The ‘Parent Trigger’ doesn’t help schools or parents is the headline of my new guest piece at The Washington Post.
It’s about the California law that allows a majority of parents at a school to sign a petition and have the school converted into a charter.
“Community Engagement in NYC and the Sustainability Challenge for Urban Education Reform” is a lengthy paper by Jeffrey R. Henig, Teachers College, Columbia University, and several others.
I haven’t gotten a chance to look at it at length yet, but I like the introduction:
In New York City, the Bloomberg/Klein administration’s approach to parent and community
engagement was framed in contradistinction to the Community School Districts (CSDs) that
predated it; CSDs were rooted in a vision of a more collective and aggressive form of
engagement in which parents and communities directly set priorities, selected policies, and
shaped implementation. The administration considered this preexisting system to be
fundamentally flawed in both concept and practice.
In place of engagement at the community level, the administration’s approach centers on
engagement at the level of families and schools. In place of involvement in setting goals and
priorities, it focuses on engagement in implementation of policies. In place of emphasizing
political voice as a way for communities to exercise their demands, it puts a strong emphasis on
exit—giving families the option to choose a different school if they consider it a better fit for
their child than they one they are assigned. Finally, while the CSDs provided education‐specific
agenda‐setting venues in which parents and teachers were influential actors, the
administration’s position on mayoral control of schools deliberately shifts authority for agenda
setting and policymaking to general purpose politics and mayoral elections, where other issues
compete for priority, and where most groups do not have a direct stake in public education.
Adults blame parents for education problems is the headline on an article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s an excerpt:
Blaming teachers for low test scores, poor graduation rates and the other ills of American schools has been popular lately, but a new survey wags a finger closer to home.
An Associated Press-Stanford University Poll on education found that 68 percent of adults believe parents deserve heavy blame for what’s wrong with the U.S. education system — more than teachers, school administrators, the government or teachers unions.
Only 35 percent of those surveyed agreed that teachers deserve a great deal or a lot of the blame.
It’s good information to know, and backs up most other polls I’ve written about in this blog.
At the same time, as I’ve written before, Teachers Have Got To Stop Blaming Parents (and politicians need to stop blaming teachers).
It’s not “us” versus “them,” as I write in an upcoming piece on the “parent trigger” that should be appearing in The Washington Post shortly.
We’ve got to reach out to each other and work in partnership to address the in-school and out-of-school challenges facing our students and their families.
Teachers plan visits to homes is the headline on a Massachusetts newspaper article about a project in Springfield.
They’re following the model of the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project, which I’ve written a lot about (and participated in).
The Parentella blog had a useful post last month titled How to Engage Parents at a Title I School.
It has some good ideas/reminders.
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I’ve written often about the sham that is the California “parent trigger” law that allows an unclear number of parents in a school’s general area to “trigger” that school’s takeover by a charter school operator (not-so-coincidentally, the push for the law was led by a group connected to a charter school company).
Sadly, we can now see how it will be used by “school reformers” as they try it for the first time on a school in Compton (see Parents hope to force sweeping changes at Compton school).
Ben Austin, the head of the group pushing for the takeover, demonstrated a fair amount of self-righteous over-zealousness:
“The only way to succeed is to bring about a radical and unapologetic transfer of raw power from defenders of the status quo to parents, because they’re the only ones who care only about kids.”
Check-out my previous posts to learn about more of my concerns, and also read today’s post from School Finance 101, Potential abuses of the Parent Trigger???
(ADDITION: Here’s an article from The Huffington Post with a little more information on what’s happening in Compton — Compton Parents Use New ‘Trigger Law’ To Demand Charter School)
Program spells success for families in need of support is newspaper headline about a program in Ohio that has what are — in effect — social workers based in each school site to provide needed social services to parents and families. It’s particularly interesting because it has research showing its positive effect on student academic achievement.
It’s an example of the sort of thing schools can do to begin to attack the two-thirds of factors that affect student academic performance and not just the one-third of factors within the teacher’s control.
It would be nice, though, if such programs were not so obviously using the social work model of looking as parents solely as “clients” and, instead or in addition to, explore how schools could work with them more as “partners.” That way, schools could connect parents who have similar challenges with each other and help them to work together to solve them, and work with other local organizations, like religious congregations, unions, and neighborhood groups, to do the same.
A state legislator in Indiana wants the state to pass a law requiring homework assignments for elementary school students and for parents to sign saying they supervised its completion. Teachers would then be required to make reports on the rate of completion, which would then be made public.
Where do begin critiquing this idea?
First, research has shown “zero” correlation between elementary school homework and academic success (see The Best Resources For Learning About Homework Issues) — even though the legislator wants to mandate “meaningful” homework assignments.
Secondly, I’m sure teachers in Indiana will be thrilled to have to submit yet another report.
Instead of spending the money to supervise and administer this effort, how about using it to offer stipends to teachers to make home visits to parents and create genuinely meaningful relationships?
Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson’s school advocacy organization has just announced a partnership to work with Sacramento schools on parent involvement issues.
The Mayor’s education agenda is generally, I think, not very helpful to students, teachers, or parents, and his organization is funded by the Eli Broad Foundation (you can read more about this at The Eli Broad Foundation Comes To Sacramento), so I’m very wary and skeptical about what might come out of this arrangement.
However, I think the staffperson who is directly in charge of these parent efforts has good intentions, so I’d be happy to be surprised.
Pushing Parent Involvement is the title of a recent Ohio PBS program on parent involvement.
This is how they describe it:
“In Cleveland, teams of administrators are delivering alarm clocks to the homes of chronically truant students. In Michigan, a county prosecutor proposes jailing parents who repeatedly miss teacher conferences. Educators agree that students do better in school when their parents are involved, whether that means assuring their attendance, monitoring their homework or meeting with their teachers. But what happens when parents are absent from their kids’ schooling? Does coaxing or compelling them to be involved actually work? And should schools take more responsibility for connecting with parents?”
You can listen to a good webcast at Parents As Partners about “Planning Parent Involvement.” Here is how they describe it:
George Couros, a principal in Stoney Plain, Albert joined the Parents as Partners webcast to share his work with involving parents in developing school improvement plans. Through out the recording you will hear George talk about his approach to working with parents as well as how he involved parents in flushing out the issues that arise in the school. George made a good point about getting parent feedback – positive and negative because all feedback is necessary to move forward with improving student success.
It’s worth checking-out…
“School effort aims to engage parents” is the headline of a recent article in the Denver Post.
It sounds like they are doing pretty decent work though, from how the article describes it, it doesn’t sound like parents are particularly involved in decision-making around it.