Roll Call: Get Involved in Your Child's School

By Wallace K. Pond
Issue 104, January-February 2001

When I was teaching in the K-12 schools, I was fascinated by the dynamic surrounding parent "involvement." It seemed that most educators truly believed that most parents didn't care much about their education. Even though I was not a parent myself when I began my career in education, that notion just didn't seem logical. Now that I am a parent of three children, I know that such an idea is preposterous. Why, then, do many educators really believe that parents don't care? And why is parent involvement, in fact, lacking in many schools?

The short answer to these questions is simply that schools have traditionally defined what parent involvement is and how and when it takes place. Just a few generations ago most families could successfully engage the schools on the schools' terms. Today's families, in contrast, often cannot involve themselves in such narrow terms. As a result, "traditional" participation by parents is down, and educators tend to correlate this decreased involvement with a lack of caring.

To find out how we arrived at the current state of affairs, a couple of years ago I set out to answer these and other mysteries in education. The end result of my quest was a book, The Lights Are On, Is Anybody Home? Education in America. What I discovered is that much of what goes on in America's schools is simply not rational. We have devised a system based on tradition and convenience that has little to do with what we know about how children think, learn, and behave or about what kids need. In essence, the American education system was, and still is, designed by adults for adults.

Why is parent involvement often so difficult? To begin with, because so many educators work so hard in a system that, at its core, is not rational, they often feel that involving anyone on the "outside" will just make their jobs harder. And in most cases, parents are on the outside. Moreover, a lot of teachers truly fear having parents in the classroom. This fear comes from a couple of different places. First, having been a classroom teacher myself for seven years, I can attest to the fact that teachers occasionally must deal with a "parent from hell"--a parent who really wants to kick someone's backside rather than resolve a problem. I have seen parents scream at, threaten, and generally make life miserable for teachers. Fortunately, this is a very rare occurrence, but it only takes one to jade a young teacher's feelings about parent involvement. Second, a teacher's work is often extremely challenging. A teacher must make decisions on the fly based upon the needs of 20 or 30 children; their choices don't necessarily make sense when taken out of the context of an entire school day. Some teachers are afraid that parents, who usually see only a "snapshot" of the classroom, will misinterpret or simply not understand what is going on.

Additionally, schools today typically aren't structured for meaningful parent involvement--they have been designed to function independently of parent and community participation, and their hierarchical structure gets in the way of open access. Administrators, particularly in public schools, are trained to "circle the wagons" when anything in the system is being questioned. The cultures existing within most schools are not conducive to parent participation either, at least not outside the narrow definition schools ascribe to it. Most educators, particularly teachers, gauge parent involvement in only a couple of ways: whether or not you show up for scheduled events such as back-to-school night and parent-teacher conferences, and whether or not you respond "satisfactorily" to their overtures regarding problems with your kids. Many parents do not, in fact, attend these scheduled events, and do not or cannot respond to problems the way the teachers want them to. This is why many teachers are convinced parents don't care.

It is, of course, absurd to suggest that any parent does not care about his or her child in general or the child's education in particular. Most parents care more about their kids than about anything else, but because of a multitude of factors ranging from economic stress to overwhelming schedules, parents often don't manifest care in the ways that educators expect them to. Single parents, parents working multiple jobs, parents without transportation, or those who are simply exhausted by the demands of life often can't make it to school events or can't make it at certain times.

One might argue that not finding the energy to support one's children in school is simply a failure to effectively prioritize one's life. This criticism fails to acknowledge a critical factor that some of us who have tried to be involved have discovered: In many cases, schools are so uninviting and inconvenient to us as parents that committing to school events not only requires scarce time and energy but participation in activities that are not rewarding nor easy to do. The average parent works all day, then comes home to prepare dinner for children, houseclean, pay the bills, etc. Then these exhausted parents must drag themselves to some event designed and controlled by school officials for school officials who have no relationship with, or understanding of, the parent, in a generally unfriendly and unstimulating environment. It's no wonder many of us choose instead to veg out in front of the TV.