Parents as students

From the beginning, the education reform equation has been missing an important factor: parents. State and federal authorities have been too eager to place the blame for low achievement on schools and teachers while virtually ignoring the fact that it’s a rare student who can succeed in even an excellent school without involved parents.

So we’re glad to see that this topic is on the agenda for Tuesday’s board meeting of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Yolie Flores, perhaps the board’s most reform-minded member, will be pushing for a more concerted, organized effort to inform and engage parents.

Most L.A. Unified schools have parent centers, open a few hours a day, where parents can receive advice and information and use computers to track their children’s progress. But Flores says there are wide disparities in the centers’ quality: There are no district-wide requirements for staff training; the centers often are open only during hours when parents must be at work; the district lacks standards for the information parents must receive, or the equipment that must be available, or how inviting the center must look, or what kind of outreach it must do to bring parents on campus.

It will take some additional funding to bring all of the centers up to standard. Flores’ idea is to reduce the number of parent advisory committees and subcommittees, which advise the district on curriculum, administrative and other issues. The committees cost the district several hundred thousand dollars a year in meals, child care and other accommodations for the parent volunteers who serve on them. These members are sure to protest that the district is diminishing parent involvement, not increasing it, but Flores contends that the committees accomplish very little.

Certainly, a high priority for the district should be to welcome and prod the parents who never set foot on campus. A school district as big as L.A. Unified can seem intimidating; many well-meaning parents are ill-informed about how to check whether their children are completing their homework and doing well on assignments and tests. Teachers also complain, justifiably, about parents who never make it to back-to-school night or other campus events; who too seldom get their children to school regularly or on time; who are unreachable by phone or mail, or refuse to cooperate.

Better parent centers won’t solve it all, but they’re a potentially important start. The board should be willing to set standards to strengthen the centers, and to review impartially whether the parent advisory committees are fulfilling a needed mission.