Are we trying to do too much?

There's an excellent post at The Education Wonks talking about a program in the Chicago Public Schools where some kids are being given bags of food to take home over the weekend. This made me think of a great discussion I had during my book study of On Common Ground, talking about the role of the schools and how it has changed.

I forget how the topic came up, but we were talking about bussing. Our school counselor is an extremely intelligent woman whom I respect quite a bit, and she flat out said she was against school bussing. She believed it was one of the earliest steps on a slippery slope; that we started arranging ways for them to get to school, then once they got here we started feeding them lunch, then brekfast. Now there are before school programs, after schools programs, sex ed, and a hundred other bits of teaching that used to be part of a parents job but that the schools have taken away.

That to me raised the question of whether we have really taken anything away, or are we meeting the needs of the parents? I doubt that anyone would argue that school bussing is inherantly evil, nor would anyone suggest that a child should go hungry if the school has the means to feed them. Again, though, even if it is something that the parents are more than willing to have the school do should it be the schools job? Are we doing to much of the "other stuff" and ignoring our core competency, teaching?

I don't really know. There isn't a definitive answer. Given the discussions about helicopter parents and the "me" generation, though, it's something worth thinking about.