When Parents Drop Out

By Jodie Morse With Reporting By Melissa August/Washington, John U. Bacon/Ann Arbor, Amy Bonesteel/Atlanta, Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Paul Cuadros/Kings Mountain And Maggie Sieger/Louisville

For several years, the public schools of Norton, Mass., a college town an hour south of Boston, have wrestled with low attendance. The students aren't the problem; they're marked present for class an impressive 94% of the time. But their parents are a different story. The district invited 1,000 parents to a drug and alcohol seminar, but only two showed up. The turnout at some parent-teacher conferences can be just as paltry. At a public meeting, where droves of parents joined a heated debate on the future of Norton's middle-school basketball league, the room cleared out when talk turned to Item B on the evening's agenda--the district's scores on the state's tough, new standardized exam. Says Richard Zusman, one of the district's curriculum coordinators: "It really makes you wonder what's important to these parents."

Lois Bean worries about the same thing. An eighth-grade teacher in the upscale Atlanta suburb of Lilburn, she says her problem students have one thing in common: detached parents. Bean's efforts to get their mothers and fathers to attend back-to-school night, help out with research papers or even return her phone calls are often in vain. Those same parents are usually no-shows even at the Little League games that her family frequents. "We end up giving the same kids, who live in beautiful homes, a ride home every night," she says. "These aren't bad parents, but absentee parents."

One of the themes that TIME writers heard consistently while reporting on candidates for our Schools of the Year was that many parents--a minority, but still too many--have virtually dropped out of their children's education. Each school that we have recognized as outstanding has found innovative ways to get parents more involved--but those schools often work against a strong headwind. In a poll conducted earlier this year by Public Agenda, a nonprofit research organization, 70% of parents said they had not volunteered to tutor or coach in the past two years, and 60% said they had not attended a single community event held at their child's school. In a U.S. Education Department survey in 1999, 1 in 4 parents said he or she does not attend parent-teacher conferences.

Recent studies, including one released last week by the University of Michigan, show that kids in two-parent families spend more time with Mom and Dad than kids did 20 years ago. But much of that time is spent on activities like shopping or watching TV together. In a survey conducted last year for TIME and the Nickelodeon channel, 24% of kids felt their parents showed little or no interest in what they studied at school. Says Kim Joiner, a technology consultant at Conway Middle School in Louisville, Ky.: "It's very popular to say we have a problem in education, but it's not very popular to say we have a parent problem."

Such talk, long limited to hushed exchanges in the faculty lounge, has broken into the open. Because teachers are increasingly held to stricter performance standards, they are demanding the same of parents. "We're now discovering that even small class sizes with the best teachers and best materials may not be enough to fix a school," says Heather Weiss, director of Harvard's Family Research Project. "If you get parents on board then you've got a better shot." To lure them back, schools are doing everything from sending teachers on house calls to giving parents a larger role in school reform. The moves are backed by new federal legislation that says a school won't get money unless it proves that its parents are getting involved.

Dropout parents are found across the spectrum of income and education. Low-income couples and single moms often juggle multiple jobs, and have little time or energy for teacher conferences or homework help. Professional couples with two demanding careers often view the schools as subcontractors whom they pay, through hefty taxes, to fill ever more complex roles: as babysitters, coaches, cops, nurses, therapists and surrogate parents. These extra burdens come at a time when teachers face rising pressure to show results in the classroom. Isabelle Carduner, a French teacher at Huron High School in Ann Arbor, Mich., says too many parents are "overextended with their jobs. When I tell them there's a problem with their kids, they literally say, 'You handle it.' That's the group that frustrates me the most."

To be sure, parental frustrations are running equally high. Moms and dads accustomed to the instant gratification of e-mail can spend dizzying days trying to connect with teachers, many of whom don't have computers or voicemail. For many working parents, meeting a teacher between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. is simply impossible.

Both schools and parents need to change. Joyce Epstein, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who has spent two decades studying children, families and schools, has found that parental involvement in a child's education--more than a family's educational background--can be one of the strongest predictors of a child's academic success. Activities like sitting on school steering committees and running capital campaigns, which may make parents feel committed, have a negligible effect on kids' achievements. Much more fruitful are the connections parents make with their children at home, dissecting what happened in class that day or puzzling over an assignment together. And teachers can help spark those discussions. In a yearlong study, Epstein tracked 700 Baltimore middle schoolers from families with little formal education whose teachers imposed a new rule: the students were required to discuss their language-arts homework with a family member. Result: higher grades and more enthusiastic writers.

And parental interest shouldn't be limited to the classroom, for many of life's lessons are learned in the extracurriculars. As Harvard's Weiss says, "A parent may not have the time to coach a team but you sure as heck better get to the game." And pay close attention. Atlanta dad and soccer coach David Black remembers looking to the father of a timid 8-year-old forward to shout a few words of encouragement as his daughter went charging down the field, only to find that Dad was talking on a cell phone and riffling through a manila envelope during his daughter's shining moment. Says Black: "I don't think he even noticed she was on the field."

Studies show that parental involvement drops off drastically in the teenage years--a full 50% between sixth and ninth grades. But research likewise shows that parents who back off in the face of teen surliness are making a big mistake at a time when students are making academic decisions with real consequence for their future.

What can schools do to encourage that engagement? Here are five ideas that are showing results:

--DO LUNCH. When parents resisted coming to events at school, teachers in Norton, Mass., got scores of families to turn out for free ice cream at a McDonald's Math and Science Night. Another evening, about 300 headed to the local Roche Bros. supermarket. Over free samples of sauteed scallops, chips and cake, teachers explained the state's new math and science standards and gave parents creative, do-at-home activities to help explore with their kids the finer points of density and the decimal system. As parents shopped, teachers conducted impromptu conferences with some they hadn't set eyes on all year.

Helen Chaset, principal of Burning Tree Elementary in the tony Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md., began scheduling meetings with parents at the board room of a District of Columbia law firm convenient to the offices where many worked. Her first brown-bag lunch there was packed with 25 parents--two-thirds of whom Chaset had never seen at a group meeting before. "There is an element of guilt because you just can't be there all the time," says Gail Scott, a lawyer for the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and mother of three who made time for the luncheon.

--GIVE PARENTS REAL POWER. In place of feeble PTAs, many districts have sanctioned so-called school-improvement teams that give parents a powerful hand in everything from hiring and firing teachers to selecting the texts their children will study. Five years ago, parents and teachers at Conway Middle School in Louisville were "enemies," according to principal Steve St. Claire. So he invited parents to take part in teacher-training sessions, where they helped develop guidelines for grading student work. When the state released the school's standardized test scores, parents and teachers analyzed them together. And the school invited students to lead their own parent-teacher conferences, explaining what they were--and weren't--learning. It was probably no accident that this school year, Conway reached the "rewards" level on Kentucky's standardized exam, which means that a significant percentage of students scored higher than average. And the school now has to turn away families from across the county who'd like to enroll their children.

--MAKE HOUSE CALLS. Jocelyn Graves, a single mom who lives in downtown Sacramento, Calif., felt that her son's school was run by suburban educators who didn't understand or care about her son. She began grumbling to friends and found that many were equally disaffected. At an informal school meeting, Graves acerbically suggested teachers could better understand students and parents by visiting their homes. Three years and 6,000 home visits later, the Sacramento schools' Home-Visit Project is credited with helping turn around the district's parents and its students. Reading scores on standardized exams have gone up 32%, math scores surged 66%. In a recent survey, 89% of parents said their children were performing better in school. The results have been so stunning that last year California approved a $15 million statewide home-visit program and districts in four other states launched pilot projects.

In the Sacramento model, teachers go to the homes of their students at least once each school year to chat with parents about what their child will study in the coming year and how precisely parents can help with homework assignments. For teachers, the visits can amount to a crash course in sensitivity training. Teachers visit homes in pairs and, once inside, have a relaxed chat with parents rather than levying instructions as they would in a classroom. Often that means overlooking threadbare interiors or a family's less-than-scholarly choice of reading material. Jennifer Ching Moff, a third-grade teacher at Sacramento's Woodbine Elementary who has logged 220 visits since the beginning of the program, lives in a suburb and ordinarily would not spend her after-school hours in a ZIP code where her pupils reside. The visits have been humbling. One family owned little furniture and had to borrow some folding chairs for Moff's visit; others welcomed her with sodas and snacks they'd been saving for a special occasion. "It's just a matter of changing the context of things because you know the children a little better and you've seen their soccer trophies," says Moff. "I didn't really understand the neighborhood or the kids and the parents until I walked in their shoes."

--HOLD PARENTS ACCOUNTABLE. The parents, teachers and administrators of all 11 million children in Title I schools--those that serve the nation's poorest students--are required to sign "compacts" that typically stipulate, among other things, how many hours parents will read with their children each week. At the KIPP Academies, two successful charter schools in Houston and New York City, parents, teachers and students sign contracts pledging everything from adherence to the dress code (teachers and students) to checking homework (parents). If students repeatedly slip up, the academies can send them back to a regular public school.

--GIVE PARENTS TALKING POINTS. TIME's High School of the Year, Stonewall Jackson, in Manassas, Va., is only one of the schools that are using Internet and voicemail systems to encourage parents to stay informed about what the kids are doing in school. Parents in Forsyth County, Ga., can log onto a website that shows everything from the levels that students must achieve on Georgia's standardized exam to what their child's next term paper is on--and when it's due. "I have to admit I don't go to PTA meetings, but I can check up on homework assignments, projects and grades while I'm at work," says Bailey Mitchell, father of a ninth-grader.

The success of all these reforms depends on the willingness of parents and schools to change. That's the mission of a weekly night class called Parent Partners held in Kings Mountain, N.C. At the close of a recent confessional-style session, Pressley Barrino, 38, a lighting technician and father of two, told how he made some mistakes with his first child, who spent time in reform school. He's doing things differently with his 8-year-old daughter Nakia--reading to her at night and helping with homework. He has even taken to dropping by her school during his lunch hour to check in with her teacher. Barrino tells the group: "A child who knows you're behind her does a lot better." So, too, does a teacher.

--With reporting by Melissa August/Washington, John U. Bacon/Ann Arbor, Amy Bonesteel/Atlanta, Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Paul Cuadros/Kings Mountain and Maggie Sieger/Louisville