Parents’ rights,yes. But parent responsibilities,too

A healthy development

While there are plenty who decry the parents’ right push, viewing it as manufactured and mean-spirited, we think it’s been a healthy, overdue development. Too many parents have felt dismissed and tuned-out, and it came to a head when schools were shuttered. As Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises (2020) observed during the pandemic, “No longer can we dust off the welcome mats for back-to-school nights and parent-teacher conferences and then swiftly roll them back up, shooing parents away and telling them, ‘Trust us.’ We are now guests in their homes.”

That a superintendent would feel moved to say such a thing was telling. It shouldn’t need to be said, but parents should never be regarded as adversaries by their children’s public schools. Yet plenty of parents, in focus groups and surveys, have said that’s exactly how they’ve felt. During the pandemic, for instance, parents in learning pods reported that resistance from school systems made it hard to tap crucial supports. Researchers found that learning pod families encountered “aggressive emails” and “vengeful” responses (Jochim & Poon, 2022).

Last fall, in this magazine, Anna King (2023), former president of the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA), observed that, when surveyed in 2022, “only 9% [of parents] understood the problem of pandemic learning loss and were concerned their children wouldn’t catch up.” Nine in 10 parents “believed there was no learning loss or were confident their children would catch up.” Given the devastating evidence of learning loss (Barnum, 2023), what gives? Well, King noted, less than half of parents said they’d worked with their child’s teacher “to develop a plan for how their child would make up for lost learning.” And we venture to guess that much of the planning that did get done was formulaic or sporadic. That’s not what an active partnership looks like.

As we argue in our new book, Getting Education Right, there’s an unhealthy disconnect here. The push for parents’ rights is a necessary corrective. But, as supportive as we are of efforts to expand parental choice, mandate heightened curricular transparency, and mobilize parents in school board elections, we also believe that championing parents’ rights is, at best, a partial solution.

The obligation of parents

After all, educators have their own legitimate grievances about the relationship with parents. Educators can reach out to parents, only to find their efforts dismissed. Parent-teacher conferences can be sparsely attended. Calls home can go unanswered. Emails home about absent students can be ignored. And, yes, some parents’ rights advocates have expressed their frustration in inappropriate, unnecessarily combative ways.

We believe that a focus on parents’ rights that doesn’t address parental responsibility is unlikely to end well. Now, responsibility is a tricky thing. While rights are easily codified in law by statute and adjudicated by courts, responsibilities are a more social, less easily defined construct. Laws can set boundaries but, by and large, our responsibilities are governed by the norms and expectations we set.

Let’s keep this simple: Those (like us) who are inclined to advocate for parents’ rights have a reciprocal obligation to be equally vociferous about the corresponding responsibilities. Why? Because family is society’s foundational building block. In his 1953 classic The Quest for Community, sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote:

The major moral and psychological influences on the individual’s life have emanated from the family and local community and the church. Within such groups have been engendered the primary types of identification: affection, friendship, prestige, recognition. And within them also have been engendered or intensified the principal incentives of work, love, prayer, and devotion to freedom and order.

Nisbet understood that young people learn their first and most important lessons about how to think and behave in the home. Schools are ultimately reliant on parents being active partners in preparing their children to be responsible students and citizens.

The handshake

The bottom line is that education is a partnership — between school and family, between teacher and student. Compulsory attendance laws can make children show up, but it’s hard to teach a student who is dead set against learning. Now, part of a teacher’s job is finding the way to open a student’s heart and mind. By the same token, though, the job of parents and guardians is to raise children who are responsible, respectful, and ready to learn — and the job of students, especially by the time they’re in high school, is to assume responsibility for their learning.

It can be useful to think about this in terms of healthcare. When we say someone is a good doctor, we don’t presume that they’re a martyr or a miracle worker. Rather, we mean that they’re competent and responsible. They diagnose conditions correctly and suggest the right treatment. If a doctor says that a kid needs to eat less sugar and the kid keeps wolfing down chocolate, we don’t typically blame the physician or label them a “bad doctor.” We understand that patients (and their families) must do their part, too. This is the implicit handshake between doctor and patient.

We can think of education in the same terms. Teachers must be professionally capable and committed to educating every child. They should follow the best practices recognized by their field. By the same token, though, we should ask parents and guardians to send children who are responsible, respectful, and ready to learn to school. This means getting their kid to school on time, reading to them, making sure they do their homework, modeling personal responsibility and discipline, and more. If parents don’t know how to do these things, they need mentoring. And if they’re unable to do them, they need support. But if they’re unwilling to do them, they need to be challenged.

Now, we fear that some education administrators and advocates have been loath to talk of personal responsibility, out of fear of sounding judgmental or insensitive. Our fellow conservatives have grown equally reticent because they don’t want to offend parent activists or give succor to teacher unions.

There’s some historical context here, which we think it’s vital to appreciate. Thirty years ago, it was easy to find educators who would say, “I can’t teach that kid,” or perhaps more troublingly, “I can’t teach those kids.” Policy makers would just shrug in response. Complaints that parents weren’t doing their part loomed as an all-purpose excuse, and some high-profile figures seemed more intent on excoriating parents than on making the case that schools needed to do better.

Today, the world looks very different. It’s become an accepted professional norm that educators should expect every child to learn. This signal triumph of 21st-century schooling has, however, left many of us disinclined to say anything that might seem to excuse educators or blame families.

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To tell the truth, this dynamic has hobbled a variety of school improvement efforts in recent decades. Testing, school accountability, and teacher evaluation have all focused intently on what educators need to do. While we heartily agree that teachers and administrators have an obligation to be responsible, competent professionals, they, in turn, have a right to expect support and cooperation from parents and communities. In our zeal to mandate changes in education policy and practice, we fear we’ve omitted the second half of this dynamic.

The odd thing in all of this is that American culture is highly receptive to notions of mutual responsibility. Close to 90% of adults say responsibility for one’s actions is a key component of what it means to be a “real American” (Grinnell College National Poll, 2018). This is not a hard sell.

Helping parents help

So what does it look like to start doing better? Last fall, former PTA President King offered some useful thoughts on how parents can lead by example. At a time when National Assessment of Educational Progress data show that adolescents spend far less time reading than they did in the past, she noted that parents can “be role models by reading in front of their kids and talking to their kids about what they’re reading.” That kind of mindset is a terrific place to start. Rather than hectoring parents or playing blame games, what’s needed are strategies that extend parents a welcoming hand, provide them with support and tools, and help them show their kids what it takes to succeed in school. Here’s what we’d recommend:

Schools are ultimately reliant on parents being active partners in preparing their children to be responsible students and citizens.

Driver’s ed for the 21st century

It isn’t just in the classroom where parents and teachers need to work together. They also sorely need each other in the evolving world of social media. Today’s tweens and teens spend a staggering amount of time online, which creates the need for new kinds of collaboration between parents and schools. When a student is cyberbullied by a classmate or engages in alarming online behavior, it’s essential that families and teachers work together to respond. Today, too often, that’s not how it works. Online arguments spill over into the classroom, catching teachers off guard.

Every technology brings both good and bad. That was the rationale for introducing driver’s ed in the last century, when cars were the most powerful technology a student would encounter. Schools tapped their institutional muscle and instructional acumen to support parents who lacked the time, know-how, or temperament to teach students how to harness this dangerous tool. Much like a car, a tween’s phone is a powerful piece of equipment that should be handled responsibly. Unfortunately, in many schools and homes today, the approach is similar to tossing a 12-year-old the keys to a Harley and saying, “Be careful.”

That’s not good enough. Many of the places kids wind up visiting online are dubious, at best. As Yuval Levin (2022), author of A Time to Build, has observed, “If Instagram and TikTok were brick-and-mortar spaces in your neighborhood, you probably would never let even your teenager go to them alone.”

But even the most tuned-in parents can struggle with enforcing cellphone rules. It’s tough to be the one family that refuses to allow smartphones. For safety, after-school pickup, and planning purposes, phones have come to feel like a necessity. After all, it’s not like there are pay phones on every corner. Meanwhile, connectivity and constant communication means schedules are more likely to shift in real time than was true before text messages, email, and pocket phones. Kids can easily feel left out and isolated if all their friends are sharing photos, planning a get-together, or communicating via direct messages.

If we want to improve this state of affairs, parents and educators will have to work together. School leaders can establish norms around when, where, and how students can access their devices, and processes for intervening when a student is being bullied or harassed online. But these will only work if parents support them. If a phone is confiscated for breaking the rules, for example, a parent shouldn’t be able to simply drive up to school, retrieve it, and give it right back to the offending student. If they want schools to hold the line, they must as well.

Helping students learn to navigate a digital world responsibly can’t be the sole province of either parents or educators. Parents need to set boundaries and model responsible behavior. Schools can complement and inform those efforts by coaching parents who want help, sharing healthy practices, and teaching students to navigate the perils of life online. It has to be a partnership.

Embrace healthy disagreement

Americans disagree with one another about all manner of important topics when it comes to schools and schooling. That’s inevitable in a nation of more than 300 million people. And even good-faith disagreements will inevitably lead to a certain degree of conflict and strife. That’s part of what it means to live in a free society. But respect for parents’ rights and a complementary commitment to parental responsibility can make these fights more civil, more manageable, and even educational.

Rather than creating a social media firestorm when troubled by a classroom assignment, a parent should say, “I’m going to talk to the teacher, express my concerns, and see if we can figure out a workable arrangement or alternative.” This kind of back-and-forth can be productive, even illuminating. After all, there are parents and teachers, on the right and on the left, who have objections to their children reading To Kill a Mockingbird or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Bluest Eye — even before we get to the more sexually frank volumes that have sparked so much recent controversy. Navigating disagreements with grace, mutual respect, and forbearance is a crucial skill in democratic life, and one that we could use a bit more of right now.

It is also a two-way street. Parents should expect teachers and administrators to listen to, and take seriously, their concerns. But teachers should not be subjected to harassment, spoken to disrespectfully, demeaned, degraded, or insulted. Schools should set expectations for how parents will interact with their staff, just like how they have expectations for how their staff will interact with parents.

As students struggle with learning loss, emotional trauma, and social isolation, and as schools seek to find their bearings amid heated cultural debates, parents and educators could both use some help. That makes this a propitious time to rethink the parent-school relationship. Educators should be expected to treat parents as equal partners: keeping parents apprised of what’s happening in school, making it easy for parents to see what’s being taught, and valuing parental concerns. And we should expect parents to do their part, as well. We think former PTA President King put it well: “By linking arms in this way, we can build a better future for our kids, our communities, and our country.”

That all seems both desirable and eminently doable.