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Sheila Simmons is education director for Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth
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The law’s promise of parent empowerment: Still just a promise
by Sheila Simmons
Among the promises of the No Child Left Behind law was to give parents greater control of their child’s academic career.
The federal Department of Education said the law would ensure “that parents have the information they need to make well-informed choices for their children, more effectively share responsibility with their children’s schools, and help those schools develop effective and successful academic programs.”
Hence, parents with children in “failing” schools could transfer them to another school. If their child’s school showed a pattern of underperformance, parents could secure free tutoring for their child. Teachers had to prove they were “highly qualified” for their work, and parents were to be alerted when their child was being taught by someone without that certification. And for major schoolwide changes, schools had to offer parents a role in drafting the improvement.
But six years later, there is little local evidence that the law has bridged the divide between what one activist called “savvy, high-octane” parents who can access better opportunities for their child, and parents for whom schools remain an intimidating system that offers no real choices or power.
Dolores Shaw, a mother of three and long-time parent leader of Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project, likens this situation to “apartheid.”
“We’re supposed to be going toward an equitable system, not a system built up for people to believe their kids can go to ‘certain’ schools,” she said.
“There are always some parents savvy enough to figure out how to get around things,” she added. “But for the most part, most of us have been very unsuccessful with this.”
Studies and other data bear out Shaw’s views. Only a fraction of students eligible for NCLB’s extra services like free tutoring have taken advantage of them. In Philadelphia, tutoring enrollment has decreased from 4,357 in 2004-2005 to about 1,200 this school year.
Locally, just 318 students applied for a transfer out of a low-scoring school (of whom about 200 were placed), although students from 125 schools were eligible to apply.
Philadelphia researcher Ruth Curran Neild, in a study of school choice, observed that, “in districts with few good school choice options for students, there are limits to parents’ ability to find a school that represents a substantial improvement over the school their child already attends.”
Indeed, as has been the case historically, better-performing schools are scarce in high-poverty, high-minority neighborhoods, raising obstacles like transportation and enrollment capacity for option-seeking parents.
Nor have parents found many new opportunities to work within their children’s schools toward school improvement. From small schools to private management to other reform models, Philadelphia schools have certainly undergone major changes, but critics charge that the District usually told parents about these reform attempts after the deal was done.
Representing a number of local parent activists, the Education Law Center last year filed a complaint with the state Department of Education, using the parent empowerment provisions of No Child Left Behind.
“We know schools have had a lot of meetings and seen many volumes of school improvement plans, many of them accompanied by parents’ signatures and so forth,” said ELC Co-director Len Rieser. “My impression – at least until recently – is that parents were not meaningfully involved in the big decisions that were being made about schools.”
With the District submitting a trail of paperwork about its parent involvement efforts, the Department closed the complaint. The state determined, according to Rieser, that the District had “done everything it needed to.”
Rieser pointed out that one of the District’s filings concluded, “We do not believe that our parents are seeking to participate directly in running the schools … . Our parents will gladly leave the running of these schools to us.”
While some might consider such language offensive, even parent activists find some agreement with it. Parents do lack the time and expertise to fix broken schools.
“We’re talking about schools that have struggled eight, nine years,” Parents United for Public Education organizer Helen Gym said, making reference to the scores of Philadelphia schools carrying the “Corrective Action II” designation. “This is not a situation for parents to sit down and talk to figure it out.”
“Parents need to be engaged and to discuss,” especially at the school-based level, Gym said. “But no one should expect them to do [the school system’s] work. Parents cannot be asked to do super-heroic things.”
Rieser commented, “Parent engagement can be difficult. It takes time and effort, and I understand that principals and school staff are not exactly flush with time. If you really want to get parents involved, you have to cultivate that … . It can only happen if the District puts a lot of support behind it.”