Rethinking the Parent-School Compact After the Pandemic

Across the land, parents are starting to get their kids ready for the new school year. In talking to parents, you can hear relief—and an undercurrent of angst. The last few years have been tumultuous for the relationship between parents and schools. The disruptions of school closure and spotty remote learning were followed by masking fights, learning loss, and fierce culture clashes.

It’s been a trying time for parents and educators, alike. But it’s one that also offers the much-needed opportunity, as I suggest in The Great School Rethink, to reset the dysfunctional relationship between families and schools.

During the pandemic, Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises penned a thoughtful essay for Education Week, noting, “I have been struck by the number of principals telling me about staff who have said they were wrong about this parent or that grandmother, now seen more as a vital ally rather than an unwanted adversary.”

Indeed, for the past few decades, too many parents felt treated like adversaries. This was on vivid display when the National School Boards Association urged the FBI, in the fall of 2021, to determine whether irate parents should be classified as “domestic terrorists.” While school officials asking federal agents to treat parents as dangerous enemies was a nadir, in too many communities the parent-school relationship has curdled into passive-aggressive distrust.

Ask veteran educators about parents and they’ll mostly spout the usual pablum about valuing parent engagement. But when you get those same educators somewhere they’re not worried about being overheard, they’ll grumble about pushy parents, parents who don’t want to be involved, and parents who don’t expect kids to do their work or behave. They feel like they’re being blamed for things over which they have no control.

While no one says much of this out loud today, these are all fair points. Education is always a partnership between families and teachers, between students and schools.

A partnership is a two-way street. Teachers must be competent and committed to educating every child. Schools must commit to keeping parents in the loop and respecting the views and values of the families they serve.

But parents and guardians have a job, too: to send children to school who are responsible, respectful, and ready to learn. This means getting their kid to school on time, making sure they do their homework, and expecting them to behave appropriately.

Ignoring it when parents don’t do these things is not the empathy of an “ally”, it’s the negligence of an enabler.

Once upon a time, back in the 1980s and 1990s, it wasn’t hard to find educators who’d say, “I can’t teach that kid.” Complaints about kids and parents served as an all-purpose excuse. Thankfully, due to the invaluable work of a bipartisan coalition of advocates and educators, that culture was gradually remade. The professional norm is now the expectation that every child will learn. Today, when educators say such things, they whisper them in parking lots. This is a seismic shift and it’s a very good thing.

But, for all that, this progress has had unexpected consequences.

Today, public officials and school leaders are reluctant to talk about whether parents are doing their part to equip their kids to succeed in school. Terrified of being deemed judgmental or old-fashioned, they avoid the subject. As a result, too many parents aren’t even clear what role they should play in their child’s schooling, and teachers can feel like convenient scapegoats.

This is bad for students, parents, and educators alike. It suggests that parents can’t be expected to take responsibility for their children. That’s not empathy. It’s disrespect.

Fortunately, there are better models of what a healthy partnership between schools and families looks like.

In Arizona’s Phoenix Union High School District, when schools went remote in March 2020, Superintendent Chad Gestson announced that school staff would reach out to each of its 30,000 students each day.

Gestson reminded employees that everyone was still on the clock and declared that every district employee would be responsible for checking in with ten students every day.

Well, it turned out that a huge chunk of the district’s contact numbers were inaccurate. “Those first few days were spent trying backup numbers, calling aunts or other family members, and just trying to make sure we knew how to find our students,” he recalls.

The result was a dramatic change in how teachers and other school staff connected with the community. Of course, Gestson wasn’t the only leader to rethink parent engagement during the pandemic. There were others who took similar steps.

While such developments seem both heartening and sensible, one can’t help but wonder why it took a pandemic to get schools to embrace them.

As students struggle with learning loss, emotional trauma, and social isolation, and as schools seek to find their bearings amidst heated cultural debates, parents and educators could both use some help. That makes this a propitious time to rethink the parent-school relationship.

Educators should be expected to treat parents as equal partners: keeping parents apprised of what’s happening in school, making it easy for parents to see what’s being taught, and valuing parental concerns. And we should equally expect parents to do their part.

That all seems both desirable and eminently doable.