Grading the Parents: How Much School Involvement is Enough (or Too Much)?

A long while ago, I wrote a post about how much more involved parents of my generation are in our kids’ schooling and schools than my parents — well meaning as they were — ever were in mine. As my kids have progressed through more school since then, it’s naturally remained on my mind. Just the other day, my third-grader brought home a book-report project with glowing reviews from the teacher. It was neat! It was comprehensive! It was clearly written! The accompanying diorama of the Titanic was fun and detailed!

So where’s my grade? Admission time: I made the diorama. It was my plan, though it was executed with the help of my son (he stuck the silver star stickers on the black-construction-paper night-sky background; he stuck the “HMS Titanic” stickers on the wooden boat that started as a $1 craft kit from Michael’s). In truth, I didn’t mind doing it, because the meat of the book report — actually writing about the book he’d read, a Magic Treehouse volume — was his responsibility; all I did was make sure he was following the directions of this particular project.

But when it came to the obligatory art-portion of the project … I had to step in. Thing is, he’s not good with the scissors the glue and the glitter, and never has been. Neither am I, frankly, but at least I have 36 years more experience in life as well as in crafts than he does, plus I can drive to Michael’s. My family is full of creative, artistic types, people with 3-dimensional imaginations and skillful patience with things like this. I did not get that gene. (Which is why, though my parents didn’t otherwise get involved to the level of showing up monthly in the classroom to be a secret reader or lead career discussions, my dad — who did get the art gene — “helped” us often, including a social-studies project on Inca farming, involving an overturned flowerpot covered with clay fashioned into a mountain slope, and a bottle of homemade shampoo with a creatively designed label he “helped” my sister make for a science fair).

Anyway, I’m thinking my “grade” as a parent would be respectably high. But in all the swirl lately surrounding how well (or, let’s face it, poorly) American kids are doing in comparison with the world, the focus may be shifting from demonizing teachers (No Child Left Behind, anyone?) to parents, at least in some cases: I was reading Lisa Belkin’s New York Times Motherlode column the other day, entitled “Whose Failing Grade Is It?”. It’s all about current legislative pushes in a couple of states to “grade” parents on such criteria as showing up (or not) to parent/teacher conferences, or being sure their children are well-prepared for school.

At first I thought, well, I’d get good marks! And then I realized that at least some of what these state legislators are asking parents to do (and hoping to punish them for not doing) are things my folks did at their minimum level of school involvement (i.e., not including 3-D Inca farming models or shampoo recipes): fill us with breakfast, pack us our lunches, make sure we had enough sleep, crack the whip when we dragged our heels over homework, show up to conferences. The difference from then to now, or one of them, is that while my parents did those things, they were leaving all the rest of it, for good or ill, up to the teachers.

Maybe this shift of blame is inevitable, as teachers have been taking the brunt for a while now, but I don’t think it bodes well.

As Belkin writes:

Teachers are fed up with being blamed for the failures of American education, and legislators are starting to hear them. A spate of bills introduced in various states now takes aim squarely at the parents. If you think you can legislate teaching, the notion goes, why not try legislating parenting?

It is a complicated idea, taking on the controversial question of whether parents, teachers or children are most to blame when a child fails to learn.

But the thinking goes like this: If you look at schools that “work,” as measured by test scores and graduation rates, they all have involved (overinvolved?) parents, who are on top of their children’s homework, in contact with their children’s teachers, and invested in their children’s futures. So just require the same of parents in schools that don’t work, and the problem is solved (or, at least, dented), right?

Time was that children’s behavior in the classroom reflected on their “upbringing” and parents were expected to reinforce an accepted truth that “teacher knows best.” But today’s parents are just as likely to see the teacher as the problem — a view that has been reinforced by presidents who accuse teachers of leaving more than a few children behind, governors who want to eliminate their collective bargaining and mayors who want to be rid of laws that protect teachers who have been in their jobs the longest.

I gotta say, I agree. Blame, if we want to use that word, should be shared all around, and there should be a realization that zeroing in on one individual or group for systemic problems doesn’t get any of us anywhere good. We can all point fingers and offer bad grades, but that doesn’t help put our kids on par with students in, for example, Singapore or China, who in some areas are blowing us out of the water.

What do you think? And what are you expected to do for your kids in their schools?