Parental Pawns and Window Dressing

There’s no bigger sham in public schooling than “parental involvement,” a concept that educrats trot out whenever they want to show that they aren’t scared of parents or when they’re trying to curry parental favor. Otherwise,  they avoid it like the plague.

Ordinarily, parental involvement translates into sheer window dressing; feel-good activities that let parents do fun things with their children, but that in no way interfere with a school’s daily operations.

An article in today’s Lexington Herald-Leader discusses just such fluff, profiling a Kentucky program in which teams of parents and teachers run art projects in local schools. Apparently, the initiative has hit its public relations mark:

"It’s a wonderful way to get parents and teachers working together,” one parent gushed. “I think any time parents and teachers are working together, it can only benefit children.”

A less common, but more devilish, type of “parental involvement” is when politicians seeking ever-more authority over schools use parents as pawns to get it. The struggle for power over schools in Los Angeles between Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) provides perfect examples of such politicized parental involvement.

Yesterday, for instance, Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot charter schools, announced the creation of a “parents union” that will lobby to give Villaraigosa more power over the district. Of course, the union will only be composed of activists who support Villaraigosa, not parents in general. But, then again, Barr is only responding to the politicized use of parents by the opposition:

Barr said he became convinced of the need to organize parents after traveling to Sacramento last month to testify in favor of the Los Angeles Unified School District reform bill. He was baffled, he said, when he saw 50 parents who had been bused to the state capital by the LAUSD claiming to represent the views of all district parents.

In the end, the only way for all parents to have meaningful involvement in their children’s education is through school choice. Only when they can remove their kids from bad schools, and put them in good ones, will parents be able to force educators to respond to their needs. Of course, that’s one kind of parental involvement educrats will never support.