My Mom Made Honor Roll

By Jodie Morse

Next Tuesday is report-card day at Chicago's Harold Washington Elementary School, and Tracy Bates is already on edge. She earned A's and B's last semester in most subjects, including attendance and presentable uniforms. But she's been working to pull up the D she got in homework monitoring. Bates, you see, is a 39-year-old stay-at-home mom whose daughter is a fifth-grader at Harold Washington.

With teachers and students held to increasingly stringent academic standards, a small but growing number of schools around the country are insisting that parents also make the grade. Harold Washington has issued its parents their own report cards for several years. Chicago has announced plans to take a similar practice district-wide this fall, when it will send home reports on the moms and dads of the 431,000 kids in grades K through 12. Posted at five-week intervals, the reports will rate parents--good, satisfactory or less than satisfactory--on points including whether they get their children to bed on time or show up for school events. Parents who accrue enough demerits risk the equivalent of academic probation: a house call from a district volunteer or an invitation to a crash course in child rearing.

The Chicago district, plagued by dismal standardized test scores, hopes this new approach will increase parental involvement, especially among its many teenage and first-time parents. "Teachers walk around moaning that it's all the parents' fault," says Chicago's schools chief, Paul Vallas. "This program will take away those excuses."

But it's spawning a swarm of new complaints--and not just from grade-wary parents. Some educators argue that the program is pointless paper pushing. Worse, they insist, grades will turn off the very parents schools need to engage. "Should a single parent who works two jobs and doesn't have much time for school activities get her knuckles rapped?" asks Gary Natriello, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College who has studied report cards of all kinds. "It will only make her more likely to hide at home."

A more measured approach is used at Baltimore's Dr. Bernard Harris Sr. Elementary School, which mailed out self-scoring parent reports last fall. After parents rate themselves in areas like provides "pencil and school supplies" or "attended back-to- school night," children bring back the transcript. So far, says principal Lucretia Coates, the rate of return has been "overwhelming." One reason: children who hand in their parents' grades get entered in a raffle to win jewelry, yo-yos or Pokemon cards.

Just seeing their parents scrutinized is incentive enough for some students to improve. Shanece Bates, 10, says of her mom, "I'm glad she got some bad grades too and really knew how I was doing. Now we're back on track." And if mom can just bring up that homework grade, she has a shot at making the parent honor roll.

--By Jodie Morse. With reporting by Lynn Emmerman/Chicago

With reporting by Lynn Emmerman/Chicago