It’s been an infuriating and decidedly odd few years for the nation’s parents.
In spring 2020, schools closed and states told parents to home-school their children, with the assistance of intermittent Zoom sessions and semifunctional online resources. Across much of the land, parents settled into an extended period of remote learning, during which they had to do their jobs, supervise their children, and keep the wheels from coming off.
LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
As schools reopened, a host of new challenges emerged. There were heated fights over masking, vaccination mandates, and politicized “anti-racist” practices. Those fights were soon followed by clashes over how schools should approach gender identity, what books belong in school libraries, and whether educators should teach first graders about sex. Parents who objected to district policies risked being smeared as bigots, with the National School Boards Association urging the FBI to investigate wrong-headed parents as possible “domestic terrorists.”
Like I said, it’s been an odd, frustrating time. After all of this, it’s no great surprise that support for school choice is soaring, that most parents say the nation’s schools are on the wrong track, or that an array of new parent groups, such as Parents Defending Education and Moms for Liberty, has risen up.
But there’s another, less obvious and less politicized, development. As I observe in The Great School Rethink, all this has given us an opportunity to rethink the relationship between families and schools. And that’s long overdue.
During the pandemic, Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises penned a thoughtful essay for Education Week, noting, “I have been struck by the number of principals telling me about staff who have said they were wrong about this parent or that grandmother, now seen more as a vital ally rather than an unwanted adversary.” She wrote, “No longer can we dust off the welcome mats for back-to-school nights and parent-teacher conferences and then swiftly roll them back up, shooing parents away and telling them, ‘Trust us.’ We are now guests in their homes.”
For 20 years or more, too many parents felt like they were treated as adversaries or nuisances. Amid COVID-19, parents in learning pods reported this type of resistance from school systems, with researchers documenting a spate of “aggressive emails” and “vengeful” responses from school officials. And parental frustrations aren’t unreasonable, especially given that half of teachers report spending less than an hour a week engaging with parents, guardians, and the community.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but it apparently does: Parent involvement matters a lot for student success. A 2017 study of 11,000 households analyzed the impact of sending parents half a dozen reminders during the year about the importance of student attendance. The result: a big drop in absenteeism, especially chronic absenteeism. A study of Title I elementary schools found that sending materials home, face-to-face parent-teacher meetings, and phone check-ins boosted academic performance. As one influential survey of the research concluded, “No matter their income or background, students with involved parents are more likely to have higher grades and test scores, attend school regularly, [and] have better social skills.”
A toxic relationship
When schools went remote in 2020, parents could suddenly see what children and teachers were doing all day. When that happened, the phrase I heard most often from parents was: “I had no idea.” They were unaware this teacher was juggling so much or how little learning actually occurred in a school day.
Shuttered schools needed parents to get children online, monitor their engagement, navigate balky web portals, handle lunch, supervise breaks, and serve as teacher aides. It was a stark reminder that schools don’t work without parents. At the same time, parents charged with printing out materials, explaining confusing concepts, keeping their children on task, and troubleshooting tech headaches gained a new appreciation for a teacher’s daily burdens.
In many communities, the parent-school relationship is a toxic one, featuring too much passive-aggressive distrust and too little straight talk. Ask veteran educators about their feelings toward parents, and they’ll echo the party line about how much they value parent engagement. But when you get those same educators in safe environs, they’ll voice doubts: that some parents don’t want to be involved, that some parents don’t know what to do, or that they get blamed when students or parents aren’t willing to meet them halfway.
These are all fair points. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say so. Education is in essence a partnership between families and teachers, between students and schools.
A partnership is a two-way street. Teachers must be competent and committed to educating every child. But parents and guardians have a job, too: to send children to school who are responsible, respectful, and ready to learn. This means getting their children to school on time, making sure they do their homework, and teaching them to treat their peers with basic courtesy.
If parents don’t know how to supervise homework, schools need to offer mentoring. If parents won’t step up, they need to be challenged, and if they struggle to do so, they need support. But the answer is not to ignore or excuse parental inaction. That’s not the empathy of an “ally.” It’s the negligence of an enabler.
Once upon a time, back in the 1980s and 1990s, it was all too easy to find educators who would say, “I can’t teach that kid.” Complaints that parents weren’t doing their part were invoked as an all-purpose excuse and mostly met with resigned shrugs. Thankfully, the world today has changed. When educators say such things, they mutter them discreetly. It’s become conventional wisdom that educators should expect every child to learn. This is a seismic shift, and it’s a very good thing.
But it’s also meant that, today, public officials and school leaders hesitate to talk about whether parents are doing their part to equip their children to succeed in school. Terrified of being labeled a bigot or an enemy of equity, they fear saying anything that might raise the ire of the social justice police. As a result, too many parents aren’t even clear about what role they should play in their child’s schooling, and teachers can feel like convenient scapegoats.
This is bad for students, parents, and educators alike. It implies that whole classes of parents are incapable of agency in their own lives or those of their children. That’s not empathy. It’s disrespect.
Fortunately, we don’t need to look that hard to find better models of what a healthy partnership between schools and families looks like.
Every child, every day
In Arizona’s Phoenix Union High School District, Superintendent Chad Gestson had an intriguing response when schools went remote in March 2020. Worried that the district was going to lose track of many of its 30,000 high schoolers, which was what ultimately happened to something like 20% of the nation’s students, he announced that school staff would be connecting with “every student, every day.”
With schools shuttered and staff working from home, Gestson reminded employees that everyone was still on the clock and directed every district employee, whether they were a teacher, member of the support staff, or administrator, to check in with 10 students or their parents every day.
The exercise surfaced all manner of challenges. For one thing, it turned out that a huge chunk of the district’s contact numbers was inaccurate. Gestson recalled that, at first, he had working numbers for just 4 of his 10 students. “Those first few days were spent trying backup numbers, calling aunts or other family members, and just trying to make sure we knew how to find our students,” he said.
Early calls mostly addressed technical problems with remote learning. Soon, though, the focus shifted to how students and families were faring. Gestson said, “Sometimes we’d talk to the student every day. In other families, the parent said, ‘Call me instead [of my child].’” Staff just followed the families’ leads, which helped to build trust between family and school.
Gestson said the calls both strengthened the school-family bond and surfaced useful insights. “One thing we learned was that a lot of students had strong relationships [with school personnel]. Kids would tell us, ‘I just talked to my math teacher or that coach.’ We also learned which students didn’t have those relationships. We heard about families struggling with food or housing.”
Along the way, the school district stitched together software that enabled staff to connect students with someone who could assist them.
Of course, Gestson wasn’t the only leader to rethink parent engagement during the pandemic. At New York City’s Concourse Village Elementary School, communication with families used to be sporadic. The principal thought parents liked it that way. During COVID-19, though, the school began weekly check-ins. Finding pent-up parent interest, the school built out a strategy of monthly surveys, follow-up phone calls, and virtual visits. At Urban Assembly Maker Academy in New York, the assistant principal and staff would spend three Fridays a month knocking on doors to reconnect with students who had logged off or stopped engaging.
While such developments seem both heartening and sensible, one can’t help but wonder why they’re the exception and not the rule — or why it took a pandemic to get schools to embrace them.
Driver’s ed and digital devices
Where are the big opportunities for parents and schools to sidestep some of the ideological clashes and roll up their sleeves? The world of social media is one such place. Today’s tweens and teens spend a staggering amount of time online. In 2021, researchers reported that, during the pandemic, aside from school-related screen time, 12- to 14-year-olds said they spent 7.7 hours on a screen each day. What’s the right response for parents and educators?
A useful model here, believe it or not, is oft-maligned driver’s education. Driver’s ed became a staple in the last century when driving became a rite of passage and cars were the most powerful technology a student would encounter. Schools tapped their institutional muscle and instructional acumen to support parents who lacked the time, know-how, or temperament to teach students how to handle a ton of speeding metal.
Reams of data on youth mental health and well-being have made it clear that a tween’s phone should be seen similarly, less as a candy-colored bauble than as a powerful piece of equipment that needs to be handled responsibly. Unfortunately, today’s approach is more like tossing a 12-year-old the keys to a Harley and saying, “Drive safely. And please stay away from the biker bars.” That’s a problem. As Yuval Levin, author of A Time to Build, has observed, “If Instagram and TikTok were brick-and-mortar spaces in your neighborhood, you probably would never let even your teenager go to them alone.”
We’ve seemingly decided that most tweens and teens are going to have devices. They need them to access class materials, arrange rides home, listen to music, take pictures, pay for things, talk to their friends, and much else. If that’s the case, teaching them to use these responsibly can’t be the province of either parents or educators alone. Parents need to set boundaries and model responsible behavior. Schools can support those efforts by coaching parents who want help and teaching students sensible practices. It must be a partnership.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Rethinking the parent-school partnership
As students have experienced epidemics of learning loss, emotional trauma, and social isolation, it’s clear that parents and educators are both in need of help. This provides the opportunity to rethink the parent-school relationship.
Striking that deal requires educators to see parents as partners. That means keeping parents apprised of what’s happening in school and asking how things are going at home. It means making it easy for parents to see what’s being taught. It means valuing parental concerns. And it also means being clear about what parents, in turn, need to do.
Moreover, in an age of information overload and expanding options, school systems should learn to play a role as trusted community hubs. For parents seeking assistance or advice, school systems can be reliable conduits to quality instructional videos, coaching programs, tutors, learning pods, and more.
Put another way, the local school system’s relationship with parents needs to evolve from the factory-era role of being the purveyor of schooling to one that engages parents where they are. That won’t be easy. But if the pandemic and its aftermath have taught us anything, it’s just how necessary such evolution is.
Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the new book The Great School Rethink (Harvard Education Press 2023).
