Putting Parents in Their Place
Once a maxim of commercial enterprise, “the customer is always right,” remains as influential today as it is inaccurate. Buyers know this of course, sometimes playing upon its assumption to raise complaints about products or service, or more duplicitously gaming the system of retail etiquette in their protestations. Storekeepers, while not believing it, nonetheless feel compelled to pretend in its validity in order to further the chance of continued business.
With this week’s staggered launch of the American school season, it remains to be seen how, or if, the same maxim will be believed or applied to education. What school administrator really thinks that students or their parents are always right? And which group of parents or students think the same about their teachers or school officials? Perhaps some of the time, or maybe even most of the time, but always? Not likely. Nor should we ever put too much credence in such over-simplified generalizations, no matter how fervently they may be voiced.
That is because schools represent a complex amalgam of people, ideas, and agendas, each laden with expectations about what education should mean and deliver. This is true whether the funding and governance structures of those institutions mark them as public, charter, or independent (private). They are all in the business of trying to make a positive impact on America and the world by helping prepare, inspire, and nurture our younger generations. Yet no universal ascriptions of intellectual certainty or moral purity can convincingly be applied to any one group involved in the enterprises of learning.
So we find ourselves all over the spectrum of attitudes about school in this second week of August, 2023, a mere 388 years after children were first exposed to the three R’s (plus Latin) in Boston, home of our first educational institution. All of the aforementioned parties—educators, students and parents—are bracing to face a season in which their hopes and ambitions will be tested, not only in classrooms and competitive arenas, but in board and PTA meetings and, quite possibly, in the courts.
In the eye of the hurricane of ill wind now blowing across our educational landscape can be found an interest group receiving more than its share of grief today. I’m talking about parents, that amorphous, nearly undefinable aggregate of grownups whose offspring will be the primary focus of scholastic attention over the next nine+ months. Where do parents stand in the equation of child development and education, or more precisely, where should they stand? With millions of moms, dads, grandparents and guardians poised to assume or resume their school-year roles as chauffeurs, tutors, volunteers, boosters, fund raisers, coaches, fans, advocates, critics, antagonists, defenders, comforters, and excusers, they are folks not easily overlooked or dismissed in the operation of America’s schools.
Yet when most of us think of the schools we’ve attended or the ones now working with our children or grandchildren, our attention most often rivets on those adults who will be wielding authoritative direction and evaluative judgment over the more than 56 million children and teens who will be attending our schools this year. Not only on their competency to teach and administer will they be held accountable. In their unique role, in loco parentis, their words and actions will be scrutinized perhaps more closely than ever before. For whether they be right out of college or old enough to recognize the names of the children of kids they once taught in their classes, they will bear the legal responsibility afforded them by our courts to function “in the place of parents.” That will both empower and burden them during the six plus hours (and during after-school and weekend school activities) in which they serve as teachers, coaches, counselors and administrators. It is an awesome charge they have been asked to fulfill, one they will share, even if only part-time, with those biological and adoptive adults and legal guardians entitled to bear the title, parents.
Being the parent of a child is one of the most treasured and challenging roles an adult will ever assume. Doubtless there are few people who can claim more devotion and emotional attachment to children over a lifetime than that known by mothers and fathers. And from conception to late adolescent nest-vacating departures, the bond between parents and children is nearly unbreakable, commanding most grownup’s attention and priority for more years than they likely will give to anyone or anything else. The vows that couples often recite in matrimonial liturgy—for better, for worse, for richer, , for poorer, in sickness and in health—are likely pushed and tested more by parenthood than any spouse could ever imagine prior to making the life-creating, and life-transforming decision to have a child.
Educators have the rare vantage point of glimpsing some of what parents both enjoy and endure, if only for a fleeting moment. Elementary teachers in self-contained classes lasting from morning to late-afternoon probably have the closest approximation of parental joy and frustration. But with the passing of the one-room school house, even they are not likely to work with any particular child for more than a single, nine-month year of weekdays in ever-compressed yearly calendars. Middle and high school teachers, along with their coaches and arts directors, bounded by the time constraints of a particular class, activity, team or grade-level, enjoy at best an itinerant relationship that may be as fleeting as an hour each day over the course of a semester or season. Considering how little is their knowledge of and exposure to their students, it doesn’t seem reasonable or fair to impose the weighty obligations that in loco parentis prescribes for people who are, at best, momentary adult acquaintances. But lacking any better choices, our courts and schools agree on this being the best of the many temporary arrangements in which children and educators find themselves joined.
In loco parentis has always been a concept entailing both empowerment and limitation. For schools this has meant a conferring of adult responsibility in the absence of a parent, with the stipulation that, unless the fitness of the parent can be proved and legally judged to be inadequate, schools are bound to yield to parental wishes. In the school’s in which I was employed, parental permission was necessary before we could proceed with scheduling classes, allowing students to ride in our vehicles, participate in extracurricular activities, or be given nurse-approved medications. We were also legally required to be vigilant to the suggestion or appearance of physical or emotional injury a child presented. Reporting such concerns to the proper community child welfare authorities was not to be a matter of our judgment or choice, but was mandated at the risk of serious professional and legal consequences. Sometimes these suspicions prove warranted, and the intervention of a teacher, coach or counselor turns out to be life-saving. Sometimes they reveal the lengths that adolescents may go in trying to get attention or manipulate a situation to their advantage.
I’d like to believe that, in most of our schools and for most of our parents, in loco parentis works about as well as we could hope. But since so much of life these days pivots more on the exception rather than the rule, the once-prevailing tacit consent about the motives and conduct of those caring for children at home and at school seems to be largely lost or tinged with cynicism. Too many cases of parental abuse, neglect or manipulation have eroded much of the trust and confidence schools once had in parental judgment and motives. Likewise too many incidents of educator abuse, neglect or manipulation have raised red flags of mistrust and rage among parents as to whether teachers really do have the best interests of children in mind.
Recent upticks in concern about what is being included, not included, or ideologically spun in school curricula, coupled with the revelations about some schools shielding parents from their children’s expressions of gender dysphoria while in school, have had a polarizing effect on both parents and educators. The battle lines that have been drawn have invited the media, politicians and even the FBI into the fray, with the result that the three R’s (not to mention history, civics, language, and other former staples of a well-rounded education) are being drowned in a maelstrom of rancor, resentment, and recrimination. All of it is casting a pall over the coming school year, threatening to further distract us from addressing our decade’s long slippage in academic progress and achievement when compared to the rest of the world and to where we once stood.
I believe schools overstep their moral and legal authority when they preempt parents from having a say in what their children are learning and who they are becoming. And I say this as one who often disagreed with the attitudes and judgments of the parents with whom I worked for more than 30 years. Yet time and again I had to remind myself that I only knew these young people as students, not as a child I had brought into being, cared for since infancy, and with whom I had forged a bond of love over years of laughter, tears, celebrations and disappointments. I couldn’t possibly claim to fully know what was best for them in prescribing what they must do, who they were, or what they must become. At the same time I never easily acceded to parental dictates about the what and how of pedagogical practices that my colleagues and I were more qualified, by training and experience, to direct.
The question for me has never been if parents will or should be involved in their children’s education. Rather it is where, and how they can be of greatest benefit to both their kids and within the schools who have taken on the responsibility of educating their offspring. Should parents in schools be…
kept in the dark, informed only on a “need to know” basis;
seen and not heard, welcomed as fans at games, plays and concerts, counted on to volunteer and raise funds, but patronized or dismissed when asking questions, offering criticism, or expressing concerns about the school;
allowed to hover over their children like remotely piloted helicopters or drones, second-guessing everything the school is trying to do for an entire student body;
empowered with setting policy and micromanaging day-to-day decisions concerning what is taught, how it is presented, and how teachers and students should be assessed and disciplined?
Any of these places seem to me both inappropriate and injurious, not only to schools and students, but burdensome or insulting to parents. It seems to me that parents best serve their students and their schools when they are not pigeonholed into any of these places, but welcomed into a constructive dialogue with the educators whom they need to both respect and trust. Such relationships are possible, and in more schools than we might hear about in the media’s portrayals of our societal dysfunctions. In such communities administrators, teachers and parents intentionally meet each other as partners rather than adversaries. The language of dialogue in meetings, conferences and work sessions is peppered with we rather than poisoned with us and them. I know this to be true because I’ve seen it happen in the two, smaller independent schools in which I was blessed to work. When schools understand the place that parents rightfully can and should occupy in the education of their students, and when parents accept the places they need to occupy while trusting those entitled to be in loco parentis, not only do our schools work: our children also work, and play, grow and mature. And our families, our communities, and our nation thrive.
Customers are not always right, but they nonetheless deserve the benefit of the doubt. So do all who are part of the marketplace of learning that we call school: students, teachers, and parents.
