<p>Right, it took three colleges’ studies to figure this out. What a waste of research money. No doubt part of the annual 5% tuition increase at these wonderful institutions.</p>
<p>In Chicago, the school system is out of money, completely, absolutely. The teachers’ union struck a deal with Mayor Emanuel to end the strike, but they don’t want to agree that a part of the medicine is to shutter non-performing schools. Well, too bad, although in those school districts I suspect it’s the non-performing parents that are more the cause than anything else. And yes, T26E4, we have to foster at least some of the blame on the parents–dual, single or absentee. That’s part of the deal when you bring a child into this world, the ‘parenting’ aspect of it.</p>
<p>This report card foolishness is misguided grandstanding at best. Send the dang report cards home with the kids and hope that the parents see them and their signatures aren’t forged upon their return.</p>
<p>Asbestos in the bathrooms and 30 kindergarteners in 1 class, no school nurses, but $25 gift cards for parents. This is why those teachers went on strike.</p>
<p>The blame lies with both the parents and the teachers. While I don’t think bribing them will get all of these parents involved, it think it could have a positive impact. There is a subset of those parents for whom it is a financial hardship to get to school to pick up the report cards. I don’t know what hours they are available, but the nearby city where my youngest attends a magnet school has a similar policy. Report cards were available for pickup last week on wednesday, from 3:30-7 pm. Few parents have a problem attending at some point during those hours, though yes there could be the parent who works 3-11 or a similar shift. For those few, the parents make other arrangements.</p>
<p>But there is also a small percentage of parents that will not get involved unless someone asks the directly, and provides a bit of incentive. Some of those parents will get involved if the sit down with the teacher and hear what is happening in the classroom - they won’t get that if the report card is mailed home. Their kid might even intercept the report card, so they never see it. Other kids will forge the signature - when I was a kid, I remember one classmate who was smart enough to obtain extra copies of most of the forms sent home at the beginning of the year. He had his parents sign the first set, then forged a second set and turned them in. That way anything he forged later matched the forms from the beginning of the year. Him parents were immigrants, so they didn’t know they should be signing report cards every marking period.</p>
<p>You can’t force parental involvement, but if this encourages even a few to get involved, perhaps it will be worth the expense (whoever is footing the bill).</p>
<p>In half the schools in Chicago, indoor air quality does not meet OSHA standards for adults. The EPA refuses to issue pediatric indoor air quality standards because they would close between a quarter and a third of the nation’s schools.</p>
<p>Wonderful learning environments. Blame the teachers and their unions. After all, they built them.</p>
Who “picks-up” report cards? Have any of you had to do that in your districts? We’ve always just had them mailed home. If for some reason it wouldn’t show up, i.e. the kid intercepted it, I’d know since I know that report cards are sent home every now and then and I’d deal with it.</p>
<p>Especially in an area where there are financial and logistical difficulties, there should be no requirement for the parent to go to the school to pick up a report card. A few stamps are a lot less expensive than $25 gift cards.</p>
<p>I suspect even most of these people with financial hardships have access to a telephone and they can call and discuss issues with a teacher if needed - they shouldn’t need to physically go to a school for that.</p>
<p>Requiring a parent to physically go to the school for what should be easily accessible functions is part of the problem and pointless.</p>
<p>If the parents are truly interested in being involved in the kid’s education and at least monitoring it for progress and results, they shouldn’t need a gift card in order to accomplish it and the idea that they would indicates easily solved problems (mailing the report cards, phone discussions with teachers) that the gift card likely wouldn’t solve anyway.</p>
<p>I do seem to remember being given the report card at the conference in middle school in order to give parents a chance to have their questions answered. The ones that couldn’t be picked up were mailed. </p>
<p>I was the chair of the parent group for an alternative K-12 public school that had students from all over the city. It was physically located in the north end and many of our families came from the south end. ( Originally, it was centrally located, but the district reneged on the promise to move it back)</p>
<p>We tried a lot of tricks to get more parents physically involved. We provided child care, arranged for potlucks or pizza, and encouraged carpools and hosted meetings in other areas of the city. We also hosted events at a range of times-weekends, week nights, during the day and asked for feedback regarding schedules. </p>
<p>Whatever the motivation, having the parents involved made a difference to the kids, no matter how blas</p>
<p>Look - we really DO know what works for poor kids in education, and it has nothing to do with this crap.</p>
<p>The first thing: hungry kids don’t learn. They need good food in school, and good food at home. Most of the difference in learning trajectories attributed to summer “vacations” has to do with the reality that some kids get to eat, and some don’t.</p>
<p>The second thing: the bad air. We know the impact of long-term substandard indoor air quality on adults; it doesn’t take a genius to know it is likely to have equal or greater impacts on kids. Fix it.</p>
<p>The third thing: I have no fewer than 12 studies that show that access to well-stocked school libraries, well-stocked and used community libraries, and free voluntary reading time in the classroom has more impact that any teaching techniques, curriculum, classroom management strategy. Get the kids to the libraries, and teach them how to use them. And give them the in-class time to benefit from them.</p>
<p>Fourth: deal with the impacts of violence in poor communities. Living in an atmosphere of violence doesn’t do a lot for learning. Spend the same amount per capita on police and crisis services in the poorest neighborhoods as we do in the richest neighborhoods. Note the per capita.</p>
<p>Yes, and then you punish the STUDENT for not being at school because the parent didn’t get them there or traffic made them late so you punish them for things out of their control. <–Situation at my high school constantly because of idiotic state regulations</p>
In my district any parent that isn’t registered for the web portal can pick up the report card at the conference. If you dont show, yeah they mail it. There is no signature return. Thats the point of the study, to establish that kids whose parents dont show typically dont do as well. The goal is to engage the parents, not provide an alternative to snail mail. </p>
<p>If you really think that some $25 gift cards are making a difference in either the schools budget or the parents lifestyle you should take a math refresher. Its simply an incentive to get some parents involved where they are most needed. If it works, all the better for those students. If not, well they tried.</p>
<p>Wow, just wow.
Mailing home is tough. Housing is very transient, I don’t know how many families were displaced because of hurricane Sandy, for example. MAny,many families live in illegal basements. Who the student lives with is fluid, could be an aunt, grandparent or great grandparent. Families who are classified as homeless still send to the school district from the last permanent address,
Parents need to sign off on ieps and they just don’t show for conferences so the students remains in a classroom that is not right. Is it worth $25 to get a sign off on a better placement or to impart a critical piece of info like don’t book flights back to your country this summer because your kid needs to go to summer school to be promoted this year.
The issues go on and on. Not that I am saying these teachers are g-ds gift, because many are really pretty bad, but it is a tough situation for sure.</p>
<p>Parents may not have email, often cant read english and prefer texting</p>
<p>Teachers can only do so much. It is the parents who need to take the responsibilty of their children’s education. We went to one of the worst schools in the midwest, but our parents made us memorize 20 vacabs every night, and that’s how we learned English. We didn’t have a paid teacher tutoring us. Maybe that’s why so many Asian immigrants have done so well. They believed in self help.</p>
<p>It’s cultural for sure.
But a family may value education and the student gets involved with gangs and other bad influences and the parent is often helpless. I guess the $25 won’t make a difference then.</p>
<p>You can blame parents all you want. But it won’t improve the kids’ education. We know what to do WITHOUT the parents, and without doing anything about the teachers. (But we won’t do it.)</p>
<p>Well, why don’t we couple the responsibility of educating the children to the funding? Oh wait, parents in a direct and indirect way are already responsible for this. Parents are FORCED to pay for or subsidize the public education. A public education system that bargained --and obtained-- the monopoly and also … independence from parents. </p>
<p>Thus, if parents are indeed responsible, why not “return” to them the cost of educating their children, and let them decide to spend the money at the local public school, the private or religious school of their choice, or simply sticking to homeschooling. </p>
<p>Actually the people who can afford it do make those choices; they vote with their feet and either make the sacrifices in money and time, or move to greener academic pastures. </p>
<p>The lack of real school choice is a crime by itself; but it is an epic tragedy when the sole publicly funded options are such failures.</p>
<p>'Excuse me, but they are incredibly successful, which is why they don’t change. What the society needs, and corporate America demands, is more Walmart clerks (as posted, the overwhelming majority of job increases in the next decade will not require any college, and many not even a high school degree.) The system is really, really good at producing what we need, so why change?</p>
The issue here is that there are many parents that do not give a crap, therefore as a society we need to have a lowest denominator in order for our world not to go pear shape. For parents who give a crap, they take the initiative of deciding where to live so they could have good public school education or how to cut back in order to afford private school, and to sacrifice their own personal time so they could be more involed with their kids’ academic progress. </p>
<p>It doesn’t matter how much money we throw at having the best school system for our kids, if parents do not care then their kids are not going to care. You could have the best teachers in world, but if they have to spend most of time in discipling students or making sure students did their homework then they could only be so effective. Growing up, we were on food stamps and I got free breakfast and lunch at school, but my parents made sure we did our homework and went to school everyday. One of the reasons we decided to put our kids in private school was because most of parents at the school valued education. We wanted our kids to be with kids who actually did their reading assignments and their problem sets so they could have productive learning experience when they were in class.</p>
<p>There are plenty of kids who do just fine, thank you, without their parents giving a crap. The rich ones park the kids at Choate, and that’s the end of it. Only costs $50k a year.</p>
<p>I had a roommate who was parked at a Choate-like place. Didn’t see his dad for five years (and not much more before then); dad never saw his report card, and never called, not even on holidays. Never a birthday card. Became a federal judge.</p>
<p>Money counts. But it has to be lots of it.</p>
<p>And we know plenty of things that work virtually without parental involvement, and without extra emphasis on teaching and teachers, and without any change in curriculum. (But we won’t do them - hey, we need those Walmart clerks, and the school systems are spectacularly successful at what they do, which is why they don’t change.)</p>