The Wall Street Journal is reporting that recent data released by the
New York City Department of Education shows that the level of parental
involvement with the school system has fallen to a new low this year.
The information is giving ammunition to critics of both the Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott for fostering a culture
at the Department of Education that is “unresponsive to families.”
All indications seem to be that the efforts by Walcott to increase
parental engagement haven’t paid off, as the participation in phone
calls, attendance at parent-teacher conferences and school-hosted
workshops during the 2011-2012 academic year was substantially lower
than the year before. In some cases, parents and guardians of students
were 50% less likely to interact with teachers over the course of the
year than they were during 2008-2009. In the instance of
parent-coordinator workshops, the attendance fell from over 450,000 to
less than 270,000 between 2009-10 and 2010-11.
Mr. Walcott pledged last fall to ease parents’ frustration with the massive bureaucracy in part by opening parent academies in every borough. He said he had listened to parents’ complaints about feeling lost and unable to be heard amid a centralized bureaucracy. The academies have not opened, although school officials said plans are moving forward. In the October 2011 speech, Mr. Walcott said he would start including parent involvement statistics in schools’ annual report cards and offered bookmarks with tips on how to make the most of parent-teacher conferences.
However, over the course of the last few years, as a money-saving
measure, the DOE has laid off 63 coordinators who were charged with
facilitating parent-faculty communications. Although having coordinators
was once considered mandatory at all schools, the new policy makes them
optional for high schools.
Some are attributing the decreasing engagement numbers to the general
dissatisfaction with how the DOE is run and specifically to the
inadequacy of its parental outreach efforts. One such critic is Rachel
Leinweber, who used to be a teacher in the NYC public school system
before she stayed home with her children. She said that her familiarity
with how schools in the district function has almost forced her to take
on the role of a coordinator herself, helping other parents of her
children’s classmates navigate the same system.
“Getting to anybody at the DOE, you have to be a mastermind,” she said. “The DOE has become an administrative nightmare for almost all the parents I know, regarding anything.”
Ms. Leinweber said some parents she knows stopped going to parent-teacher conferences after waiting in line for 20 to 30 minutes for a seven-minute meeting with a teacher.
