Public School Excuse No. 5 — Parents Are AWOL from Their Children’s Education?

Another excuse school authorities use to justify public schools’ dismal performance is that allegedly, many parents are indifferent to their children’s education. School officials aim this charge mostly at low-income minority parents. Teachers and school authorities often complain that many low-income minority parents don’t come to parent-teacher conferences. Many teachers claim that these parents don’t show up for meetings the teachers arrange and don’t respond to the messages teachers send home with the children.

However, minority parents often complain just as passionately that teachers don’t treat them with respect, that they give up on their children, and are only interested in collecting their paychecks.

This excuse implies that black or hispanic parents don’t value their children’s education as much as white or asian-american parents do. Inner-city minority parents allegedly don’t monitor their children’s progress in reading and other subjects, push their children to do their homework, or meet with teachers to go over problems their kids are having in school. Without parents’ cooperation, school authorities ask, how can we educate their children?

Who is right here? Are minority parents AWOL, and if so, why? If some minority parents are AWOL from the public schools, their comments to the former teacher-union president reveal why. These parents believe that teachers and principals don’t listen to them, don’t respect them, and don’t care about their kids.

The following scenario at a typical parent-teacher conference illustrates why some parents might go AWOL. Low-income minority and other parents who attend a conference might bitterly complain to the teachers and principal that their children can’t read, and that the school is doing a lousy job teaching their kids. In turn, to defend themselves, the teachers will give these parents their list of excuses. They might explain to the allegedly uninformed parents that teachers are the experts, and that their teaching methods are based on the latest scientific research. If parents press them, they might claim that no one could do a better job than they do, considering the alleged low salary they get or the big class sizes. Or they might tell parents that their kids have been getting passing grades, so why complain. But the parents might then respond, “but my kids can’t read!”

If parents tell teachers and the principal they want the school to change its teaching methods, do you think it will? If parents insist they want their children to learn to read with the phonics method, instead of whole-language instruction, many principals will probably say it is out of the question. They will say that school authorities set the curriculum and tell him to use whole-language instruction. Parents have no choice or power in the matter. That is the message many teachers and principals will convey to them.

Many teachers don’t know how to teach phonics anymore —their so-called teacher colleges never taught them. Principals have to obey the orders of their superiors in the Board of Education who insist they use the whole-language method. If schools had to teach phonics reading, that would require complete retraining of teachers. Most school authorities with tight budgets are just not interested.

So the teachers and principal at this “friendly” parent-teacher conference often politely look down their noses at parents and tell them, in effect, to buzz off. They say or imply that they know what is best for their children’s education, and they will make no changes in how they teach their kids.

In a parent-teacher’s conference, the school’s final argument with parents is, in effect, a gun. That is, compulsory-attendance laws force minority parents to send their children to these schools, and school authorities can dictate what and how children learn. Remember that teachers and principals are tenured civil servants who are almost impossible to fire, and they know this. In response to every frustrated demand and complaint by parents, teachers and principals can simply say, “Too bad, we’re doing it our way, and you can’t do anything about it.” They may not use those exact words, but that is the underlying message.

Parents quickly learn that their complaints fall on deaf ears. If a school refuses to act on parents’ complaints or give parents some control over their children’s education, naturally minority parents feel helpless. No matter how many parent-teacher conferences they go to, parents can’t change the system in any meaningful way, and it is the system that betrays their children. Teachers and principals are just little cogs in the system’s machinery. They can’t change the system, even if they wanted to. So low-income minority and other parents see that no matter how much they complain, nothing changes. Isn’t it understandable why they might go AWOL, why they might give up? Wouldn’t you?

Here is one parent’s experience with parent-teacher meetings as described in Education Week magazine:

“Parents are welcome in the building for the traditional cookie-bake fund-raiser. But when PIE [Partners in Education], our Nyack group [Nyack, NY], organized 30 volunteers to read aloud to children, they were not welcome. The program was arranged with the principal and teachers through the shared decision-making team. But once district employees realized this meant parents would be inside — with a chance to see how the school worked — the program was nixed. I don’t believe ours is the only district with a tendency to see parents as spies. . . . Parents are welcome in the building—but not for too long.“

Another reason many parents may go AWOL is because they think public schools are free. There’s a simple law of human psychology that says, when you pay, you pay attention.   When we pay for something out of our own pockets, we become careful consumers. This applies even more to low-income families or single, working mothers. A single, working mom might work longer hours or take on a second job to pay the bills. Her hard-earned money is precious to her, so she can’t afford to waste a penny. If she pays tuition to a Catholic or Protestant-affiliated school for her child, she is far more likely to watch like a hawk how the school is teaching her children. She will constantly check how her children progress in reading and other subjects. She doesn’t have a second chance with her children’s education, because she doesn’t have much money to spare.

As a result, she will push her children to study, do their homework, and listen to the teacher. She will encourage her children and consult with their teachers. She knows her hard-earned money, and her children’s only chance at a future, will go down the drain if she does not pay attention to her children’s education.

In contrast, low-income parents who think public schools are “free” because they don’t pay school taxes, are less likely to pay attention to their children’s progress in school. That’s because of another law of human psychology—if you don’t pay for it, you don’t value it. Low-income parents who don’t own a home, don’t waste their hard-earned school taxes if their children’s public school does a lousy job. Of course, most parents will be angry with the schools because they love their children and want the best for them, but for low-income minority parents, the financial sting is gone. Low-income parents who don’t pay school taxes for public-school education might value it less, so might pay less attention to their children’s progress.

Yet another law of human psychology applies in this matter — if you don’t pay for it, you don’t think you have the right to complain. If a stranger gives you something for free, you probably won’t complain if there’s something wrong with it. If parents think public schools are free, many might think they have no right to complain. They may think that because the education is free, whatever their children learn is better than nothing. So they go AWOL. If those same parents pay school tuition for a private school with their hard-earned money, they complain loud and clear if the school doesn’t teach their children to read.

Another question is why public schools need all these parent-teacher conferences in the first place. Sure, parents getting involved in their kids’ education is a good thing, and can only help their children learn better. Home-schooling parents know this first hand. However, if you paid a tutor to teach your child to read, you expect him to know his job and earn his pay. If public schools were the education experts they claim to be, why do they need so much help from parents?

Children are learning machines. They love learning — that’s their nature. Learning is wired into their brains. You only have to watch children at play to confirm this truth. If children are passionate learners, why do public schools constantly need parents’ cooperation to push their kids to learn?

When children find something that interests them, no one has to push them to learn. In fact, kids constantly ask their parents hundreds of questions, and love when their mother or father teach them a new skill such as cooking or riding a bike. Millions of kids today are more computer literate than the average public-school teacher. I’ve seen articles about young children who were teaching their teachers how to use the computer. When most children learn a new skill they enjoy, they don’t need much parent involvement. Children often become so absorbed in their new toys or skills that they forget all about their parents, until mom calls them to dinner.

When children go to summer camp, they learn boating, archery, baseball, drawing, dancing, and camping skills. Do the camp counselors constantly call parents and ask for their help to get the kids to learn these skills? No. If anything, there is only one parent-visiting day the whole summer when kids show their parents all the exciting new things they’ve learned, without the parent’s involvement.

When self-motivated high-school graduates go to the college of their choice to study something they love, do college professors constantly whine that they need parent involvement? Do the professors tell parents to nag their children to study and do their homework? No. If anything, parents complain that their college kids don’t call them enough and only see them on holidays.

When children constantly need parental involvement to learn, something is terribly wrong.  As **John Holt, author of How Children Fail, points out, what is wrong is that public schools strangle children’s innate love of learning. In public school, passing the next test is the goal, not learning anything useful or interesting. Each child’s unique interests, strengths, and weaknesses are ignored for the sake of covering the material and making sure kids pass the standardized tests. Children must sit in a class full of maybe twenty-five other students for six to eight hours a day, and learn boring facts that don’t interest them, from often ill-trained or mediocre teachers. Is it any wonder that public schools can’t keep children interested, and cripple their natural passion to learn? That is why teachers and principals constantly complain that they need more parent cooperation and involvement. The schools wreck children’s love of learning, so they try to enlist parents to help undo the damage.

Low-income minority parents do not want to be AWOL. In fact, they fight for school choice because public schools hurt their children the most, and because they have the least options. George A. Clowes wrote recently in School Reform News, “African-Americans are no longer willing to accept that poverty and dysfunctional families are the reasons black children cannot learn. Black parents are demanding that their children be taught to read, write, compute, analyze, think.”

When the free market gives parents real school choice, these formerly AWOL parents become involved parents. Theodore J. Forstmann and his business partner John Walton are successful entrepreneurs with a passion for helping children get an education. They created a multimillion-dollar, private scholarship program called the Children’s Scholarship Fund. Forstmann and Walton pledged $100 million of their own money to fund 40,000 scholarships for  kids trapped in the worst public schools. With the help of other prominent business leaders and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, they raised another $70 million in matching funds. They made these scholarships open to low-income families across America.

The demand for these scholarships was explosive, especially from minority and low-income parents. These are the same parents that principals and teachers claim are AWOL from their kids’ education. Forstmann’s program received over 1,250,000 applications. In many areas, huge blocks of the eligible population applied: 26 percent in Chicago; 29 percent in New York, 33 percent in Washington, D.C., and 44 percent in Baltimore.

In his September, 1999 testimony before the U.S. House of Representative’s House Committee on the Budget, Forstmann pointed out that the incredible demand for his scholarships revealed a huge dissatisfaction with many of our public schools, and the need for alternatives.

In short, many parents go AWOL from public schools because they have little control over their kid’s education, the schools keep failing their children, and no matter how much they complain, nothing changes. When these same parents get school choice, all of a sudden they spend lots of time and energy on their children’s education.

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Tags: education, kids, parents