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public schools: parents, please go away

This story just comes out and says it: parents just need to quit poking their noses where they don’t belong!

They are needy, overanxious and sometimes plain pesky — and schools at every level are trying to find ways to deal with them.

No, not students. Parents — specifically parents of today’s "millennial generation" who, many educators are discovering, can’t let their kids go.

They text message their children in middle school, use the cellphone like an umbilical cord to Harvard Yard and have no compunction about marching into kindergarten class and screaming at a teacher about a grade.

To handle the modern breed of micromanaging parent, educators are devising programs to help them separate from their kids — and they are taking a harder line on especially intrusive parents.

At seminars, such as one in Phoenix last year titled "Managing Millennial Parents," they swap strategies on how to handle the "hovercrafts" or "helicopter parents," so dubbed because of a propensity to swoop in at the slightest crisis.

Educators worry not only about how their school climates are affected by intrusive parents trying to set their own agendas but also about the ability of young people to become independent.

Spunky Homeschooler is, shall we say, less than impressed:

Educator and author Rosalind Wiseman calls parents who try to set the agenda for schools "queen bee moms" and "kingpin dads." What’s ironic about Ms. Wiseman is that she is the co-founder of the Empower Program, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating teenagers about violence. So it’s alright for a complete stranger to fret over my children but I’m supposed to back off or be labeled a "Queen Bee". Sorry Ms. Wiseman you’ve got it all backwards. It is you and your social engineers who need to quit attempting to parent our nation’s children and resenting the involvement of those whom God has entrusted to their care. It is the parents of this nation who need to collectively say to our nation’s schools and the "experts" who want to raise them for us – BACK OFF! They are NOT your children!

I hope parents will finally see that our nation’s government schools are a conduit for social engineering meant to replace the parent with the state as the primary influence in children’s lives. For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear let them understand before it’s too late.

MORE: Mwheh. 

Sorry folks. You can’t have it both ways. You need to decide which excuse you’re going to use and stick with it. This will just confuse everyone. How will NEA, CTA, CDE, ACSA, CCSESA, CSBA and others know who to blame? They’ll never be able to keep the excuses straight without help.

Now, for a few caveats.  Drill deeper in the WaPo article, and you’ll find this isn’t merely a public school phenomenon:

A number of private schools have added language in their enrollment contracts and handbooks warning that a student can be asked to leave as a result of a parent’s behavior. Some have tossed out children because their parents became too difficult to work with. (emphasis added)

Now that’s an interesting, albeit heavy-handed, way of dealing with the problem.  Rather than the government school trying to mold the behavior of parent and student, the school simply says, "Our way or the highway."  In other words, society copes with social problems rather than government trying to fix them.  Hmmm…