Changing Views of Parent Involvement
1995; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 76; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Education Studies and Reforms
ResumoJust wait until her daughter graduates this spring, an old friend warns me. Then she plans to tell the high school officials what a miserable place their school is - notwithstanding the fact that it is considered to be Maryland's most prestigious college-prep public school. (To tell off the school administrators before graduation is risky in this school, and I didn't do it either when my youngest was a student there.) Her daughter is in honors classes and will attend an excellent college, despite having been physically ill for the last two years - mostly because of the school's pressure-cooker environment that measures worth by SAT scores. Contrast this parent's indignation with that of a mother from the Henry Horner Homes on Chicago's West Side. While on a bus taking her child and several dozen others from the public housing project to a Saturday science program at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, she was busily organizing other mother/chaperones. We need to get our children's school to have science classes like those at the academy, she said. Them, middle-grade students excitedly engage in hands-on learning and are able to grasp complex knowledge. Actually, though the equipment and instruction were provided through a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, there is nothing the academy offers that the average school science program could not provide. But the nearby public school does not consider science a priority for these youngsters. I wish both of these parents well. Despite their very different circumstances, they are frustrated by the schools' lack of sensitivity to the needs of their children. They want the schools to be more responsive. And they resent the notion of parent involvement being touted as a panacea for low student interest and lack of success in learning. The country now has a new national goal, which is every bit as symbolic as the other seven: to have every school promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement. Secretary of Education Richard Riley has launched a family involvement initiative and signed up more than 100 national organizations as partners in the effort. And parental responsibility for children's learning will undoubtedly be part of the debate over welfare mothers, because it is assumed that dependency on welfare makes it less likely that a parent can support learning. Often homework becomes the core of parent involvement as it is defined by educators. Teachers complain about the lack of parental support for and interest in what schools are trying to do, measuring these shortcomings by how frequently homework assignments are completed. Meanwhile, parents zero in on homework as a tool to control the use of time at home. However, the focus on homework masks more complicated issues. Some ethnographic researchers have concluded that teachers tend more and more to use homework to teach rather than to reinforce what has been taught. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education's own report on parent involvement downplays the issue of homework and emphasizes other ways in which the home environment can support learning. For example, the factors that together explain almost 90% of the differences among eighth-graders in math performance on the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress are ones parents control: student absenteeism, variety of reading materials available in the home, and excessive television watching. Reading aloud to young children, the report says, is the single most important activity that parents can undertake to influence the future reading success of their children. …
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