"And sometimes the parents don’t even know that the “choice” they are making is a bad one. When researchers from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington studied the school choice process in Hartford, they found that schools with the highest levels of parental satisfaction were often ones with the lowest levels of academic achievement. “You see this all over the country,” said Sarah Yatsko, a research analyst at the center.
Empowering parents may prove to be a crucial turning point in education reform in our generation. But if we are going to give parents broader decision-making power, they need to become more sophisticated about schooling.Professional educators are rather clueless.
We need to supply public-school parents with substantive training programs to help them figure out, for instance, what a good reading program looks like, what should be expected from a parent-teacher conference and how to ensure that elementary, middle and high school curriculums are preparing students for college.
At the very least, parents need unbiased, accessible information about what solid research tells us works best in schools — even if they don’t have a computer at home or if English isn’t their first language. Otherwise, the next big thing in education — parent power — is going to hurt our children, instead of helping them."
Parents have another assessment tactic they often use: the health and happiness of their child. It may not be an award-winning reading comprehension program but there it is. This is actually supremely important information. A happy child and the converse, an unhappy child, are qualitative data that is lost unless we have parents empowered and making choices.
The reverse of what the speaker says is true: parents can be a check on abstract educational schemes, endless testing and drills, career paths that are not a fit. Parental power isn't about training parents to be mini-educational curriculum monitors. It is about precisely the opposite: parents that are able to have real and substantial input into what makes sense for their child and their family.
Are poor kids failing our schools? — Joanne Jacobs:
"In fact, if I could fix either all of the parents (broadly defined, meaning ending childhood poverty, making sure every child had plenty of books and both parents in the home, etc.) or all of the schools in America, I’d choose the former in a heartbeat. But I’m not sure it’s possible to fix the parents — and I know it’s possible to fix the schools."
Oh, "fixing the parents" means ending poverty. The translation really helps ensure we understand that it isn't corporations like KIPP or the war industry that are hurting kids and families. It's basically .... parents, not corporations, banks, political parties or all the suits in Washington, that create poverty.
Good to know.
blaming families: juvenile justice edition
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