I can answer that

Trying to catch up on old copies of Ed Week....and I find....

Good news!

Harvard Education School has partnered with Survey Monkey to create a PARENT SURVEY.

All about parent involvement in the schools!

Very exciting.

Reading right along .... I have a suggested revision for Item 10 under Parent Engagement:

I answered a couple of others as is...

AND SEE:
do not press send
Harvard, SurveyMonkey Offer Tool to Weigh Parent Engagement By Michele Molnar January 15, 2013

in the leafy suburbs

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I’d agreed to talk to the Rhodes community about “work-family balance.” ... What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion’s share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home.
Why Women Still Can't Have It All
by Anne-Marie SlaughterAtlantic Monthy | July-August 2012

Anne-Marie Slaughter is talking about a phenomenon I never see addressed in popular articles about "balancing work and family": the teen years are the hard ones. Or can be. When I was young the feminist model was: stay home for 3 or 4 months while you're nursing, then go back to work. The demanding years were assumed to be a child's pre-school years; once the child reached school age, you were 'done,' in a sense. It made sense to work outside the home at that point.

That always struck me as wrong, even before I had kids. My question was always: so when your child turns 13 and goes sprong, where are you? Not that all children go sprong at age 13. C. didn't, and thank God for that. Nevertheless, plenty of kids do go sprong, and if you have more than one child, that would seem to raise the odds of your someday being the parent of a teenage kid who has come unglued.

So I like the fact that this high profile woman has actually spoken, out loud, about what happens to a high profile career when a teenager is in distress.

That said, I was struck by the list of problems Ms. Slaughter's son is having:

• skipping homework
• disrupting classes
• failing math
• tuning out adults who try to reach him

With the possible exception of the fourth item, all of these issues are school problems, requiring school solutions.

You can see this easily if you imagine a 14-year old student who has no parents, or, alternatively, has parents who are dysfunctional. When that student skips homework, disrupts classes, fails math, and tunes out helpful adults, who deals with it?

The school. At least, it's the school that is going to have to deal with the problems if they're to be dealt with at all. There's no one else. And, over the past ten years, some schools have come to see things just this way.

But word hasn't reached the leafy suburbs (Slaughter teaches at Princeton and presumably sends her boys to Princeton public schools.) Nominally high-performing schools believe it is up to parents to solve school problems. More accurately, nominally high-performing schools believe students don't actually have school problems. Students have student problems, which stem from the student's upbringing and genes and have nothing to do with the school one way or another. ^*

The problem with this philosophy is that parents can't solve school problems from home, no matter how engaged and well educated and emotionally stable they are themselves. Most obviously, parents can't fix disruptive classroom behavior from home. And while in theory a parent can make sure homework gets done, in practice it's not easy and in some cases it's not possible. (I've seen the not possible scenario firsthand.) Typically, parents have no idea what the homework assignments are or when they're due (echalk notwithstanding), and a parent who has no expertise in a subject can't tell whether her child actually did his or her homework property, or just wrote something down on paper.

As to math, teaching math has got to be the school's job, period. It doesn't matter what emotional problems a student is having; the school has to teach math to struggling students, too.

Affluent schools won't be good schools until they ask themselves Richard DuFour's question: "What will we do when students aren't learning?"Ask, and answer.

the leafy suburbs: School Reform Moves to the Suburbs by Mike Petrilli

^* True of the bullying issue, too. Bullying is something kids do, and parents are responsible for kids, so parents need to stop their kids being bullies. Not sure what this means for parents of the child being bullied, of course. 

Help Desk question: Can parents affect a curriculum change at a school?

I'm looking for success stories of parents affecting the math program taught in an elementary school.
I'd like to provide some encouragement to a commenter on my blog, who asked:

How does one get their school district to consider changing over to Singapore Math?

Most of the schools I have worked with have had teacher-led math curriculum initiatives. Does anyone have examples of parent-initiated changes to share?

extreme parenting

The New York Times has a group of responses to Amy Chua's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior."

I thought two were interesting:

The Power of Conviction

Defining Success for Myself

Amazingly, no one has thought to ask Laurence Steinberg what he thinks. At this point, we have 50 years of research into what type of parenting produces great kids, but no one mentions it over at the Times.

multiple choice:

a) authoritarian
b) permissive
c) authoritative
d) disengaged

The answer is C.

let's not and say we did

In Michigan’s Wayne County, prosecutor Kym Worthy plans to meet this month with the Detroit City Council to discuss an ordinance she’s proposing to require parents to attend conferences. The most severe penalty would be three days in jail. It troubles her when she hears of Detroit schools that have 300 students, and just two parents will show up for conferences. A lack of parental involvement often leads to truancy, which leads to crime, says Ms. Worthy. She knows her proposal may be challenged by civil libertarians, “but at least we’ll get the conversation started.”

How Would You Grade Parent-Teacher Conferences
by Jeffrey Zaslow
Wall Street Journal
October 6, 2010, 9:40 AM ET

That's going to be one short conversation.

Number one: yes, indeed, civil libertarians are going to object. Strenuously.

Number two: do they teach logic in law school?

Number three: perhaps prosecutor Kym Worthy should ask teachers whether they want parents showing up for parent-teacher meetings on pain of arrest and incarceration.

And that pretty much covers it.

Next.

let's not and say we did
let's not and say we did, part 2
let's not and say we did, part 3

Teachers telling it like it is

. . . the UFT is an advocate for teachers . . . The UFT is not there to protect education or to insure excellence in the classroom.

The UFT . . . Their job is to protect us, not the students.

. . . when students start paying dues, that's when the union will start representing them.

These are lifted from teachers’ comments over at a NYC Educator post where they were lamenting what they considered to be a teacher-bashing New Yorker magazine essay about the infamous ”rubber room”. Most readers would probably agree that this piece was not kind in its treatment of NYC teachers.

Although I certainly don’t fault these teachers for their candor, it did surprise me a bit. I rarely see this type of honesty from educators, where they openly admit that the union’s goal is to protect the teachers, not the students. Interestingly, on their website the UFT claims it is “an advocate for public school students”. Now, some would argue that protected teachers = well-educated students, but I would disagree that it works out that way all the time or even most of the time.

On the other hand, there is no doubt in my mind that the overriding goal of parents is to protect their children. Parents want to insure excellence in the classroom for their children. Let’s be clear, although unions and parents are often supportive of each other, in many ways this is an adversarial model at work, with each side protecting its own interests. I would like this to be uppermost in the minds of all involved in education reform efforts, especially whenever the unions agree to participate with disingenuous claims that it’s all “for the children”.

As we at KTM have been saying for years, parents should not be shut out of the education debate. If teacher unions, politicians and education bureaucrats are the only ones allowed a place at the table, how likely is it that our children’s interests will be prioritized as they should be? Parents, specialists in the various disciplines and other interested parties should be included in order for there to be any chance for a fair and productive resolution of our nation’s education crisis.


http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2008/09/parents-need-union.html

One Step Ahead of the Train Wreck

Barry Garelick has a great new article in EducationNews.org!

helicopter parents of the world

I am behind.

I am horribly behind.

I am so behind that, for me, it isn't today, it's still yesterday, or possibly the day before.^*

......................

For the time being, here's something fun:

A 1983 study conducted by McClelland and Pilon backs up the link between achievement drive and performance. These researchers conducted achievement tests on thirty-one year old adults whose mothers had been extensively interviewed twenty-five years earlier by Sears, Maccoby and Lewin (1957) regarding their child rearing practices. This study reveals that the highest correlate to achievement drive is clearly the mother’s belief that it is very important for her child to perform well in school. This was true across all socio-economic strata, with the highest effect among the children of white collar workers.

How to Increase Your Child’s Verbal Intelligence by Carmen McGuinness & Geoffrey McGuinness, pp. 5-6

I'm going to have to finally get around to writing my Richard Elmore posts on the subject of wealthy suburban schools.


^* comma splice intentional

comments I have known and loved

Parents should have an outside assessment of their children. This should be voluntary for all parents to have their child independently tested. They would find out that the state assessments are often times flawed and their child is not proficient. This would help parents see the truth and in turn put pressure on the school to improve.

Anne Marie


I'm for national standards but only if they are standards based on Core Knowledge, Singapore Math and Direct Instruction. [ed.: hear! hear!]

Ari Haviv

We need national mathematics standards focused on CONTENT, not any specific program.

The abundance of mediocre programs, along with all of the time and money wasted on implementation, has crippled our elementary and middle school math instruction.

Investing more money on "professional development" will yield nothing. We must focus on the content first. It doesn't matter how wonderful the teaching methodology if content nonexistent.

Read the National Mathematics Panel Report.

First things first :D

concerned [ed.: I think I know this person!]

I noted that the representatives of neither candidate had anything to say about whether individual public schools should be autonomous. The empirical evidence clearly indicates that children acquire more academic skills and knowledge when such schools are self-directed.

Patrick Groff

Americans should be concerned that neither party has a serious policy with regard to education. When candidates discuss school reform, they forget about fiscal accountability. If the concern is with standards they won't respond to questions about curriculum.

Americans are sadly misinformed. The Singapore Ministry of Education developed standards and a created a curriculum that did what was promised. It was a curriculum written in English for children who's primary language was not English. Comparisons between Singapore and the US are striking. If the United States adopted Singapore standards there would be no need for standardized testing.

With a strong academic curriculum, more students would graduate from high school and be prepared for college and work. It costs Americans about $6 billion per year for every 10,000 high school dropouts. The past 10 years have been especially devastating for children as I've seen communities become increasingly resegregated. In this inflationary economy, our government is trading our children's futures by making school less efficient.

Nothing is lost by adopting the world’s best curriculum. Our great leaders should at least give communities a choice by putting Singapore on the state's list of adoptable curriculum. Eventually, the pain of not taking that risk will be greater than the reward for accepting it. We are running out of time.

Al Rode

The Singapore project is interesting and effective in a centrally-controlled educational system. The US is a long ways from agreeing that central control is a good idea. With others on this topic, I'd hope that Sens. McCain and Obama can come up with a serious solution for the conflict between federal and state/local governance of education that was started by Goals 2000 and really made worse by NCLB. [ed.: is this the case? What do people think? I haven't been able to form a solid opinion, although I tend to think this Commenter is right....] If educational content is truly a national issue, and if current NGO-type resources (like ASCD) are not up to the task of guaranteeing the content base for (e.g.) a high school diploma, then the whole US plan needs a shakeup and that will take leadership in the White House.

Terry

Parent Involvement

Parental involvement has real staying power as a catch phrase in education-speak. Possibly because it assumes that parents can always be counted on to take the blame (or blame each other) for most anything going wrong. But there are a few schools that take parent involvement seriously, and could possibly serve as role models. One of the local public schools in my town has taken a few simple steps to move past rhetoric; and I offer it as an example.

1) last May, a Parent's evening was held for parents of 6th graders. The principal, VPrinc, and Guidance Counselor answered questions and gave information. I found this typical and not terribly helpful -- a lot of general information on middle school organization, lockers, classes, blah blah blah. Nothing specific on curriculum, which is what I'd like to hear about.

2) a week before school starts -- a picnic on the lawn for families then about an hour for kids and families to wander the school, find the classrooms they'd be in, lockers, talk to administrators. The event ran past the scheduled end time, but no one was hurried to the door.

3) the second full day of classes -- parents are invited to come immediately after classes to meet teachers for an hour in the cafeteria (although it ran late, again, and nobody threw the parents out). Every teacher was there, all were willing to discuss curriculum and expectations

4) Two weeks into the year -- an open house is held in the evening. We got copies of our child's schedule and followed their day class to class for 2 hours. Every teacher was there, curriculum was discussed, some teachers had detailed syllabi available.

5) 3rd week of classes -- a morning parent open house is held -- from 7:30 to 9:30 parents are invited to attend classes with their child. Parents park all over the lawn. The Principal takes pictures -- the more parents the better. He's told us repeatedly at the first 4 events how he wants to blanket the front grass with parent cars. Yes it's disruptive, but he wants parents to see what their kids are actually doing in class.

The point of all of the events at various times of the day make it easier for parents to find at least one time when they can make it in to the school. The principal asks parents to come to school. He makes it easy to get them there by making the times flexible. No topic is off-limits.

Having sat through two classes with my daughter's teachers (with students present) has given me a far greater understanding of what is happening in my child's school day. I may not like everything going on there, but there is no doubt that transparency is more than empty talk. There are things I will continue to fight to change (still too much emphasis on the child taking responsibility for their own learning), but with transparency and an attitude of openness towards parents, I feel I am involved (for the first time ever in this school district) WITH and NOT AGAINST the school my child attends.