One lesson I learned in four years as a substitute teacher is that we cannot improve public education in America until we first improve the relationship between teachers and parents.
Doing that requires that the two parties do a better and more equitable job of sharing the credit when students succeed and the blame when they do not. For many parents, a bad student may be evidence of a bad teacher. For many teachers, a pupil who refuses to learn is a sure sign of an uninvolved parent.
Both camps are correct.
Too many parents are still missing in action in the education of their children. They might be willing to defend their children against authority, but not to discipline them in ways that would make the job of school authorities easier. Inclined to see education as the responsibility of teachers and teachers alone, they drop their kids off at the schoolhouse gate, drive off to work and then complain when the report card arrives in the mail.
Too many teachers are too quick to shrug off the poor performance of whole groups of students by pointing an accusatory finger at those students’ parents, culture or home environment. They hold on to faulty, racist and class-based assumptions about which kinds of students can learn and which cannot. They put those low expectations into practice by demanding less from some than they do from others, and when they get what they asked for, they heap more blame on forces that are beyond the classroom–and so, they say, beyond their control.
In an odd way, this trend of teachers shifting blame to parents and the home bolsters the argument for giving parents vouchers. After all, if parents are going to get the blame for the shortcomings of their children’s education, then why shouldn’t they have greater control?
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Those who run our schools are fond of saying that they want more parental involvement in their children’s education. What they mean by that is simply that they want parents to be engaged in the process of learning, to make sure their children do their homework, to be available for parent-teacher conferences and to provide at home the sort of hands-on discipline that teachers feel they cannot provide at school. While they’re at it, voting for measures to build new school buildings and supporting demands for teacher pay increases wouldn’t hurt either.
What they do not mean, however, is that parents should be so engaged as to be meddling with their concepts of educational priorities. While parents often see a classroom as a public building paid for by public dollars in which members of the public should always be welcomed, many teachers see their classrooms as their own private office space. They are as protective and territorial of this turf as many in the private sector are of their offices and cubicles.
But that mindset, while understandable, makes it more difficult to achieve any meaningful degree of education reform. The whole notion of schools asking for more parental involvement is a farce for Latino parents in cities such as Los Angeles or Phoenix, who hit administrative brick walls when trying to pull their kids out of bilingual education programs. It is a joke to the black parents in Cleveland and Milwaukee who met fierce resistance when they demanded vouchers to take their kids out of failing schools. And it doesn’t mean much more to affluent white parents who get only rolling eyes and smirks when they march down to the school to ask why their child did not make early admission to Princeton.
To many teachers, these are not involved parents. They’re meddlers, and teachers will not tolerate meddlers.
What the rest of us should have no tolerance for is the tendency of teachers and parents alike to view a bad report card as someone else’s responsibility. To cut the number of dropouts and raise test scores, we cannot just say that we support partnerships between teachers, parents and students. We have to mean it.
If we don’t, we will never give the young people who attend our schools the tools necessary to improve their lot in life and our society along the way. If that happens, the issue of fault is resolved. The blame is ours.
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Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a syndicated columnist based in Dallas. Address e-mail to [email protected].