Families are more anxious than ever to find out what happens in school. But there may be value in a measure of not-knowing and not-telling.
, conducted in August, thirty-five per cent of K-12 parents said that they were “completely satisfied” with the quality of their oldest child’s education, while forty-one per cent were “somewhat satisfied.
”panic room, tensions continue to vibrate in subtler ways. Michael Thompson is a child psychologist, a school consultant, and the author of several best-selling parenting books; he began his career in education fifty-three years ago, as a middle-school teacher. “Over the last twenty years, parents have become much more anxious in their parenting,” he told me. “Parents are more. This is the most devoted, most conscientious, most aware parent cohort ever—but they’re also wildly anxious.” For these parents, the pandemic was an anxiety factory. Then school went back to being a place where they couldn’t be. “They think that the more information they have, the better their child’s school journey is going to be,” Thompson said. “That hunger for information becomes, at times, rapacious. Teachers know that. They’re giving them information to feed the beast.” If some parents feel as though they’re getting too much information, it may be because teachers are responding to these broader shifts. Thompson is an easy laugh, bearded and merry—an effortlessly comfortable presence, as if a fisherman’s sweater had a doctorate in education. By the time our interview wrapped, I sensed, as I did with Faber and King, that he knew more about my son—or, rather, knew more of my experiences as my son’s mother—than my son’s teachers did. But I also sensed that this shouldn’t bother me: the well-meaning parent may feel that she is advocating for her child when she keeps close contact with a teacher, Thompson said, but, too often, “the more you call, the less the teacher feels trusted, and the more it corrodes a relationship.” Meanwhile, kids themselves, once they get home from school, tend to shy away from feeding the beast. Most parents know the script:“Nothing.” School is Fight Club; school is Las Vegas. “Children need to have a space that is their own,” Thompson said. Overinvolved parents “may think they’re always adding value, but often they’re undermining their child’s psychological ownership of the moment. The child is having the experience, but he also must be thinking about how Mom or Dad is experiencing it.” The parent’s dilemma fits readily into a Winnicottian framework: the child losing control over his mother begins to steal, and the parents losing control over their child begin to hover and meddle. If we wish to add a bit of Winnicott’s flair for drama, we could also say that the child, lacking full possession of his school world, “will become split in his person; split into two parts.” By asking my son about his imaginary brother, I had caused him shame. I had intruded on a space that was private to him—or, more precisely, private from me. Perhaps his teacher, by making the disclosure, had already breached the boundaries of that space. She wanted my son to be honest about who is in his family, but, under this pressure for the truth, his trust in both of us buckled. We as adults needed to reconcile ourselves to a measure of distance and reticence, of not-knowing and not-telling. Years ago, Thompson gave a talk to parents where a nine-year-old boy was in the audience. During the discussion, the kid admitted that he, like many of his peers, tended to be laconic about his day when he got home in the afternoons. Thompson recalled asking the boy why he wouldn’t share more with his mom: “He paused for the longest time. Then he looked right at me and said, ‘There’s not that much she can do about it.’ ”of a socioeconomically diverse group of elementary schools in Hawaii, participants said that the most positive and constructive exchanges between teachers and parents happened through informal, face-to-face conversations, of the kind that occur at drop-off or pickup or at school events—exactly the serendipitous and utterly normal social encounters made temporarily impossible by the pandemic. A structural flaw in much teacher-family communication is that it is unidirectional: parents get information from school, however erratically, but they aren’t necessarily asked for information from home. “We know that when schools and families communicate in a reciprocal way, not just a one-sided way, children tend to have better academic, behavioral, and emotional outcomes,” Lisa Rafferty, a professor in the Exceptional Education Department at Buffalo State University, told me. Rafferty is a former special-education teacher with expertise in children who have emotional and behavioral difficulties—“invisible disabilities,” as she put it. Adversarial parent-teacher relationships sometimes stem from one-size-fits-all expectations that don’t account for what the teacher can’t see, Rafferty said. As desperate as some parents may feel to know more about what goes on at school, it may be far more important for teachers to know what goes on at home. “If I were in charge of the world,” Thompson told me, “every teacher would be given the time and the compensation to visit every child’s home before the school year started.” Barring that, he said, teachers should ask parents three questions: Is there anything I should know about your child? Is there anything in particular that you are hoping for your child this year? And what are your worries? “These questions need to be asked and answered in person or on the phone,” Thompson went on. “A proactive question in person builds an alliance.” And, as kids get older, there may be value in nudging parents gently to the side of the conversation. An elegant 2013arranged for cohorts of sixth- and ninth-grade students to receive daily notes or texts from their teacher, who also made daily phone calls to the students’ parents. The regular check-ins caused higher rates of completed, on-time homework assignments and lower rates of disruptive behavior. One ninth-grade teacher observed that students were “more eager to appear vulnerable in class”—a minor miracle amid the tough-guy posturing that is native to the early teen years. But Matthew Kraft, a co-author of the study, said that the calls from teachers to parents left some of the ninth graders feeling rattled, perhaps because “reaching out to their parents undercut their own autonomy.” With older students, Kraft went on, “teachers might benefit from directly communicating with students first, or in conjunction with parents, instead of going over their heads.” Kraft, who is an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, began his career in education teaching eighth and ninth grade in public schools in Oakland and Berkeley, including in a specialized classroom setting for kids at risk of dropping out of high school. There, he said, “I benefitted from smaller class sizes and the ability to invest time to get to know kids. That meant that I could make it a priority to communicate with families.” But manifold structural obstacles prevent most educators from creating the kinds of connections that are possible in a controlled research setting, Kraft said. Families may face language barriers. Schools often don’t have formal policies around parent-teacher communication, so expectations are unclear. Educators lack noninstructional time built into their day to make the calls and write the texts—elementary-school teachers may have thirty-plus students, and high-school teachers may have a hundred or more. As a result, teachers triage—they get in touch only when there’s trouble, which conditions families to dread the calls rather than welcome them. Instead, Kraft said, teachers need to balance positive feedback with “specific and actionable” feedback about how students can improve. As Rafferty put it, “A parent shouldn’t feel their stomach drop every time they see the school’s number on the caller I.D.” “You have to make sure you’re not always calling home about what a kid needs to fix,” she went on. “You have to catch them being good.” When I picture the classroom idyll that I would have wanted for my son last year, I see something that’s probably looser and goofier than the real thing, lower stakes, with more room for the fantasy and play that Faber and King talked about, more spots in the parking lot for scuzzy Pontiacs. In this kindergarten, I imagine Michael Thompson and my son improvising a “Yes, and . . .” story about the ghost teen’s high jinks. I imagine Joanna Faber pretending tothe ghost teen. And I could only ever imagine it, because, within this walled-off little garden, the ghost teen would be considered none of my business. Secrets are safe here. The spoken dialect is slightly different; the jokes don’t always travel. You will not see a parent pacing outside in a hallway or pressing her nose to a windowpane, because she trusts in things she doesn’t know, and her fellow-parents share that trust. Ideally, if the teacher did find a spare moment to call home, the news bulletin would be brief. Kraft was careful and measured throughout our conversation, but, when I asked him what kinds of communication with families worked best in his classroom, he answered instantly. “A quick and unscripted, unexpected, positive message,” he said. “These families never got that, ever. Just call them up and say, ‘Hey, your kid worked really hard this week. Keep up the great work.’ That’s it.” ♦
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
For Teachers, A New Year -- And New Book Bans -- Means More WorkAs conservative-led states target school books and curriculum, teachers say they’re being put in an impossible situation
Read more »
HISD teachers push back on new employment terms- What's Your Point?New evaluation on teachers based primarily on student grades- What's Your Point?
Read more »
South Korean teachers to rally after colleague's deathSouth Korean teachers are set to rally on Monday and sit out of work to demand better protection of their rights and to protest what they say is widespread harassment by overbearing parents that has led colleagues to take their own lives.
Read more »
South Korean teachers to rally after colleague’s deathTeachers are protesting what they say is widespread harassment by overbearing parents after an elementary school teacher was found dead in an apparent suicide.
Read more »
Historic Pease Elementary Becoming Child Care Center for AISD TeachersPease rises from the ashes with federal renovation funding
Read more »
South Korean teachers hold mass protests after suicide highlights pressures from parentsHundreds of thousands of teachers are protesting in South Korea after the suspected suicide of a teacher that was widely blamed on the burden on educators in a country notorious for its high-pressure education system.
Read more »