The Parent/Teacher Relationship

Until education experts and policy makers accept that what children at home and school really need is that personal touch that inspires them to learn and love it, we will continue to make the mistake of trying to improve education through standardization and technology. If we want children to get the very best education, an education that will develop their natural abilities to think, reason, and create then we are going to have to focus our resources and ideas in the two most critical areas, parents and teachers. Parents and teachers are the most important factor in the success of a student and anything that impedes the mutual respect between the home and the school is detrimental to the educational progress of children.

It is simply intuitive that the family is the heart and driver of a child's education. In order to foster the best educational nurturing for children, families and communities must develop a real commitment to family centered education reforms. A couple weeks ago I was listening to a NPR program in my car when the reporter asked her guest which teacher made the most significant impact in his life, she meant a school teacher of course, but my immediate response to the question was, my father. My father and mother nurtured my talents, instilled confidence, encouraged diligence, and fostered a life-long love of learning. I can remember only a few of my elementary teacher’s names or faces. What I remember is the overall impressions leftover from those years in school. I remember my second grade year because my teacher really liked me, my fourth grade year when my teacher completely ignored me, and my sixth grade year when my teacher made me feel stupid. I remember a few more of my high school and collage teachers but in the balance the one teacher who had the greatest impact was and still is my father. Through it all I remember my father and mother were always there answering my questions and helping me make sense of what I was learning, something they continue to do even now.

Being a mother and working in a 3rd grade classroom, I realize that more than my particular relationships with my teachers, it was my parent’s attitudes towards my education that had the greatest impact on my success in any given school year. Teachers should be able to count on the role of parents as the foundation for her students success and they should reverence this truth. Good parents work with their children's teachers, as mine did. Parents support the teacher in enforcement of standards, allowing discipline to take place, addressing at home with their children the issues teachers raise, and raising concerns with the occasional problem in a professional manner. Like two parents who are back each other up in parenting, parents who back up their kid’s teacher and work with them when problems arise, build a firm foundation for their child’s development.

Next to mom and dad, it is common today that children will spend a great deal of their time with their classroom teacher, and for this reason it is in quality teachers that education dollars should be most heavily invested in. Certainly the totally uninvolved parent or the "helicopter" parent who belligerently hovers undermine the efforts of their child’s teacher, but these bad examples don’t excuse teachers from their responsibility to work for the respect of parents. Having worked with many teachers, as a parents and an Para-educator, I have meant plenty of dedicated teachers who love their students and earn the respect of their parents. Unfortunately, I have also met too many teachers who speak with arrogant condescension of their students’ parents. One day during a teachers lunch I listened to several teachers talk derisively of the “stay-at-home” mom of one of their students, a mother that earned their derision for choosing to stay at home and care for her children and lacking a “higher education.” One teacher actually said “I can't listen to all parents.... sometimes my soon to be TWO Master's Degree's outweigh your thoughts as a parent”

I believe the most common reason that mutual respect between parents and teachers is suffering is that a family centered educational philosophy has been undermined by education policy that is shifting responsibility for a child's future destiny from parents to the state, and the purpose of public education from providing equal opportunity to guaranteeing equal outcomes. This shift is making parents feel less connected to their schools and a less valued participant in their child's education. It has angered some parents as they feel their influence diminished. This shift is making it more difficult for teachers to please parents as they have unmanageable pressures and burdens placed on them. It is systematically diluting the art of teaching, turning teachers into technocrats, and making parents inferior to experts. Teachers and students are being drowned in targets, testing, and technology. They are continually at the whim of the latest "educational trend" and the next technology. If only technocrats would leave the schools alone, teachers might be able to get on with teaching and parents may develop more natural bonds with their children’s teachers.

The attitudes of derision that an ever expanding technocrat class have for parents, and the mistrust they have for teachers who want to practice their art, is negatively impacting the extremely important bonds between parents and teachers. What we need to turn it around is a mutual recognition by teacher and parent that far off agendas are pitting us against each other, and that children are caught in the cross fire. Our mutual love for the children in our care is a strong foundation to develop an alliance of mutual respect. To build the education we want for our children and students we must set teachers free to creatively practice their profession in concert with parents in school districts whose policies are family centered and invest heavily in our quality teachers.