by Robert Pondiscio
December 23rd, 2009
Tags: Foundation for Child Development, low-income students, parental involvement
Posted in Parents, Research and Reports, accountability | 2 Comments »
Under Title I, schools serving the children of low-income families are required to spend 1% of those funds engaging parents in their childrens’ education. But there is little oversight on how schools spend that money–and little sense if the efforts are raising achievement, according to Dale Russakoff of the Foundation for Child Development.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Russakoff quotes an expert who notes schools “have so much they consider more important that they’ve gotten good at knowing how to minimally meet the requirements.” The usual parental involvement strategies, including parent nights and notes home in backpacks might work in middle class schools, but are not effective with low-income parents or parents who don’t speak English, he notes.
“It’s a dilemma we all face in the area of parental involvement,” Rosie Kelly, a U.S. Department of Education official involved in monitoring state Title I programs, observes. “Our monitoring is for compliance. You’re talking about a quality issue.” Research efforts have likewise yielded little of value, Russakoff notes, frequently failing to take families social class into account. This is not to suggest, however, that there are not promising strategies to explore.
Joyce Epstein, a sociologist who directs the Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University, has helped low-income schools raise student achievement by involving both parents and local institutions in learning. “You don’t have to give parents a college education,” Epstein said. “You just have to give them a strategy for having an interesting conversation with their third-grader about a book they’re reading even if the parents haven’t read the book.”
New York City schools hold workshops early in the morning and on weekends, when parents who work multiple jobs are free. “There are many such strategies that the government could subject to rigorous examination and guide districts on how to implement those that bring results,” Russakoff writes. “Rather than chanting the familiar mantra that parental involvement helps students, it is time to tackle the reasons the current approach isn’t working for everyone and seize this opportunity to lower the tall barriers to achievement facing low-income children,” he concludes.
by Robert Pondiscio
November 20th, 2009
Tags: free range kids, helicopter parents, parental involvement, parenting
Posted in Education News, Parents | 19 Comments »
A new revolution is under way, according to the cover story of the latest Time Magazine. It’s aimed at rolling back “the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads.” Call it slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting, the magazine notes, but the message is the same: “Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher. We’re often the ones who hold them down.”
A fair amount of the piece looks at the mixed blessing of hyperinvolved parents in schools. Parental involvement in education is unambiguously good. But how much is too much? Like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, you know it when you see it.
Teachers now face a climate in which parents ghostwrite students’ homework, airbrush their lab reports — then lobby like a K Street hired gun for their child to be assigned to certain classes. Principal Karen Faucher instituted a “no rescue” policy at Belinder Elementary in Prairie Village, Kans., when she noticed the front-office table covered each day with forgotten lunch boxes and notebooks, all brought in by parents. The tipping point was the day a mom rushed in with a necklace meant to complete her daughter’s coordinated outfit.
Time writer Nancy Gibbs quotes a guidance counselor at a Washington prep school who urges parents to make friends with parents who don’t think their kids are perfect, and willing to push back: “When schools debate whether to drop recess to free up more test-prep time, parents need to let a school know if they think that’s a trade-off worth making.”
Lenore Skenazy, whose account of letting her nine-year-old son ride the subway on his own was the shot heard round the world of the helicopter parenting backlash, points out there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy. And the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million.
When parents confront you with “How can you let him go to the store alone?,” she suggests countering with “How can you let him visit your relatives?” (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) “I’m not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn’t be prepared,” she says. “But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources.”
The best quote in the piece belongs to Skenazy. “10 is the new 2,” she quips. “We’re infantilizing our kids into incompetence.”
by Robert Pondiscio
August 21st, 2009
Tags: parental involvement
Posted in No category | 3 Comments »
So let me make sure I’ve got this right. If you want parents to be involved in your school — even low-income parents — you have to call them? You mean, like on the telephone?!?
(H/T: Joanne Jacobs)
by Robert Pondiscio
June 30th, 2009
Tags: Ed Balls, parental involvement, truancy
Posted in Education News | 2 Comments »
…but so will you. Or else. Under a new vision for schools, parents could be fined if their children are unruly in class and their education is unsupported at home.
U.K. Schools Secretary Ed Balls has published a new ”white paper for education,” setting out plans for schools to get annual report cards, similar to New York City’s accountability system. The Guardian newspaper says the plan gives British parents a guarantee that their child will have ”a place at school or college for their child until the age of 18, a promise of one-to-one tuition if their child is falling behind and a personal tutor throughout secondary to give them pastoral support.”
In return, parents will be under new obligations to support their child at school. They will have to sign stricter home school agreements and face fines of up to £1,000, enforced by the courts, if they fail to meet the conditions.
“There must be real consequences for those parents who don’t take their responsibilities seriously,” said Mr. Balls in an interview last week. Interesting concept. Wonder how it’ll be enforced. Or if it can be.
by Robert Pondiscio
May 22nd, 2009
Tags: employment issues, middle school, parental involvement
Posted in Education News, Parents | 4 Comments »
Teaching middle school students that academic performance is a key to their future job prospects is more important to student achievement than helping kids with their homework, according to a new study. “Instilling the value of education and linking school work to future goals is what this age group needs to excel in school, more than parents’ helping with homework or showing up at school,” lead researcher Nancy E. Hill, PhD, of Harvard University tells Science Daily. She examined 50 studies with more than 50,000 students over a 26-year period looking at what kinds of parent involvement helped children’s academic achievement.
I clearly recall my late father making sure he instilled in his son the value of education. And the links he established between school and future job prospects were clear and unambiguous:
“Get your @#$%! to school! Do you want to be a #$%@! bum your whole life?
Does that count?
by Robert Pondiscio
February 13th, 2009
Tags: parental involvement
Posted in Education News, Parents | 2 Comments »
Within the last few weeks we learned about one Maryland school district that’s thinking of doing away with parent teacher conferences, and a proposed law in Colorado to give parents unpaid leave to attend them. Now a Kentucky lawmaker wants a law to require every parent who to meet with his or her child’s teacher within the first 60 days of school–or risk a fine of up to $200.
Rep. Adam Koenig seems unsure if his proposal has a chance. “Parental involvement is not something policymakers are used to talking about, but should be talking about,” he said.
“You can’t dictate parental involvement,” says one school superintendent. “You have to create avenues to make parents feel welcome in the school, and break down those barriers that prevent them from getting involved.”
by Robert Pondiscio
February 10th, 2009
Tags: Georgia, parental involvement, vouchers
Posted in Education Practice, Parents | 15 Comments »
Before her twins entered first grade, Maureen Downey sent a note to the principal asking if one of them could have a beloved teacher who taught her older children in first grade. “Close to retirement, this teacher would be one of the few that my teens and my younger kids would ever share in common,” notes Downey, an editorial writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
With only 4 classes on the grade, there was a 50-50 chance that one of her kids would end up in the class, but neither did. And when she asked why not, the principal suggested it was because she had asked. ”She just didn’t believe in honoring parent requests even when it was possible and painless to do so,” Downey notes.
That uncompromising posture — shared by many school leaders across the state — has helped lay the groundwork for the voucher bill introduced last week in the state Legislature that would allow all parents to use tax dollars to send their kids to private schools. Let me be clear. I think the voucher bill is counterproductive legislation that will only help its sponsor’s political career. However, I also think the bill represents an overdue wake-up call for public schools that they must be more responsive to parents.
Georgia would be the first state to offer vouchers to all public school students under a plan introduced in the state Senate last week. Other parents have testified to far greater problems with the state’s public schools than hers, But, Downey concludes, “the most forceful defense against vouchers is a receptive, creative and innovative public school system that doesn’t treat parents as uninvited guests, that doesn’t wield policy as a shield and where children are more than faces in the crowd.”
