Middle school teacher Mrs. Bluebird loves PowerSchool, her district’s online grading system. It lets her update students’ grades from home, run progress reports and all kinds of other tricks. “Parents can check grades any time of the night or day, see that work is missing, and can even get grade updates emailed to them,” she writes at her blog, Bluebird’s Classroom. “Students hate it because parents can keep a really close eye on what they are, or more precisely, what they are not doing,” she says.
In other words, for home-school communications, it’s the greatest thing since the parent-teacher conference. Well, maybe not.
The District folks did a survey of PowerSchool usage and discovered that only 20% of the families in the District have ever logged on to PowerSchool. Let me repeat that…20%. That’s it. 89% supposedly have access to a computer but only 20% have made the effort to check their child’s grades. That silence you hear is the sound of parent involvement, or, more precisely, the lack thereof.
In response, Bluebird’s principal continues to send home report cards, despite the district’s move to go paperless. “My team sent home 97 report cards. I had 47 students fail science for this nine weeks. To date, I have not heard a peep. No email, no call requesting a conference, nothing,” she laments. ”It’s like they don’t even care. And we wonder why the kids don’t care either.”
[H/T: Blogboard]
Certainly if a high proportion of students are failing, you’d expect to be contacted by parents. BUT, I have to say I’m glad this technology didn’t exist when my children were in grade school and high school. What it teaches the students is that it’s their parents’ job to make them do their homework, not their own job. This would be especially true for high school level students.
At my previous school we had problems with this type of transparent grade system because, we learned, some parents expected it to be updated in “real time” every day – as if they would see incremental progress in their student’s grade as the day progressed. It took me a while to remind many of them that a) I only had their student once every other day and didn’t take a grade every single day (block schedule), and b) when 160 essays came in on a Tuesday it might take me the weekend to get them all graded.
Most parents understood this and there was much humor shared over the misunderstandings of what they expected and what was realistic.
At my current school a large majority of parents don’t have access to a similar grade transparency system because they don’t have computers, or have a computer but no internet access.
Our school attempts to reduce paper waste by sending progress reports only to those families whose children are failing classes.
I would have absolutely HATED this type of system when I was in high school. I always tested really well, so I would manage my workload by strategically either skipping certain assignments or doing a lackluster job on them during one of my other classes. All my parents saw was the final “A” grade so they left me alone.
I suspect that enabling this type of electronic parental micromanagement majorly encourages cheating. I did not participate in copying of answers on homework assignments when I was in school, though I certainly knew kids who did. However, I have to say that I very well might have done it too if I knew that my parents would see every single grade on every single assignment.
The key is to look at schools that successfully engage their parents. An online system won’t do anything on its own. The “build it and they will come” philosophy has failed in so many other areas, so why would we expect it to work online?
Washington State’s Granger High School engaged its largely immigrant, low income parents by learning about parents’ needs and adapting to those needs. It wasn’t true that parents didn’t care. Instead, economic pressures, social pressures, and difficulties navigating the system kept parents away. After reaching out to parents much more aggressively and more thoughtfully, the school now boasts 100% attendance at parent/teacher conferences and much higher graduation rates. (We did an interview with Granger’s former principal here: http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/visionaries/RicardoEsparza.)