers who are willing to go above and beyond, and willing to train throughout the summer, and willing to stay long hours without being paid. And we have an abundance of that at the School of Science and Engineering, and they really make the difference. They’re there for the students.”

Great teachers are definitely a must, but this school has something most public schools do not have: the luxury of hand-picking their student body. Here’s how it works. This school pulls students from the whole Dallas area, looking at their ITBS scores, their GPA, as well as an on-site math assessment, an essay, and an interview. 

Why so many hoops to jump through to get into this school? Wells explains, “Because it’s a school of choice, and they have to be interested to want to go through this rigorous process.”

Wells said they look at the scores carefully, trying to pull evenly from the whole Dallas area, so that their enrollment is a representation of the whole district. But is it really?

What this process spells out to me is a cream of the crop student population, which automatically puts this school on a different playing field from most public schools. Let’s face it! These are students who really care about education, who are incredibly gifted in math and science, and who probably have a lot of parental support. They don’t show up at this school by accident. With a student body such as this, the sky’s quite literally the limit!

The amount of time students spend in this school makes a huge difference, too. The school day itself is pretty traditional; next year the school day goes from 9:15 to 4:15, but the school actually opens at 7:30. At that time, they have what they call a zero period or students might be tutored by their teachers, and, at the end of the day, there is a 9th period that lasts till 5:00 in addition to after-school tutoring.

“It’s maximizing the time on task, and students are there before and after school just as if it was the entire school day. I mean, they’re there working and really taking advantage of that extra time available to study and work with the teachers,” said Wells.

Again, this is great, but they get this kind of turnout due to the nature of the kids they have the honor of teaching. These are gifted, academically-successful kids who are motivated to learn. All of you teachers out there, just imagine what you could do with a classroom filled with these kinds of students!

And what was Well’s advice to parents who live in school districts that don’t have the option to send their children to a magnet school like this one? How do they help them to be successful in the school that they are currently attending? She recommends getting their children involved in chess camp, math camp, and supplementing what they are learning in school in those areas of interest to them through programs available at the university level. She encourages parents to be proactive and research what is available in their local area which could provide extension opportunities in their children’s areas of interest.

What makes the students at the Dallas Science and Engineering Magnet School so successful? There is a correlation between the higher expectations of their parents and teachers to their desire to achieve. Can that same formula work elsewhere? It seems very likely.

The key to this school’s success? Certainly, the students that this school gets to work with are exceptional. That is a huge advantage. But it is the dedication, long hours, and hard work of both the students and the teachers in this school working together with a common purpose which spells success.

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In Conan O’Brien’s speech to the 2011 graduating class from Dartmouth College, he made these amusing but highly relevant comments to both the graduates and their parents: “Many of your children, you haven’t seen them in four years. Well, now you’re about to see them every day when they come out of the basement to tell you the Wi-Fi isn’t working. If your child majored in fine arts or philosophy, you have good reason to be worried. The only place they are really qualified to get a job is Ancient Greece.”

Funny comments, right? Well, not so funny if you happen to be one of this year’s college graduates who cannot find a job. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say times are tough, and it isn’t easy for kids coming out of college to find jobs out there. With loans to pay off and no income with which to make payments, more and more college grads are moving home, putting more of a burden on already strapped parents. Let’s take a closer look at the financial issues college grads face after graduation.

New statistics reveal a rather dismal picture for both parents and graduates. According to NEFE, the National Endowment for Financial Education, 59% of parents are helping or have helped adult children after graduation, and most of those have helped by letting them move home. 65% of 18-39 year-olds feel that financial pressures are tougher than previous generations, and 32% of parents say that they had it easier than their children.

NYU education professor and Executive Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, Pedro Noguera told CNN that these statistics are a reflection of the fact that kids aren’t being as practical as they should be about their choices of what they will study in school and how that choice will impact the next phase of their life. He explained, “I think too many students have just chosen to do things that they think they are interested in and not enough about thinking about what am I going to do next in life.”

But Noguera doesn’t put all the blame on students. “They need a lot of help, and the colleges need to step up in providing some more guidance and helping students think about life after college.” CNN’s Christine Romans was quick to add that the guidance needs to start in high school and with parents since there is just no margin for error anymore.

The chart above reflects the problem that graduates face today: if income was keeping up with the cost of tuition, the typical graduate should be making $77,000 a year, which is obviously not the case. And with the tuition rates rising all the time, this raises the question whether college is worth the money.

“It’s worth the cost in the long term. It’s certainly worth the investment. But what we have to ask is whether or not these increases in college tuitions, what are they based on and why do they go up every year, as the way they do?” said Noguera.

But the higher cost of tuition is not the only problem students face today. According to CNNMoney, the amount of federal aid available to students is not keeping up with the increases in tuition either. The maximum money available to students through government-subsidized student loans has stayed at $23,000 for a four-year degree since 1992. How can that be fair?

Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators told CNNMoney, “There does seem to be this growing disparity between income and the cost of higher education. At the same time, there’s been a fundamental shift, moving away from public subsidization, to individuals bearing more of the cost of higher education.”

This need to subsidize their children’s tuition through private loans has led to the following tendencies: families are taking on huge levels of debt, or they are pushing their child to complete a two-year degree instead of a four-year degree.

The third trend is the exorbitant student loans which graduates must pay off on their own with often limited resources. FinAid. Org claims that about two thirds of the students who graduate with a four-year degree today will walk away with an average debt of around $23,186. Yikes! But, the news gets bleaker!

Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of financial aid sites FinAid.org and FastWeb.com. reports that about half of these students will still be paying off their loans in 20 years, and for many of these unfortunate graduates, paying on their loans will keep them from being able to afford a home, save for retirement, or put away money for their own children’s education.

“They could still be paying back their own student loans, when their children are in college,” he said.

Any way you cut it, the high cost of college tuition is draining parents and young people today, and with tuition continuing to climb, there seems to be no easy solution.

Noguera told CNN, “These are questions we should all be asking our society because we are saddling our youth with these huge debts that they will take years to pay off, and it does undermine them in their ability to lead independent, productive lives.”

LZ Granderson, CNN.com contributor, said high schools need to start looking at colleges differently. Rather than looking at a 4 or 5 year degree, he urges parents to help their children make the smarter decision to take their lower level classes at a cheaper community college.

“There are other solutions now that parents have to start looking at in order to help their kids get through schools without being saddled with a tremendous debt when they graduate,” Granderson said.

Sound advice for parents of high school students! Start preparing your children now for a better future tomorrow.

Teacher-World's Blog CNN, CNNMoney, college graduates, college tuition, LZ Granderson, Pedro Noguera, scarcity of jobs, student loans