“Mother knows best” goes one saying, while “It takes a village to raise a child,” goes another. To which bit of wisdom should we adhere when considering the state and future of K-12 education? The family and the school have become increasingly distanced in areas where they should collaborate and overlap in sectors where they should be separate. In recent years, this divide has led some parents to attempt to reassert dominance over their child’s education, criticizing curricula, opting out of certain lessons, or even pulling their children out of public schools entirely. On the other hand, some parents, unaware of what their children are doing and relying on schools to provide the majority of resources for their children, stand on the sidelines. How did we get to this point? How can we heal the hurt between both of these essential parts of our country’s educational infrastructure?
Cracks in the Foundation
If we are to authentically bridge this canyon, we must understand its root causes — the cracks in our educational foundation. Frederick M. Hess, an education policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Great School Rethink,” points back at No Child Left Behind as one of the unexpected culprits. No Child Left Behind, a federal regulation over U.S. education, passed in 2002 under President Bush. Its main innovation was the introduction of routine standardized tests used to measure student success under the expectation that schools would ensure all students were meeting these standards.
It was good to assert that every student could and would learn inside the classroom, but this shift, which did not work to address the underlying familial and societal causes for differences in student performance, meant the burden to ensure those results fell entirely on teachers. “We essentially said it’s all on the school,” Hess explained in an interview with the HPR.
“Sometimes that partnership you have with families doesn’t feel like an equal partnership,” said Ivelisse Ramos Brannon during a teacher panel for the Harvard course “What Education Should Be.” As a teacher and PhD student at the Harvard School of Education, she attempted to offer a more empathetic approach: “Why isn’t there anybody from this child’s family at parent-teacher conferences? Maybe mom is working or dad is working or grandma is working 10 hours a day or working two jobs. Or perhaps there’s a language issue. Perhaps the family doesn’t feel welcome in school.”
Her comments illustrate the post-No Child Left Behind culture that Hess is referring to. Expectations that parents will contribute to their child’s education have dwindled significantly. Originally an exception made for parents who faced socio-economic challenges, this divide between the family and the school had been replicated at nearly every school across the nation.
Today, this divide is no longer passively accepted. Across the country, parents are flocking to school board meetings and protesting curriculum choices. In Maine, one father spoke out against “Gender Queer,” a book that reportedly “depicts “sexually explicit depictions of two minors” and has a content advisory recommending the book for those over the age of 18 — yet stood on the shelf of his son’s middle school. In California, at least three protesters were arrested outside a school board meeting that was scheduled to discuss the designation of June as Pride Month.
Why this increase in engagement? According to Michael Hansen, an education policy expert at Brookings Institute, it’s not because of the subject matter: “As long as public schools have been around, there has been some controversy around what is being taught,” he said in an interview with the HPR. “Sometimes those controversies seem relatively tame, and sometimes they spill out into full, open view, and everybody’s engaging in them. I feel like right now we are in a time where it feels like many of these controversies are spilling into public view.”
So if not for the subject matter, there must be something else driving this particularly public response; it is likely the recent COVID-19 pandemic. School closures and online classes meant that parents experienced a new window into the education of their children, both the good and the bad. According to a survey done by Rutgers, “two-thirds [of parents] reported that they have a stronger sense of what their child is learning in school” after the pandemic’s learning changes. For those that were not pleased by what they found, they were even more distressed by their incapacity to do anything about it. Ultimately, most conflict between school boards and concerned parents comes down to parents’ rights over their children’s education.
Controversial Content
Beyond value-based arguments about what students should be learning in schools, tension between schools and parents over controversial content is impacting student performance. Test scores across the U.S. have been dropping for some time, and concerns about student performance often emerge in content-centered debates. While current evidence on the extent of this impact is limited, Hansen explained that there is “some empirical evidence to support that, as things become controversial, student performance declines a little bit.” According to Hansen, this negative impact could have several mechanisms — almost all of them focused on the teacher rather than the student experience.
The first is the stress put on the teacher due to the increased risk of scrutiny. The rise of cell phone usage, he said, means that any moment could be captured and used to criticize the teacher, which leads to more anxiety. An article on WeAreTeachers.com, a community of over 3 million educators, advises teachers on how to respond if a student records them without permission, warning about “teacher baiting” and advising teachers to be “ready if it ever happens in your classroom.”
On top of that, there is the question of whether or not the district or school leadership will support a teacher. “The ideal situation is that the leadership supports the teacher,” Hansen asserted. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, however, conservative parents have begun taking to school boards, striving to prevent schools from becoming institutions entirely rid of their values. As the leadership of these schools tries to navigate their relationships with school boards, teachers who may desire to offer their students instruction in areas impacted by these issues tend to feel unsupported.
Finally, Hansen describes “a chilling effect” on the actual curriculum. “If the controversial topics are things that directly impact what’s being discussed in the classroom, the teacher is less likely to engage in those areas,” impacting what students learn and “what they take away from those conversations.”
Disputed Territory
While some parents who abhor pro-LGBTQ+ and Critical Race Theory curricula may be afraid that teachers with an activist agenda are undermining their authority, realistically, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, it ultimately comes down to the question of where the parent’s role ends and the role of the teacher begins.
“I chiefly see my relationship with parents as a collaboration. We are working together,” Ivelisse offered, but acknowledged that this partnership often extended in a one-way fashion beyond the confines of the school day. “[Students] have emailed me at various times of the evening or the night or the early morning, and I often felt a responsibility to respond to them and to attend to their needs in those moments.”
Melina Melgoza, another teacher and second-year PhD student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education agreed with this sentiment during the teacher panel: “Teaching is one of those jobs that you think about at night and every single day. You take your children’s stories with you home and you think about what’s the best way to meet their needs, sometimes beyond what the professional expectation is.”
She went on to describe the difficulties that come from the no-expectations framework we have been working under for so long. “You do work in collaboration with parents, but you do spend a lot of time with folks’ children — more than they do with their own caretakers. And so you can take on those responsibilities like having food in class to make sure that students are fed, ensuring that young women have access to feminine hygiene products, and so forth. It goes beyond six hours a day.”
But even though most teachers desire to collaborate with parents, they also want to maintain distinct spheres of influence. “I don’t get to have a say in bedtime for students or maybe they shouldn’t be playing Xbox this weekend until they finish this assignment. I can make suggestions, but that is not my role,” said Justin Hauver, a teacher from California and second-year PhD student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, during the class panel. “I think the opposite is true as well. There is this kind of ‘home domain’ that I can collaborate with, but ultimately it’s not my domain, and then there’s a ‘school domain’ that ultimately is for me to decide what I think is best for everyone in my classroom community.”
Hansen, also a parent of school-age children himself, agrees with Hauver, asserting that there is an available balance between trusting the experts and respecting the needs of the family. “On one hand, the experts have developed expertise in the topic areas that they’re studying,” he said. “But parents should also be able to have an opinion about what students are learning and how they’re being taught this especially on topics that feel controversial.”
Hess further refines this argument, suggesting that there should not be a rejection of expertise as a whole, but instead that it should be utilized in its proper context: helping schools function effectively and educating parents in the ways they can improve their own practices. Gender ideology, postmodernist approaches to studying race, and the full impact of sexually explicit literature on young children are areas in which the average teacher has not received extensive training. “These are areas where instead of being humble and recognizing the parents in the community have strong, defensible value-based views, we’ve seen a lot of schools under the guise of self-proclaimed experts, leaning very heavily into valuated debates, which strikes me as utterly backwards,” Hess said. “This is where they ought to be most respectful of parents.”
Building Stronger Bridges
It is imperative, for the sake of parents, teachers, and especially students, that we are able to better distinguish between the role of the school and the role of the parent in educating children and, in the process of doing so, find more modes of collaboration between these two spheres. This requires frank communication, both as to what the teacher’s intentions are with controversial lessons and to aid the parents as they oversee education within the home domain.
Hansen explained that teachers or school leadership should be more open with parents. “If the teacher knows that we’re going to be discussing some controversial topics in the classroom then they should be sort of planning in advance what that looks like … maybe from the beginning of the school year,” he said. “That way parents can know what the teachers are talking about too. And I think if parents are aware that this is happening and they are given an opportunity to express their views at home, I think that also helps to diffuse those kinds of tensions.”
In “The Great School Rethink,” Hess writes that “about half of teachers report they devote less than an hour a week to communicating with parents, guardians, and the community. Just 13% of teachers spend more than three hours a week doing so.” For Hansen, this lack of transparency is the ultimate source of these school-parent conflicts.
“I think a lot of the tensions and the sort of the demand for an opt-out often is because parents feel like they don’t have control. By providing that information, and they see where it’s coming from, there is a little bit of a greater sense of control over the situation. So even though they don’t control what’s being taught in the classroom. At least they can control some of the messaging afterwards and check in with their kids and make sure they’re understanding and get some of the parents’ perspectives on what’s happening.”
We must also change the parent-free vision of education that No Child Left Behind policies fostered. Schools should purposefully seek to strengthen the collaboration between parents and teachers by providing parents with education in their areas of proven expertise. “When it comes to making sure the kids are not chronically absent, when it comes to ensuring school discipline, when it comes to making sure kids are not on digital devices, and when it comes to ensuring that kids are mastering academics — these are places where educational expertise and expertise in adolescent and preadolescent behavior seem highly relevant,” Hess explained.
Technology use especially is an area in which Hess thinks “schools and parents can work together really effectively.” Hess believes that “too many parents buy smartphones for young children because it’s what everybody’s got, and they don’t want to be left out of the text chain.” He envisions this as one area where schools can offer wisdom to parents. “For a parent, your kid is 16 only once. A high school has hundreds of 16-year-olds every single day. So, if you think about the opportunities there for schools to support parents, educate kids, provide parents with practical support and advice. They’re enormous.”
While I acknowledge that it takes a village to raise — and educate — a child, the village that attempts such a feat cannot do so without acknowledging the places where parents know best and establishing a clear place for the family within education. When both the school and the family have clear roles, expectations, and respect for the legitimate contributions the other can provide, they are able to support one another most effectively. This renewed collaboration, with schools providing resources for parents and parents being allowed charge of the moral content their children learn, is the way forward for education within the United States. I look forward to innovations that continue fostering this relationship, healing the years of division, and improving outcomes for every child.
