Camden’s Blog

As a parent, I was aware of the studies that showed a correlation to student achievement and parent involvement.  As a teacher, I now know that my students confidence soars when their parents are involvement and visible at school.  I often attribute our class success to parent involvement in my reflections at the end of the year on my goals.  This is the first year that I have had little parent involvement in my class and at first, I found myself “blaming” parents for this until I dug in and got to know my parents and developed a relationship with them.  With some, I have had to settle for a voice on the phone but never-the-less I believe most of my parents trust me as I trust them to do what we can to help their child succeed.  Going more broadly in my school, parent involvement is sadly dwindling and I see the complaints of “too little” coming from both teachers and administrators.  We have a lot of marginally and not so marginally poor families and the accusations come flying out in all direction over parents who don’t care and the more socially acceptable ones of can’t care or don’t know how to care, spurred by deficit thinkers. What is new in the past few years is that administration has also began to say these things.  I believe the cause for this is two fold.  One, our administration does not want to share decision-making power with parents and should be no surprise because they do not want to share it with teachers.  Second, they are often in a position where they feel they must, as Lipton and Oakes put it, acquiesce to parents’ demands, even if it means giving special privileges or reining in a reform.  This pressure usually comes from the county main office in response to a complaint.  It is a reactive action rather than a proactive action brought about by collaboration with parents.  Another aspect of this is being federally mandated to do so through NCLB and Title 1.  Once parent involvement becomes something outsiders tell you to do, authenticity goes out the door. And despite the mandates, few schools “allow parents a deep influence over the core practices or resources of the school” according to Lipton and Oakes.   I noted Lipton and Oakes’ comments on traditional parent involvement.  That which includes enlisting parent support or services for the school and providing support for families and is controlled by the schools.  This is the type of parent involvement that our school really seeks and the problem lies with being unable to see a way to constructively engage parents to participate.  As Lipton and Oakes argue, we have to rethink the roles of parents in our school and issue genuine invitations to take part in the process.   I was particularly interested in the section on schools meeting families’ needs.  At my school, I believe we have had difficulty in this area for two reasons.  One, we approach it with deficit thinking.  Two, we as teachers are either unwilling or unable to provide the extra effort it would take to provide some of these services.  I am though, very encouraged by an effort by one of our AP’s this year to provide after school clubs.  Teachers have had to volunteer their time but she has been successful in getting parents to do this.  But this does not reach out to parents, parents have to get their children to or from the school and that has limited participation.  Home visits are pretty much forbidden by our administration but this is the one thing that I am committed to trying next year.  Wish me luck!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS