Peg Tyre is the author of “The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve.”
THE school year is in full swing and, if you are the parent of a school-age child, you’ve probably figured out how to get your children up each weekday morning, dressed and out the door — toast in hand — in order to catch the school bus. Good for you.
If you’ve met and exchanged contact information with your child’s homeroom teacher or gone the extra step and volunteered to become the class parent, give yourself a pat on the back. You’re on your way to becoming an engaged parent — the kind of adult, education researchers say, who helps children to be the best they can be in school.
Now, steady yourself. New legislation, called the parent trigger, which is being proposed in more than 20 states, including New York, is about to make your role as an engaged parent a lot more complicated.
What is the parent trigger? California was the first to adopt it. There, it works like this: parents whose children attend a failing school can band together. If 51 percent of them sign a petition, they can demand, and the district must provide, a new set of administrators to run the school. Alternately, the disgruntled parents can ask that a charter school operator be brought in to take over.
In Texas, parents can pull the trigger after two or more years of an “unacceptable” performance rating.
In Connecticut, a slightly different iteration of the parent trigger recently became law — this one calls for powerful parent councils to help run the school.
Suddenly parents, a huge and untapped force for improving our schools, have become the hottest players in education reform.
On a policy level, it’s an encouraging development. For years, well-heeled reformers, well-meaning politicians and education bureaucrats have imposed an agenda on public school children with almost no regard for the families of the children they claim to be serving. The trigger creates an opportunity for parents to be heard. But around the dining room table, parents of school-age children could be forgiven for greeting the proposed legislation with weary disbelief.
Parents at schools that “pull the trigger” will be deciding among school operators. Some will offer bilingual education, others will offer inclusion classes, an international baccalaureate program, Advanced Placement courses or vocational training. Which is best? How do we decide? It’s hard not to pine, at least for a few minutes, for the good old days. Thirty years ago, “parental engagement” meant signing a report card once a quarter, attending the yearly parent-teacher conference and making a batch of brownies for a bake sale.
It turned out, though, that the good old days weren’t so good for low-income students. So over the last 15 years, parents were first invited — and now, in many places, are required — to participate in choosing what school their children will attend. It’s a great idea, but on the ground, it’s messy, frustrating, imperfect and staggeringly time-consuming. Public-school parents must attend chaotic school fairs and crowded open houses, navigate confusing guides and rules about choosing schools.
Some wealthy parents, even those who favor public education for their children, opt out and enroll their children in private and parochial schools, where the admission process is often much easier. Savvy middle-class parents (especially ones with lots of free time, who speak English and have college educations) come up with a credible short list of schools they like, but in the end, their children may not be allowed to attend, because of space.
Many low-income parents are finding better options for their children. But many are not. For parents who are less adept at working the system, school choice is far from a perfect solution.
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. 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.
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