Archive for the 'Parents' Category

Parental [Dis]engagement

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 31, 2009 in Parents and Teaching. 4 Comments

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]

No Biking Allowed

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 5, 2009 in Parents. 10 Comments

An upstate New York mother is fighting a school policy that prohibits her 12-year-old son from riding his bike to and from school each day.  Seventh-grader Adam Marino and his mother, Janette Kaddo Marino, were met one day by a school administrator and a state trooper who told them that biking and walking to the school are “banned.”  Students must either take the school bus or be driven to school by someone else.

Mom says the school has no right to tell her how to get her son to school, and the school agrees–sort of.  “The existing policy is worded in such a way that it may lead one to believe that we’re prohibiting biking to school,” Saratoga Springs superintendent Janice White tells the Albany Times-Union. According to school board handbook:  “The riding of bicycles by elementary pupils to and from school is prohibited.”

Yeah, that is pretty ambiguous.

Kids, Don’t Try This At Home

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 5, 2009 in Parents. 2 Comments

Blair Waldorf and Chuck Bass of Gossip Girl, and Nancy Botwin, played by Mary-Louise Parker on Weeds, top Common Sense Media’s list of the “10 Worst TV Role Models.”  The Gossip Girl duo represent the “ultimate mean girl” and a “drinking, drugging gigolo,” while Botwin “makes consistently terrible parenting decisions, getting her sons caught up in a world of drug dealing, crime, and violence” (that’s only good enough for #3?).

Other’s making the list: Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell on The Office (”so self-absorbed that he can’t see beyond his own ambitions”); Peter Griffin of Family Guy (”watches way too much TV, for starters”); and Naomi Clark  on 90210 (”conniving, manipulative, and out for herself”).  If kids and teens watch these shows, Common Sense Media suggests parents use the characters on-screen behaviors for discussion.  “Even negative role models can open the door to a discussion of what is and isn’t acceptable behavior,” they note.

Pinocchio Parents (and Teachers)

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 1, 2009 in Parents, Research and Reports and Teaching. 7 Comments

Most mothers and fathers practice “Pinocchio parenting” — teaching their kids that lying is bad while regularly fibbing to them, according to a pair of new studies in the Journal of Moral Education.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of California found that parents who stress the importance of truth-telling to their little ones quite often tell lies to influence the children’s behaviour or emotions, whether it’s an idle threat to make them eat their peas or boost their confidence by praising their ear-splitting saxophone solo.

“Because it’s easy, we just do it,” Dr. Kang Lee of the University of Toronto tells the Globe and Mail. “Some parents may have been doing it for years and they really have no idea they are actually telling lies.”  Lee’s study doesn’t look at the impact of Pinocchio Parenting on kids, but he confesses he’s guilty of it himself.

To quell his son’s habit of fidgeting in his car-seat, the savvy dad renamed the hazard button on his dashboard the “eject” button. If dad presses the button, six-year-old Nathan thinks he’ll be catapulted from the vehicle. “I just put my hand over it” and Nathan behaves, Dr. Lee says.

Teachers in particular are guilty of what the researchers describe as the “confidence boosting lie” — telling students they are excellent writers, for example, when in fact they are average or worse.   Teachers in my elementary school trained in the Teacher’s College Writer’s Workshop were expected to give a compliment to every student at the start of each “conference” and required to record it in our conference notes.   The intended effect obviously was to boost confidence and inspire additional effort.   The danger (equally obvious) was that students might overestimate their ability, slack off, and be set up for disappointment later on.

Ask Your Child About Content, Not Grades

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 10, 2009 in Curriculum and Parents. 2 Comments

Don’t ask your kids about grades, test scores or homework, advises Kerry Dickinson of the East Bay Homework Blog.  Instead, focus on the content of the subject he or she is studying.

Instead of “What did you get on the test?” say, “What are you learning in science?” If you are connected to some school communication tool (like Schoolloop) you can look at homework assignments and grades privately. Benefits: you are teaching them to take ownership of their own schedules. You are letting them manage their own time. You are taking the focus off scores and putting it on learning.

Dickinson’s ”10 Tips to Start the School Year Off Right” offers a list of ideas from common sense to counterintuitive: Don’t overschedule your children; don’t sign your child up for academic tutoring unless he or she is in jeopardy of failing a class; and don’t attend every sports game or extracurricular activity (”your child will be participating for the love of the game or of the activity, not to earn your approval”).

(H/T: Kathleen Manzo via Twitter)

Parents Read More, Praise More, But Keep Kids on a Short Leash

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 19, 2009 in Parents and Research and Reports. 3 Comments

Children today have fewer chores around the house and greater autonomy than previous generations, but they’re kept on a shorter leash outside the home.  That’s the takeaway from a novel study that analyzed 300 advice columns and editorials from randomly chosen issues of Parents magazine from 1929 to 2006.  Dr. Markella Rutherford of Wellesley College was studying changes in the portrayals of parental authority and children’s autonomy over time, Science Daily reports:  

The articles in Parents showed that children were increasingly autonomous when it came to their self-expression, particularly in relation to daily activity chores, personal appearance and defiance of parents. In contrast to this increased autonomy that child-centered parenting has given children, the 20th century has seen, in other ways, children’s autonomy curtailed, through increasingly restricted freedom of movement and substantially delayed acceptance of responsibilities. Children now have fewer opportunities to conduct themselves in public spaces free from adult supervision than they did in the early and mid-twentieth century.

“Today’s parents face demands that require near-constant surveillance of their children,” says Rutherford.  “Allowing children more autonomy to express themselves and their disagreements at home may well be a response to the loss of more substantial forms of children’s autonomy to move through and participate in their communities on their own.”

Meanwhile an Ohio State study tracked parenting patterns over two generations and found ”great increases” in the amount of reading and affection shown to children today–and reductions in the amount of spanking.

In general, the amount of affection parents show their children increased significantly over the generations. Sixty percent of fathers and 73 percent of mothers in the second generation reported showing their children physical affection and praising them within the last week. But only about 40 percent of their parents showed open affection on a weekly basis.  Reading to children also showed a generational shift. Nearly three times more mothers in the second generation reported reading to their children daily compared to their own parents.

No Excuses

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 17, 2009 in Opinion, Parents and Students. 3 Comments

One of the biggest applause line in President Obama’s speech to the NAACP Thursday wasn’t in his prepared remarks–it came when he exhorted parents and children to take full advantage of their educational opportunities and make “no excuses.”

We have to say to our children, Yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that someone in a wealthy suburb does not. But that’s not a reason to get bad grades, that’s not a reason to cut class, that’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands – and don’t you forget that.  That’s what we have to teach all of our children! No excuses! No excuses!” 

The “Your destiny is in your hands…no excuses” bit was not in the President’s prepared remarks, but both Fox News and the Huffington Post put it in their respective headlines.

In education circles, of course, the “no excuses” meme has become shorthand for schools–and especially teachers–making no excuses for poor student achievement.  It reflects the deeply held conviction by some that a school can, should, must overcome all deficits in the children it serves, regardless of outside circumstances.  It remains an excellent rallying cry, if not a realistic standard by which to measure teacher performance. 

It’s refreshing to hear the standard applied to all actors in the process, not just teachers.  The response to Obama’s off-the-cuff remark clearly demonstrates the wisdom of crowds.

Close Only Counts in Horseshoes…and School Choice?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 14, 2009 in Education Theory, Parents and Research and Reports. 12 Comments

Why do parents enroll children in underperforming schools when there appear to be better choices nearby?   For some, transportation may be a dealbreaker,  according to a new survey by the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education posted by EdWeek’s Debra Viadero:

The results suggest that transportation is especially challenging for low-income families, 45 percent of whom do not own cars, or who own vehicles that are unreliable. According to the survey, one third of those families said they did not enroll their child in the school they preferred due to transportation difficulties.

Dan Willingham recently unpacked one of the paradoxes surrounding school choice over at Britannica Blog with his patented cog sci spin.  In particular, he takes issue with the argument that choice will improve the overall quality of education, since parents would not knowingly send their kids to “bad” schools.   Yet they do it all the time.   “Why should we expect people to make rational decisions about their child’s schooling,” Willingham notes, “when they don’t make rational decisions in other complex arenas?”

I can imagine an advocate saying ‘But the real point is that it’s the parent’s choice. If they want to send their kid to a mediocre school because it’s close to the home, that’s their business.’ Fair enough, but that is a different argument. We are no longer debating whether choice will improve schools but about philosophy of governance. What happens if parents do not make sensible educational choices for their children?  We don’t let parents choose not to educate their children—there are truancy laws. Should society intervene if parents send their child to a school that the parents ought to know is terrible? And are we, as a society, going to allow people to make poor choices for which there is a collective cost? Perhaps this is the educational equivalent of letting people choose to drive without wearing a seatbelt.

When I taught in the South Bronx, I routinely (and quietly) encouraged dozens of families to enter their children in the lottery for the KIPP school less than a half a mile away, but few ever did.  Meanwhile, the massive and dangerous middle school across the street was the top choice of students leaving my school.   Granted, there were three basic flavors of middle school in the neighborhood : bad, worse, and abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-here   Still, to Willingham’s point, a disproportionate number made what I perceived to be the worst possible choice.  The one thing it had going for it was proximity.

Update: Jay Greene wanders into the fray at his blog and in the comments below.

Bad Scores, Good School?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 1, 2009 in Educational Policy and Parents. 8 Comments

Is it possible to get a good education in a school with bad test scores?  Or are parents merely incapable of seeing a bad school for what it really is?  “Many parents of children in academically struggling schools still believe their child is getting a fine education,” notes the Atlanta Journal and Constitution’s education columnist Maureen Downey. ”They are either unfazed by the lackluster test scores or unaware of them.” 

What they notice — and what they value — is that their 10-year-old son’s artwork hangs in the school hallway or their 15-year-old daughter marches on the field with the band on Friday nights. Parents talk about how hard the teachers work, regardless of how the school’s test scores rank with other schools across the state. They feel their children are accepted and encouraged.

Downey, who has been cranking out thoughtful and provocative ed pieces for the AJC for much of the past year, cites data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, which noted “a disconnect between actual student performance and parental satisfaction…especially among parents of low-achieving students and students attending schools in high-poverty neighborhoods.”

 “The state may say our school is failing, but it’s not failing my child,” one parent tells Downey, who also notes that “as states encourage the creation of still more charter schools, parental satisfaction will become more important.”

 

Parents, Prudence and Paranoia

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 24, 2009 in No category and Parents. 4 Comments

Every now and then, you read a story that makes you wonder if you’ve been living in a cave.   If this piece in Teusday’s Baltimore Sun is any indication, selling devices to parents afraid of getting separated from their children has become a big business.

GPS tracking devices with wander alerts emit beeps or vibrations when a child strays too far. Digital watches and apparel have high-decibel alarms. And there’s the SafetyTat, a waterproof tattoo created by a Baltimore-area mom who wanted to attach her phone number to her child; a half-million have been sold.

Half a million??!?  How did I manage to miss all the tatted-up tykes wandering the streets?  The takeaway:  Sex sells.  Paranoia sells more.  Two predictions:  1.  Somewhere a school or district will pass a rule requiring students get tattoed before they go on field trips.  2.  Someone will post a comment telling me it’s already been happening.