The fact is that there are 130,930 K-12 public schools in the United States of America, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, with the average of 2,618 schools per state. For the 2022-20223 school year there is an average of 514 students per school.
Using the state of Massachusetts, my home state as an example, while we might doubt that there is an average of 514 students per school because we see so few children running around outside all the elementary schools we might drive by on any given day, it should be remembered that the high schools are huge compared to the Miss Marple Elementary on the corner. Brockton High has 4,046 students, Lawrence has 3,132, New Bedford has 2,722. That’s a lot of students and related families in those schools.
The amazing thing for me is that, ignoring the actual numbers, the conservative, anti-public school media choose to support their condemnations of teachers and public schools by finding parents with a complaint as if these few people they find represent all students and parents connected to the 130,930 schools
They don’t.
It’s like saying four out of five dentists recommend a certain toothpaste and then having one dentist pro and one con on a panel for discussion as if the representation were equal. To be honest in the discussion, it should be one dentist vs the other four, or one pro toothpaste dentists and only 1/5 of the other which limits discussion as part of a body really has little to contribute.
The division is not 50/50 and should not be represented as if both sides are supported by an equal number of people. This is not so.
A single complaining parent or a group of them only represents that individual or that group but not the opinions of the rest of the parents and should neither present themselves as a representative of all parents nor be interviewed as if they were.
In my 38-year teaching career I taught all grade levels, multiple subjects both in regular and special education classes, in a number of towns, cities, and states. A common occurrence that most teachers experienced during that time, and probably still do, was that on Back to School Teacher/Parent Night and the similar nights held throughout the year with each report card, parents of high achieving students would come to have their parent/education approach validated by being told how well their child was doing.
The parents you really needed to talk to would not show up. These, unfortunately, were those who, while avoiding any contact with the school or a teacher to discuss a problem or deal with a complaint were the first to run to someone with a microphone, their pastor, the news media, and now social media to air a complaint about something with which they do not approve, something that could have been more effectively handled if the parents attended meetings as scheduled or those called because of circumstances.
If you watch the reports on the news, the person being interviewed is presented as a true representative of all parents and students, but while the complaints are freely accepted, no one asks the complaining parents if they have met with the school, and by meet, I do not mean go to the classroom and yell at a teacher, but go to meet the teacher about a problem and agree on solutions that can be applied.
This does not get your name out there and your picture in the media, though, so it is not the preferred approach. Melodrama is.
Teachers have actually been accused by parents in the media of having done something on days they were absent because of illness, a personal day, or attendance at a conference.
Parents have complained about classes that actually do not exist.
Parents have complained that their children are having to learn more than they had been taught in school as if time froze with them.
A parent of one of my students brought a complaint to a local media news channel making all sorts of accusations about something in my classroom his daughter found objectionable to her religious beliefs After first airing a news report, the station sent a news team complete with the mobile telecast van, a cameraman, and a reporter to my apartment to see the horrible things that had been reported as a series of lewd pictures promoting homosexuality, only to leave disappointed to see that the parent, whose complaint they had made into a big news story as homosexuality was running rampant in my classroom, had actually misrepresented the facts and they had gone along with it. The follow up report that night to that of the evening before was basically to explain that there really had been no substance to the complaint, but they would keep the viewers informed if there were something to report.
There may have been a bit of a Keystone Kops aspect to the school’s administrators who, after the first report was aired in which the parent asserted he was coming to the school with members of his church to protest the Homosexualizing of the school and go to my room to remove all the Gay stuff, went to my classroom hours after the school was closed to remove all of the Gay stuff which, in reality, was just not there. Before the mess was cleared up, local pastors in the town had decided as a group to preach one Sunday about the Gay situation at the high school which violated their religious beliefs, demand a cessation of that which did not exist, that the teacher of homosexuality be fired, and that the school allow kids to bring Bibles to school.
The clearing up involved just presenting the facts to these town criers with mild apologies coming from both the media and the pastors but left the public to believe I was a militant pedophile.
Apparently, the anticipated salacious details were so exciting that the media, so eager to report it, had failed to ask the complaining parent for actual details of that which had horrified his daughter, or questioned the veracity of the daughter’s complaint as her attendance was so sketchy that it was likely she really had not seen what was being complained about. As it turned out, she had, indeed, based her complaint on what she heard someone say without having seen what they were talking about. As far as Gay books and stuff being allowed on campus while Bibles were not, this false claim was easily dispelled as, the day after my students had seen the report and knowing the complaining student had no credibility, my first class of the day took Bibles out of their backpacks in class to show me they all had one.
Had the parent contacted the principal and/or me, a lot could have been avoided without a false media story.
Regardless how many of her children a complaining parent mentions in an interview, there is no follow up as to the attendance, behavior, or achievement of the children, while also not looking into the home to see what the support for and involvement in the children’s education actually is.
If it sounds juicy, it is accepted without verification.
We have all seen parents at school committee meetings demanding certain topics be forbidden while others should be taught in school and have been taken aback a bit by the virulence. Teachers see the parents who often come to school to make a demand but not to discuss the rationale for or even the existence of a rational approach to a problem.
There is no room for rational discussion because their complaint must be honored in full or, as many parents do, threaten to go higher up and have the teacher fired. Often these are parents with the worst kids because there is no discipline at home, and who resent anyone who may have their child follow rules. These parents protect their princes and princesses until they become old enough to have minds of their own and do not follow whatever rules there might be at home.
In one experience, I and other teachers had a number of meetings with a parent when her child was in middle school where he had begun those grades as a cute kid. He became disruptive throughout the building convinced whatever he did had the approval of the other students who actually were becoming annoyed with him as the kid never looked to see if others were enjoying something but disrupted because of his lack of interest. The parental go-to defense was that he was not like this at home, where obviously the parents were present and there were not hundreds of others there to play off of or perform for, so, obviously, we were making things up because for some reason there was a universal dislike of her son among all the employees on campus from custodian to principal.
When I transferred to the high school where that student went after middle school, I was called to a meeting because I knew him from the middle school and the parent wanted advice on what to do with her now very tall and muscled son who refused to follow any direction she issued at home and had shown signs he was willing to defend this independence with violence. She was pleading for help to rein him in as he was disruptive at home and refused to follow any rules she had finally decided to lay down or directions from her about the simplest thing. I could only agree to do the best I could to help the kid, but having had these discussions for three years at the middle school only to be told the child was an angel and I a hater, her having allowed him to go undisciplined for 16 years and with her defending him from all teachers and rules for the 10 years of school to that point, there was really nothing I could do about the home situation which she promoted and defended until her son began taking advantage of his height and muscularity, having grown into an undisciplined adolescent that the parent now wanted to start disciplining.
She had finally met the son she had created while ignoring the warnings of how an undisciplined person will not do well in society. Having ignored teachers wanting to work collaboratively with the parent to help the kid in the self-control department, she was now demanding we do something to make it all right. However, like recognizing the rising water means the ship is sinking after having ignored multiple warnings and suggestions on how to save yourself, there comes a time you have to accept that the Titanic is doomed.
Not long after that meeting the son was arrested on a charge related to violence.
She had never attended a Parent/Teacher Night.
I have had a parent object to my having my middle school students memorize the times tables up to 10 because he did not know his. I was forcing his son to learn something that the parent considered useless and, if I continued, he would bring his complaint to the school board. I agreed to not force his son to learn the times table knowing that as he realized everyone else in class knew them and had an easier time with math, the student would eventually decide on his own he needed to learn something the others knew.
He did.
Every teacher has stories of parents who only get involved in their child’s education to defend them against rules and the expectations of school and society on a regular basis with long lasting negative events.
They can also relate how a situation was dealt with in meetings where there were discussions and give and take that more often than not had the parent accepting realities of which they were not aware, such as a child acting differently in society outside of parental observation as compared to home where there were fewer people and a parental presence.
There are fewer of these stories than the other ones
Politicians are ignoring the real majority of parents, instead, paying attention to and pleasing an obscenely small but loud group of parents known mainly for their complaining in more areas than just schools, and do it for the cameras.
Education is complicated making it more involved as it broadens to meet society’s changes. What was useful during the Cold War gave way to what was needed in the Atomic Age, the Space Age, and the Computer Age, each requiring education to evolve.
It is a foolish betrayal of students and their futures if, as some demand, we return to just teaching readin’, ritin, and rithmatic.
Each generation should be smarter than the previous ones, but it would seem that those who scream at school board meetings and demand their views and interests be the only views allowed, while attempting to limit education to the requirements of the past are advocating that it now go in the other direction.
With 130,930 K-12 public schools in the United States of America with the average of 2,618 schools per state and an average of 514 students per school, it is incumbent upon the politicians, media, and other parents to demand these loud people prove they speak for all, parents or even the majority and why their personal issues and their political and religious beliefs have control over the education of all students beyond their own kid or kids.
The majority of parents need to consider why it is required that teachers get degrees, have professional training, and get official certification while continuing their education in their fields only to be ignored when it comes to education in favor of the person who yells the loudest at a board meeting.
Is this who they want controlling their children’s future?
As it is, if the trend is allowed to continue, regardless what they may want for their own child, parents will have to accept that their child will only be taught as much as some other parent has decided their child will be taught and no more.
And the next generation, for the first time in history, will end up less educated than their parents.
.
.
.
.
..
.
