By Mark
I doubt this will ever fly, but it sure makes for good staff lunchroom conversation.
A CNN.com article reported that Florida State Rep. Kelli Stargel has presented a bill wherein "public school teachers would be required to grade the parents of students in kindergarten through the third grade." The three grading criteria:
• A child should be at school on time, prepared to learn after a good night's sleep, and have eaten a meal.
• A child should have the homework done and prepared for examinations.
• There should be regular communication between the parent and teacher.
At first I thought it was a joke, and now I think that this bill is more a social statement than an actual attempt at creating the law.
What's your take? Below is the video that accompanied the article, sorry about the commercials which precede it.
and clix, I always tell the kids that lockout is a gift and a punishment: the gift is the time to get caught up so they can move forward fully prepared, the punishment is the isolation and being “out of the club” for a little while.
If I have frequent fliers in lockout (more than twice in the same week or twice in a row) we arrange for them to serve non-disciplinary “academic detention” where they are required to spend a half hour with me after school for one-on-one help…this gets arranged with parents/guardians, etc., and is actually a building wide policy: teachers can require students to come to this “academic detention” and it has no impact on their discipline record…if a student fails to show up for an arranged appointment, then we can write a discipline referral if we choose. It is supposed to be like “office hours” in college, where kids are supposed to make appointments for help/remediation.
@clix… More often than not, what they are missing is something they don’t want to miss: whole-group socratic (which surprisingly is the thing they work hardest not to miss), a review game, viewing a video. If they miss lecture or oral reading, they have to get notes from my website and show me they ALSO did that.
I actually enforce it by having consequences for the kids not in lockout… if anyone NOT in lockout communicates with someone in lockout, the non-l.o. kid owes me a week’s detention (I only have to play that card once every few years for the legend to spread and people to take me seriously!)
Once a kid has finished the work they didn’t do, they rejoin the group, and usually a peer catches them up or I make the time to work with them. It also helps reinforce that the work I ask them to do isn’t just to fill the gradebook, it is necessary in order to move on to the next step…and they see that.
mark: how do you enforce lockout (ie making sure other students don’t distract / interact? What about the instruction they’re missing?
I’m not interested in grading parents, either. I’ve always found that you get more done befriending them.
On the other hand, it troubles me that some parents care a lot more about their kids’ school pictures than about having them complete their daily homework.
A good education results from everyone doing their part: teachers, administrators, parents and students.
I wonder why we seem to think that “holding someone accountable” and “giving them a grade, score, or ranking” are the same thing.
When I hold my own kids accountable, for example if they don’t clean up their toys…natural consequence is they don’t get those toys any more. I don’t give them a score on toy-cleaned-upping-ness.
When I hold my own students accountable, it isn’t just about a grade…they show up without homework, they go into “lockout,” which is social isolation where they get time to finish the homework but are not allowed human contact with anyone but me (AND, they get 50% on the homework). Yes, they still do the homework even though they only get part credit, because (1) they can’t stand the isolation, even the loner kids, and (2) they have come to realize that every assignment builds to the next one and if you do the work, the next step is easier.
Used to be that I’d threaten just F’s for all who didn’t bring an assignment, and a quarter to a third might come back empty handed. I threaten lockout, and maybe one or two out of thirty shows up without it…and the first thing they do is spin their desk into lockout so they can finish. To me, that is holding them accountable.
Whose job is it to hold the parents accountable? I don’t know that this ought to be the role of the school…though I wish we had ample enough social services that schools could have the power to refer parents to community/court resources for guidance in parenting when we see things that are alarming. As is, we can pretty much only act if we see abuse or neglect.
Jeez, it took me 15 years to get efficient enough at grading my students that I could have some sort of personal life.
I don’t think I’m interested in grading parents.
In Seattle, the new teacher evaluation system takes test scores into account, but also takes into account attendance and disciplinary action. So, in a sense, if you have a child whose scores didn’t demonstrate growth, but he was in class 20% of the time, it doesn’t count against your effectiveness as a teacher…one would hope.