A FOR EFFORT, BUT F FOR FAR TOO MUCH OF IT



By PATRICK WELSH
Sunday, December 6, 1998
The Washington Post

It may sound strange from someone who's been teaching for 30 years, but no single day in the school year makes me more nervous than parent-teacher conference day. After the kids were let out early one recent Thursday, their mothers and fathers poured in. For six hours straight, from 12:45 to 6:45, I had 33 conversations, each only about 10 minutes long. For most of those parents, it was their first chance to get a sense of who I am.

I never know what to expect from these brief meetings. Much of the input is invaluable: Once I meet a parent, I can't help but take special notice of their kid. That's not favoritism; it's human nature. Hearing from them about a divorce, for example, helps me understand why a good student has suddenly bombed. But I always brace myself for the two or three parents who will put heat on me, usually to raise a grade: "You're ruining her self-esteem," they'll say. "She won't get into the University of Virginia with your C." Or, "But you know how smart he is. Give him a break . . . ."

A few parents have absolutely no qualms about going further. Last year, one mother even asked administrators to regrade the essays her daughter wrote for me. (They refused.) And these exchanges, confrontational as they sometimes become, give me a sense of what steps parents will take to have things at school done just the way they want. Administrators find themselves devoting far too much time and energy to placating the noisy few--usually middle-class parents--while other kids get lost in the fray.

I'm not suggesting that parents should never be involved in their kids' schooling. Even in high school, parents need to watch over students; and we teachers need all the assistance we can get to understand those 120 or so individuals who pass through our classes every day. What's clear to me whenever I meet parents, though, is how much is at stake for them--and how that plays out in their dealings with individual teachers and with the school. That tension is right there on the table on conference day. There's no getting away from it.

Often enough, I'm just plain inspired by the families. One father who works two jobs as a chef took time out last month to visit all his son's teachers. His broken English didn't keep him from probing me on every detail of the boy's work--straight As even though the kid had come from Africa just four months before and is working in a second language.

This year, I also heard from a few parents who volunteered information about how drugs or learning disabilities have affected their kids; several asked advice about colleges. One mom even thanked me for giving her child a D, saying, "The kid's got to wake up." And I well remember a mother who once called me to say that her son--a 6-foot-4-inch bruiser who had been sitting in class looking as if he wanted to kill me--was actually terrified because the girls I was teaching seemed to understand the poems we were studying so much more easily than he could. I needed that feedback!

Feedback is one thing. Intervening is another--and it leaves me with far more mixed feelings. There are times when a parent's prompting has changed my thinking: A boy I thought was lazy turns out to have been working flat out. And of course there are times when parents shouldn't sit back and expect things at school to be fine. If parents aren't vigilant, their kids risk ending up with the least inspiring teachers, for example. For the most part, high-school students are assigned to teachers by a computer, and schools resist making any changes once the machinery spits out the schedule. The dirty little secret in schools, though, is that the weakest teachers are seldom given classes in which there a lot of children whose parents are willing to speak up.

When at the end of last year a friend told me that her daughter was having a horrible year because of a string of dull teachers, I didn't hesitate to give her the names of some I thought her child would find more stimulating. I told her to go in and demand them for the next year. The mother got her kid into the classes she wanted, and this year her daughter is happy at school once again.

For every parent to be scouting out their kids' teachers is an administrator's nightmare, of course. And although in this case I actively encouraged a parent's intervention--and remain convinced that it was the right thing to do--I still share with many other teachers and school administrators a wariness about parental interference. There aren't any hard and fast guidelines about when and how often parents should push to make changes on their kids' behalf. But the administrators I've talked to tell me they are troubled by the same sort of behavior that I recognize from those complaints about grades: parents who seem to see the school as an adversary, and have unrealistic views of their own kids.

Carolyn Lewis, who has worked as an administrator in several Alexandria schools, says "a lot of parents never miss an opportunity to promote their private interests in the guise of what is best for all children." Lewis sees a difference between the way black parents and white parents confront administrators. "Black parents tend to scream and holler at you, then settle down; the whites tend to be more devious. They'll tell you what a great job you're doing then go around your back if you don't give them what they want." Lewis remembers one parent who managed to get another administrator to overturn her decision about where a boy should serve detention.

When it comes to discipline, Lewis says there is a "give my kid a break" attitude among many of these types. "They try to push anything their own kids have done under the rug, but make a big deal out of what everyone else's kids have done."

A Fairfax County school official I spoke with recently agrees that many parents in her system "are in total denial about their kids." Last year a Fairfax County student was caught on a school surveillance camera beating up another student. When his parents were confronted with the taped evidence, they denied it was their son. "Parents regularly march into schools with lawyers to protest the smallest punishments," says this official. "They take the slightest disciplinary move against their kid as a personal attack on them. It's not the kid selling drugs that seems to bother them, but the fact the neighbors will know he's being punished. At disciplinary hearings, our administrators have to sit through incredible venom and abuse from parents. There's no sense of a greater community that we are all part of . . . It's just every parent for his own kid."

What's more, as one Alexandria administrator told me, "There's politics around every corner. We'll make decisions at the school, but if a certain group of parents don't like them, all of a sudden there's a barrage of letters and phone calls and a decision floats down from above contrary to everything that was worked out at the school level."

Today a school principal has to be more "the principal politician" than what he or she was intended to be--"the principal teacher," based on the British concept of the headmaster. Constantly dodging bullets and having to placate this and that individual or group, a principal has less time to be an instructional leader.

Take my principal, John Porter. A native of Alexandria who has kept T.C. Williams running smoothly for the last 16 years, Porter is one of the most highly respected people in the city. Yet despite his impressive record, last year Porter was treated as a nonentity at one school board meeting. The board's curriculum committee, consisting of three mothers with kids in the system, wanted to change the T.C. Williams curriculum so that sophomore English would be taught concurrently with a World Civilization course.

The social studies and English department chairmen as well as every one of their teachers (myself included) were strongly opposed to the move. So was Porter. Of course there is room for disagreement about how to teach the courses, but you'd think that the wishes of Porter and all the teachers would have carried some weight. Not so. When Porter was about to present his views before the board, one of the mothers objected, saying that she already knew what Porter's opinion was. The board then voted to pass the measure supported by the mothers.

One former school board member pressured the school a few years back to change its rules for determining which sculls were eligible to compete in a major regatta. To the outrage of crew coaches, school officials gave in and a weak boat, in which the board member's child rowed, suddenly became eligible.

With that kind of erosion of their authority, it's a wonder to me that administrators like Porter remain committed to their jobs.

Unlike Porter, I can avoid the daily hassle of dealing with self-important members of the school community by shutting the classroom door and devoting my energies to teaching. I know that most parents act out of a sense of responsibility and ambition for their kids--that their hopes are placed in these teenagers. But when I look at the kids I teach, I see clearly that, when it comes to teenagers, nothing is written in stone. No amount of parental manipulation can alter that fact. I've seen many high-school superstars falter when they get out of college; and I've known many kids who tormented their parents beyond endurance only to become successful beyond those parents' dreams. One of the biggest "party girls" in the history of the school ended up with a master's degree from Harvard and a fabulous job. A boy notorious for drinking and every kind of antisocial behavior got straight A's in medical school and now runs a clinic for indigents.

Parents and teachers alike have to find the balance between being vigilant about kids' education and chilling out, letting them fend for themselves. As a parent of two teenagers, I know that nothing is more difficult. But as a teacher, I know there's a difference between being active and involved in your child's schooling and trying to manipulate the system.

Patrick Welsh teaches English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria.