Doug Johnson

Making Parents Partners with Technology
Teacher Magazine, March 2005

Doug Johnson
dougj@doug-johnson.com

For just this column, I’d like you to look at a technology application through parental eyes. I’m accustomed to doing so since I’ve been blessed with two wonderful children. My first, a daughter, had a genuine academic bent getting good grades throughout school, graduating from high school with honors and earning two college degrees. There was never a parent-teacher conference I did not look forward to attending.

And then there is Brady, my son. He is a smart and delightful young man but his motto during his school years has always been, “What is the absolute minimum I need to do to get by?” Report cards and teacher conferences often contained surprising and disappointing information. It seemed Brady and his teachers often had different ideas of what constituted “minimum.”

And judging by my conversations with other parents and teachers, Brady is not the only “Mr. Minimum” in this world.

High academic performance and timely, quality work completion by students are important to both teachers and caring parents. Given the common goal of making all children successful in school, parents and teachers are naturally educational partners. The problem has often been that communication between the school and the home has been inadequate, inconvenient and belated. By the time the report card comes out, bad habits have been formed and skills prerequisite to future learning have not been acquired, increasing the chance of yet more academic failure.  How can technology improve home/school communications to the degree that parents and teachers can become true educational partners and increase the chance of all children’s success – especially that of the Bradys out there?

While our district has been encouraging the use of e-mail and teacher-created classroom web pages for a number of years, we have just recently fully implemented a program that gives parents “real-time” access to their children’s academic progress. (While my district uses a Pearson product called ParentConnectxp, there are a number of programs on the market that also provide parent access to student information.)

Using a web browser, parents in our district can now log-on and see their individual students’ attendance, health, and discipline records; current class registration; grades; GPA; class rank; and course history. In addition, parents can actually peer into teachers’ grade books to see their children’s scores on daily work, tests and projects; what assignments may be late; and what tests or projects are coming up. If requested, this program will automatically send parents an e-mail message if their child is tardy or absent, fails to turn an assignment, or performs poorly on a test.

For parents who have grown accustomed to online access to bank accounts, flight status, and online purchase shipments, checking their children’s progress in school is a natural. Rather than simply relying on quarterly report cards that tell little about student performance other than a final grade or short, semi-annual parent-teacher conferences, parents can monitor their children’s work on a daily basis. They can also check the accuracy of their children’s health, discipline, and demographic information. The tenor of suppertime conversations change from a casually asked, “How’s school going?” with a grunted reply of “Fine,” to a genuine discussion based on what’s happening in school this week.

While initially teachers were concerned about the additional time burden of the program, an increased amount of e-mail from parents, and the potential of compromised student privacy, this program has proven to be popular with both parents and teachers - although less so with students. Concerned parents can get questions answered without frequent e-mails and telephone calls to individual teachers. Since the program imports data directly from the student information system and electronic grade books, there are no additional reporting requirements on the part of the teacher.  Strict server security and a formal procedure for registering parent usernames and passwords help insure student data privacy.

What teachers have found is that they need to keep their grade books current and have a defensible system for how grades are determined. Both of which are simply good professional practice anyway. And of course, this program does little for parents without computer skills, ready access to the Internet or much interest in their children’s education.

Looking not far down the path, it seems natural that the next step for our district will be to create links between assignments and projects to the curriculum standards they meet and the assessments used to evaluate them. Having those pieces of information will allow parents to be “quality control managers” of homework and projects.

In a 1999 survey, the Horace Mann Educators Corporation found that 96% of American adults said parents should partner with teachers in their children’s education. < http://www.horacemann.com/html/news/news1999-09-13.html>. As competition for students heats up, schools giving parents access to their children’s educational progress in real time is as necessary as a bank giving customers access to online statements.