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]


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