The Parent-Teacher Partnership

While teachers’ first responsibility is to their students, we spend a significant amount of time working with parents. Students are best served when their parents and teachers are partners working for the same goals. However, sometimes finding common goals can be challenging.

Recently, lauded teacher Ron Clark wrote a strongly worded column on CNN.com asking parents to work with, rather than against, teachers, administrators, and the educational system. He laments parents who make excuses for their children, treat teachers poorly, or refuse to hear anything but positive things about their children. He states that, “Today, new teachers remain in our profession an average of just 4.5 years, and many of them list ‘issues with parents’ as one of their reasons for throwing in the towel.”

My experience as a parent and a teacher supports Mr. Clark’s contentions. However, there is a surprising flipside: many parents are afraid of contacting teachers! As a parent, I have been shocked at some of the things that have happened in my children’s classrooms and stunned that no one has said a word! Likewise, I fully understand why some teachers would prefer to send an email or do nothing at all rather than directly speak to parents.

Once we have had a negative experience with a parent or teacher, we are less likely to reach out again. Once that teacher (or coach) has said to our child, “We don’t want your parents making a fuss again, so could you please tell them what we did today?” The parent is less likely to call any other school staff member. If a parent overlooks all the time, effort, patience, and care a teacher has given and refuses to acknowledge what that teacher sees in class, that teacher is less likely to pick up the phone and call any parent or guardian.

And the experience need not be first hand. Parent or teacher experiences spreads through the school and community. Teachers find out which families are difficult and parents know which teachers will take it out on the kids. The walls go up around these people and no one wants to deal with them.

Then there is the fatalistic factor. How many calls to the teacher or parent will it take to effect change? If calling the teacher or principal isn’t going to change anything, why bother? If calling the parent is only going to get you beat up, what’s the point? Parents and teachers can easily rationalize themselves out of talking to each other.

Increasingly, parents and school personnel have more communication vehicles. We have email and online grade books, websites and blogs, newsletters and social networks – and we still have difficulty talking to each other.

I have excellent conversations with the vast majority of parents. Most of the time, when I have contacted teachers, the response has been professional and appropriate. We are really talking about that not-so-apocryphal twenty percent.

Do teachers need additional training in communicating with students’ homes? Do parents need help learning how to partner with schools? Could we do this together? Almost every school has an organization that is called, in some form or fashion, a Parent-Teacher organization. But they aren’t. My experience has been the PTO is a mostly moms club.

It is time to leap over the walls between school and home. It is time to create ways to bring parents, students, and educators together for more than a crisis phone call or intervention meeting.

Mr. Clark’s column is asking for parent cooperation. I am asking for collaboration. It is not enough to be nice. It is not enough to be professional. We need to be innovative, inclusive, and indefatigable! It is in our children’s best interest!