PARENTS' CONCERNS, INVOLVEMENT ROUTINELY DISMISSED BY TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS
By Onnie Shekerjian
TownHall.com Reader Comment, February 24, 2002

Dear Mr. Goldberg, 

I appreciated your comments in your column "Supreme Court Shouldn't Kill School Choice" (TownHall.com, February 22, 2002). It was the first I had heard of Robert Chanin's choice of words when it came to the use of vouchers in Cleveland. When he spoke of the parent's role as being nothing more than "ritualistic" he spoke volumes about the crux of the problem in public schools today. It isn't just in the case of the Cleveland vouchers that parents are viewed as fulfilling a ritualistic role; it is how most of us are viewed and treated by the traditional public schools regarding our role in our children's academic lives.

I know first hand of this - I have three children: 19 years old, 16 years old and 11 years old. I have been an involved parent having served on over 50 committees, task forces, commissions, and board at the school, district, state and even the national level over the last 14 years. I have even been a district school board member (Kyrene School District, a K-8 district of approximately 19,000 students) and currently sit on the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, an entity that sponsors and monitors over 300 school sites in Arizona. And through the years, it has been made clear to me that my role in my children's school life was to lend support not to our child's individual educational needs, but to the institution that housed them. It is clear when public school folks talk of parent involvement it really means xeroxing and fundraising (with an emphasis on fundraising). But whoa! Don't voice any concerns or question any practices! Do that and you were then deemed a " High Maintenance Parent"!

Years ago, one school in our district actually identified "High Maintenance Parents" with a "blue dot" on their child's information card. This card was used to place the child with the following year's teachers. The reason? They didn't want any one teacher to be "burdened" with too many of these types of parents. Can you believe that? Instead of seeing highly interested and educated parents (at the time, 34% of our parents had a bachelors degree or above) as a resource, they were seen as a burden. The school staff stopped the practice once one of the teachers, disgusted by the process, made the practice known to the parents.

My husband and I researched and chose our school district. Our children live in a home with a mom and a dad who loved each other and work as a team in raising children. We decided I would put my career on hold to be a stay at home mom. Our children have curfews; we know their friends and their friends' parents. We help with homework and projects and read with our children. And our kids actually enjoy spending time with us. Yet, even in this ideal situation, each of our three children fell through the cracks, academically, and our schools didn't have a mechanism to do anything about it. It was math for our two daughters and reading for our 11 year old son. While my personal repertoire of horror stories as a parent could fill several volumes, I will just give you one example: I will share with you our oldest child's story.

When our 19 year old daughter, Emily, was in 5th grade, she began disliking math and making statements to the effect that she wasn't very good in math. I knew from reading that in this country we begin losing girls in math and science in the 4th through 6th grade. One day, in the grocery store, we were practicing some techniques I had learned at a seminar called "Family Math". It became very clear that my daughter, despite her grades of A's and B's in math could not do simple problems in her head: problems like 9 + 4. When we arrived home, I tested her on paper; she had no greater success at home than in the grocery store. My husband and I became very worried. I attempted to conference with the teacher sending in several notes, leaving phone messages for her and even stopping by to catch her after school. Unfortunately, she was always the first one out of the parking lot. I had no success in connecting with her. I called and left a message for the principal requesting a meeting between her, the teacher, my husband and me. Within ten minutes the teacher returned my call, crying and asking why the principal needed to be involved. I explained I had been trying for weeks to speak with her about Emily and her lack of ability to do simple computations. The teacher was completely unaware of our daughter's lack of math competence.

At the meeting, we were told Emily was doing fine in math. The company line changed when we produced almost a month's worth of ungraded homework that showed vividly my daughter's inadequacies. Then we were told it was completely fine our daughter couldn't do computations, she understood the math concepts and could use a calculator the rest of her life. Let me tell you, this didn't fly with us. I asked for extra homework that would support the learning in the classroom so that I could work with Emily after school. I was told I would only frustrate her because I was not "an education professional" (No, I am not joking.) I decided to take a different tact on this discussion asking about my daughter's self-esteem in the area of math. After all, this was an area the school felt was important. I was told " we have strategies we can employ to boost your daughter's self-esteem." Even 8 years later I can remember word for word that statement. "How about helping her to become competent at math?" I asked. It was insinuated that we were making too big a deal over the math issue.

Fortunately, we had the resources to supplement our children's education with Kumon math and tutors. We weren't alone. There were many kids at our children's elementary school that had tutors. So many that a couple of the teachers had a cottage industry going with summer and after school tutoring. We placed both of our little girls in Kumon for two school years. I am proud to report that Emily is now in her second year at Arizona State University, studying bioengineering and had the highest cumulative grade in her Calculus section last semester. Kari, our other daughter, is in Honors PreCalculus as a Junior at Corona Del Sol High School. She has her own math story that I won't bother to share with you. I can guarantee you our daughters' success would have never occurred if we, as parents, had not been vigilant and had the resources to buy help.

When my son came along and had reading problems, again, the neighborhood school was disinterested in helping us. We moved him to a charter school. In 18 months he went from being 6 months below grade level to scoring post high school on most of the language and reading areas of the Stanford 9's. His story (Nick's Story: How a Charter School Changed Everything for My Son) is featured in this month's Parent Power! newsletter put out by the Center for Education Reform.

If it can happen to our children in a good family situation, with an educated mom who has the time and interest to be intimately involved, what chance does a kid have when the mother is single, working two jobs to put food on the table, may have an 8th grade education and doesn't understand English very well. I can tell you - that kid has a slim chance, at best, of getting a quality education.

My personal experiences are not atypical of parents these days. I know because I have worked a parent advocacy hotline for the last 7 years, listening to parents vent because their child's individual needs were not being met. As one Mom who's 4th grade daughter couldn't read summed it up best, "It's like watching your child drown and you don't hold the life preserver, the school does. And they aren't willing to throw it to your child." You see, the school acknowledged her child couldn't read and kept telling this mom that next year's teacher would work with the child. The mother called asking me about charter schools.

In Arizona, we actually have some competition with the proliferation of charter schools - it is estimated that next year, 71,000 of the 860,000 public school students in Arizona will be attending public charter schools. The competition is having a huge ripple effect on traditional districts. As they lose children (read dollars) they are slowly coming to terms with the fact that each child's education is important. It is no longer acceptable to think as one superintendent said to me " well you know, some kids just aren't going to get it." I can guarantee in that guy's district, some of the kids were destine to not "get it". Because parents choose and transport children to charter schools, these schools clearly understand who is ultimately responsible and in charge of a child's education. With increased choices for parents, even the traditional district public schools will eventually be forced to see that the children they teach are not wards of the state and that parents should be seen and treated as fulfilling much more than a "ritualistic" role in their children's education.

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Onnie Shekerjian is a mother and school activist. She has served on over 50 committees, task forces, commissions, and board at the school, district, state and even the national level over the last 14 years, is a former district school board member, and currently sit on the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools.

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