Parents and Schools
Will more parental involvement help students? January 20, 1995 • Volume 5, Issue 3
By Charles S. Clark
Introduction
Unprecedented efforts are being made across the country to boost the role of parents in schools. Teachers and grass-roots parents' groups as well as the EducationNext Hit Department and Previous HiteducationNext Hit associations have joined a campaign to encourage new efforts by parents as the key to raising student achievement. Though the strategies include the traditional methods of PTA membership and help with homework, parental involvement 1990s-style has broadened to include creation of parent centers at schools, adult Previous HiteducationNext Hit classes on parenting and even parent participation in school governance. Teachers and administrators, however, sometimes worry that parents are challenging their professionalism. And parents, always prone to displays of passion over the emotional subject of schools, are quick to become divided over school politics.
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Overview
There's still a teacher's lounge at John Holland Elementary School in Boston. But now it's a bit smaller. A portion of the lounge and attic space above the cafeteria have been turned into a retreat for parents who volunteer at the heavily black and Hispanic school in a working-class neighborhood. There they can sit down for coffee and share concerns, read literature on parenting and neighborhood social services and even take computer job training.
“Most of the parents do library or office work, or cafeteria monitoring, or they can cover a class if the teacher gets a phone call,” says Principal Janet Williams. “But by doing more than just a bake sale, they develop a sense of belonging to the school, almost to the point of becoming a staff member.”
The school requires only that parents call ahead for appointments and sign in at the office, “not for permission, but just to say, 'Here's where I'll be if you need me,'” Williams says. “I don't need 800 parents here every day. But at least they know they are welcome.”
Putting out the welcome mat has paid off. In recent years there have been huge turnouts of parents at Holland's Christmas show, crafts fair and Fathers Day lunch, which draws upwards of 300 dads. But even more important, the school's achievement test scores have risen from below-average to well above, according to outside experts.
Research clearly shows that children's academic performance is higher at schools that have high parental involvement. “Three factors over which parents exercise authority - student absenteeism, variety of reading materials in the home and excessive television watching - explain nearly 90 percent of the difference in eighth-grade mathematics test scores across 37 states,” says a recent federal report. Footnote 1 Such improvements also help explain why parental involvement has emerged as one of the hottest new developments in educational reform.
Last September, Previous HitEducationNext Hit Secretary Richard W. Riley underscored the importance being given to parental involvement when he unveiled a new “partnership for family involvement” campaign. The new campaign follows the inclusion of parental involvement among the eight Goals 2000 Previous HiteducationNext Hit-standards legislation signed into law last March. (See interview, p. 66.) And nearly 50 Previous HiteducationNext Hit organizations have become members of the National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Previous HitEducationNext Hit, which also has support from some 40 youth and business groups, such as the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and the National Alliance of Business.
The movement is hardly confined to the federal effort:
- The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson is working with an array of community leaders to get parents to sign pledges to monitor children's grades, turn off the TV and exchange phone numbers with teachers.
- Teachers' unions, after years of reluctance due to concerns about protecting their turf, have joined Previous HiteducationNext Hit associations and private publishers in flooding the market with pamphlets, magazines and videos offering tips for parental involvement.
- Entrepreneurs in St. Louis are using the Internet, the worldwide computer network, to launch the Appleseed Project, a nationwide pledge campaign to recruit parents for schools.
- Grandparents, who have primary custody for an estimated 3.4 million young children, have developed their own information clearinghouse on working with schools, with help from the American Association for Retired Persons.
Despite such gains, the parental involvement movement has its work cut out for it. Parents were rated as highly involved in only 46 percent of the schools attended by students in the future high school class of 2000, according to a government survey. Footnote 2 What's more, support steadily declines as children get older, from 73 percent of parents active when the child is 8-11, down to only 51 percent by age 16, according to data from the 1993 National Household Previous HitEducationNext Hit Survey.
The biggest barrier to parental involvement is lack of time, according to a 1992 survey of 30,000 parents by the National PTA. Time was cited by 89 percent, followed distantly by such barriers as “nothing to contribute” (32 percent) and lack of child care (28 percent). (See list, p. 53.)
Definitions of parental involvement range from joining the PTA and helping with homework to taking an active role in school governance, as in the recent trend toward site-based management of schools, in which parents serve on advisory committees dealing with budgets and curriculum. Efforts to boost parental involvement range from rewording a school's “Visitors must report to the office” sign to make it more welcoming, to active community outreach that includes visits to parents at home.
In Previous Hitinner-cityNext Hit neighborhoods, says Adrian Lewis, director of an Previous HiteducationNext Hit and career program for the National Urban League in New York Previous HitCityNext Hit, efforts to bring in parents means “going to where the folks are, such as community-based organizations, churches, settlement houses for immigrants, barber shops, beauty shops and grocery stores to get information to parents wherever they go regularly and are comfortable. Many of these parents had negative experiences when they were in school, so we try to use those negatives to catalyze a change and get them more involved.”
Modern-day parental involvement differs from what was common 30 or 40 years ago. “Teachers are establishing closer relationships on an individual basis with parents, so they're more understanding of the realities of home situations,” says Harold Howe II, a former U.S. Previous HitEducationNext Hit commissioner and Harvard University professor. “Nowadays we also have a broader concern about how the many agencies that serve children - their recreation needs, mental health, job training - are melded with the school so there is more of an awareness of each other and of the total child.”
Dan Safran, who heads the Center for the Study of Parent Involvement at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, Calif., says that while the primary value of parental involvement is greater academic achievement, there are other important benefits. Chief among them are “the opportunity for parents to contribute to school reform, which is part of our participatory tradition, and the potential for the many cultures of our society to find some common ground around children,” he says. “This is particularly true in low-income, minority and rural areas and among new immigrants, especially at the elementary school level.”
Involvement may mean something else, however, for more affluent parents, especially the famous baby-boom generation that replaced the “Baby on Board” signs on its cars with bumper stickers that say, “My child is an honor student.” Writing in The School-Smart Parent, former New York Times Previous HiteducationNext Hit reporter Gene I. Maeroff notes that today's anxious parents can no longer take for granted that the American dream will be available to their children, as their parents thought it would be for them. “Like generals preparing for battle,” he writes, “parents must weigh the consequences of their actions and map out their strategies.” Footnote 3
Modern parents are under new pressures because of TV news, with its “15-second sound bites that offer a daily diet of instant access to bad things,” says Kathryn Whitfill, president of the National PTA. “A street may have two drive-by shootings, or a kid may bring a knife to school, and this may happen clear across the country, but it arouses the apprehension of parents as if it could happen anywhere.” The parents' response, Whitfill adds, “has been that more young [mothers] are postponing going back to work for a few years, and more fathers are getting involved in schools, because of concerns about Previous HiteducationNext Hit and violence. And it cuts across ethnic lines.”
Many of these parents have gone further than just joining the PTA. They are helping organize and design charter schools - independent, locally run schools that in 11 states can receive public money. Footnote 4 Many are opting to school their kids at home. Still others have embraced organized protests around single issues such as sex Previous HiteducationNext Hit and the pedagogical technique known as outcomes-based Previous HiteducationNext Hit. Footnote 5
“Parents age 35-45 came of age in the 1960s, a time of activism when it was acceptable, even 'cool,' to question what is going on,” says Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota. “And nowadays, thanks to public Previous HiteducationNext Hit, we have a more educated citizenry, and so parents are as educated as the educators.”
Despite a decade-long movement for Previous HiteducationNext Hit reform, however, “There is growing evidence that we don't have a national consensus,” laments Tony Wagner, president of the Institute for Responsive Previous HitEducationNext Hit at Boston University. “Answers from parents about what is school reform are all over the map. Some say back to basics, others say forget basics, let's do computers, while a third say none of this prepares my kid for a job.”
Jeffrey Bell, an economic consultant in Northern Virginia and the father of four children, has launched the group For the People, an initiative to add a parents' rights amendment to state constitutions. He sees the movement for parental involvement as “a well-intentioned but elitist effort that is doomed to failure. It gets everything backward,” he says. “The reason parents have not been involved is that they're demoralized because society has contracted out to schools the responsibilities that should be for parents.” He bemoans “the rise of the sociological types of schooling, in which teachers are asked to be mothers, cops, social workers and medical experts.” Parents, he says, “should be more skeptical and more militant about the latest educational directive coming down from on high.”
Dorothy Rich, founder of the Home and School Institute in Washington and the author of a popular book of parenting advice, says, “Schools are used as a battleground for lots of other issues, but I'm interested in the bottom line: Do the children learn? Schools and the public have recognized that schools, no matter how good, can't do it alone,” she adds. “They are dependent on families and communities they deal with. This has always been true, but we didn't know it.”
Whether the parental involvement push succeeds will depend largely on the following question:
Will parental involvement create tension between parents and teachers?
Parents and teachers have been talking past each other since the days of the little red schoolhouse. “Parents complain that teachers don't make enough effort to understand their children, that they keep parents at bay with educational jargon and that they are more concerned with preserving their professional prerogatives than with helping kids,” observes a primer on parental involvement, Beyond the Bake Sale. “Teachers complain that parents don't discipline their children properly, that they make inappropriate demands of children and teachers, and that they seem unwilling to continue at home what the teacher is doing in the classroom.” Footnote 6
A joke common among educators has the teacher telling a parent: “I promise to believe only half of what the students say about you if you believe only half of what they say about us.”
The responsibilities of raising the next generation take their toll on both sides. The typical parent, says Boston University Previous HiteducationNext Hit Professor Vivian Johnson, “is concerned about the teacher's judgment of her child's performance and that of her as a parent. She feels vulnerable, exposed, unsafe and insecure. The teacher knows the parent will blame the teacher if things go wrong and complain to the principal. So she feels vulnerable, exposed, unsafe and insecure.”
Despite the inherent tension, surveys show that teachers value parental input, sometimes placing it ahead of such goals as smaller class size and more teacher control. The teacher's notion that it is the parents who aren't doing their share came out in a survey of teachers by Peter D. Hart Associates, sponsored last October by the American Federation of Teachers and the Chrysler Corp. It showed that parents play a role in their children's math homework but not in writing. Fully 78 percent of the teachers wanted parents to help more with writing.
“I know that parents are only one piece of the puzzle, but aren't they the most important piece?” asks Lisa Graff, a Montgomery County, Md., teacher. “Sadly, many of my students did not have good role models within their own home, so it's small wonder that they have no respect for authority. Within the first two weeks of a school year, I can recognize those students who do not have a good family life.” Footnote 7
Among parents, there is some agreement with the teachers' frequent complaint that parents with no teaching experience often feel qualified to lecture them based on how “things were taught when I was in school.” A Louis Harris and Associates survey of 1,000 parents sponsored by Met Life last spring found that a third of parents think most of their peers don't respect teachers. Footnote 8
Surveys also show that teachers often define parental involvement in its traditional sense of being available when called upon, but not its modern, activist sense. When elementary and secondary school teachers from 29 states were asked the most important ways parents could help students do well, 76 percent said attend a conference with the teacher, 67 percent said help with homework and 65 percent chose telling the child regularly that doing well in school is important. Far fewer selected more aggressive activities, such as volunteering in the school and helping arrange learning programs in the community. Footnote 9
The perception gap between parents and teachers extends to the general debate over school reform, as revealed in a series of surveys by the Public Agenda Foundation in New York. In one survey of 1,100 Americans, including 550 parents with children in public school, 33 percent said teachers are doing a poor job, but 55 percent thought parents are doing a worse job.
The poll showed that while teachers and administrators believe schools need more money for salaries and equipment, parents and community members say less-costly changes in discipline and teacher accountability are what's needed. “The problem is that the reform movement has neglected to address the public's chief concern: Are the public schools calm, orderly and purposeful enough for any kind of learning to take place?” says Public Agenda Executive Director Deborah Wadsworth. Footnote 10
To many parents seeking school reform, even the best teachers and administrators are inherently obstacles. Stanford L. Busby, founder of The Parent Network, a parents' group at Holton Arms, a private school in Bethesda, Md., says teachers and administrators “are too busy to take the long-term view, and because they have their own turf, it is difficult for them to give up control. But they get all their authority from parents and families, and more people are realizing that.”
Longtime Previous HiteducationNext Hit critic Phyllis Schlafly accuses teachers of condescending to parents and even actively blocking parent access. “They send their people to workshops at taxpayer expense to learn how to humiliate and stonewall parents, to throw epithets at them, calling them right-wing, fundamentalist extremist, book-burning censors,” says Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum in Alton, Ill.
Schlafly dismisses teachers' union brochures that promote parental involvement, saying the teachers merely “want parents to help raise money and support bond issues. For curriculum, it's pure hostility,” she says. “I don't think we're paying schools to teach parents to be parents. Teachers should teach kids facts and skills and quit blaming their failure on parents, TV or societal problems.”
Peg Luksik, the Pennsylvania parent whose well-publicized campaign against outcomes-based Previous HiteducationNext Hit landed her on last November's ballot for governor, is among the advocates of parent activism. Luksik describes how she marched into the office of her child's school and asked to see all the lesson books, including teachers' manuals. “You're the only one who ever asked,'” she says they told her, “which was the wrong answer. It's guaranteed to make you feel all alone. The principal then asked, 'What were you hoping to find?' 'Nothing until this conversation,' I said.”
Luksik used the manual to confirm that the teacher was employing a technique known as “inventive spelling,” which she calls a “disaster.” She countered the technique - designed to encourage kids to write without anxiety about mistakes - by correcting her children's spelling at home.
“The point is that parents have a right, even a responsibility, to know what's happening,” she says. “But both parents and teachers are put on the defensive when the government tells teachers to blame all the school problems on parents. I'm a teacher and a parent, and there's no comparison between the relationships. There's not a school on this planet that knows children better than parents.”
The notion that schools should do more to accommodate concerns of parents draws support from Gary Marx, senior associate executive director of the National Association of School Administrators. “Sometimes parents see the school system as a large entity that they must penetrate,” he says. “That means all who work in schools - administrators, teachers and staff - must be prepared to listen [to parents], and send the right non-verbal signals: Don't cross your legs, fold your arms and put a line in your brows that says, 'I don't want to hear it.'”
Conversely, Marx says, administrators are concerned about parental apathy. They worry about single parents and two-income couples who are too busy to be involved in school. And they are wary that “some parents will go too far, like telling teachers to do things that might not be in their child's interest,” he says. “These parents may be politically motivated and propose such things as, 'Let's get rid of a reading program because I have had contact with an organization in Texas that says it's against my religion,'” he says.
Carole Kennedy, principal of New Haven Elementary School in Columbia, Mo., says: “Too many times we set ourselves up as experts. But the parents know kids, know what goals they have and how schools can help. It's nice if we can share goals, but we don't allow parents to have as much of a meaningful involvement as we should.”
Why, asks Kennedy, a board member of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, shouldn't parents help interview teacher candidates, decide curriculum issues and design report cards? “Research shows that the older the teacher, the less they want real parental involvement, while the beginning teachers are more open,” she adds. “But parents are responsible for some of the communications breakdowns. They don't read what we send home.”
Janet Bass, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers, flatly denies Schlafly's charge that teachers are trained in how to lock out parents. “We want parents to know what the class is up to, so they can do homework and outside activities to augment it,” she says. “Teachers are too busy worrying about the next day's lesson plan to worry about ways to block parents. What we hope is that it will be seen as a two-way street, that parents will show teachers some respect and acknowledge their experience and training.”
More common than the parent who feels shut out is the parent who simply won't get involved, says Warleen Gary, an urban-Previous HiteducationNext Hit specialist at the National Previous HitEducationNext Hit Association (NEA), the largest teachers' union. But most of the tension between parents and teachers is unintentional miscommunication, she says. “Our goal is to build a collaborative relationship revolving around the child. You always have some people who are pushy and demanding. But if you work with common sense to deal with it, they too can be rational. When it gets adversarial between the parent and teacher, we lose the focus on the child.”
Teachers, notes Safran of the Center for the Study of Parent Involvement, think that a new role for parents undercuts their authority, but it need not. “Teaching has been described by sociologists as a only a 'semi-profession,' unlike that of doctors and lawyers, and so some teachers compensate for that by emphasizing the forms of the profession to make up for the lack of respect and renown. I don't want to overstate it, but there's also the psychological factor. Many teachers in their early 20s are just are getting out of the home, differentiating themselves from their own families. So in dealing with older people, they identify with the youngsters and split off from adults, seeing parents not as allies but as controlling forces.”
But just as sales clerks at Macy's are trained to work with demanding customers, Safran adds, “Teachers must learn to understand the emotional lives of parents. It's the burden that educators must carry, and I feel bad about it. But it can be done with new forms of leadership.”
Nathan of the Center for School Change, who writes a newspaper column on schools, gets 50 calls and letters a week from parents and teachers dealing with clashes. He recalls the Minneapolis parent who complained to the principal that the playground was dangerous. In response, the principal asked whether the parents would be willing to work together to solve the problem, and eventually a crew of volunteers raised money and built a new playground - for far less than the school would have had to pay.
But Nathan also recalls the parent who helped her 8-year-old write a business letter for homework. The child was given an F on the project because, the teacher said, the format was wrong. When the parent - a professional writer - went to complain, the teacher became defensive. It turned out the teacher was using a format that was 10 years out of date.
“All parents don't consider themselves as knowledgeable as the teachers,” Nathan says, “but many have ideas, and teachers should make use of their expertise. Wise educators will understand that in a democracy, you try to listen carefully to customers, and educators who learn to work closely with parents learn that it's more satisfying, and they can be more effective.”
Too often, however, parents see themselves only as “the consumer who's seeking a guarantee of success,” says Peter D. Relic, president of the National Association of Independent Schools. “This can be positive, but it also can be negative. Many parents aren't talking about the schools as a cause that requires a moral commitment. I'm more impressed with schools that are part of a community, in which parents are citizens with responsibilities” as well as consumers seeking academic progress.
“It's hard to be a teacher with today's level of high expectations,” adds author Rich. “They need a smile and a helping hand and a commitment from parents to be partners. There are complementary, non-duplicative roles between home and school. The twain shall meet.”