Many parents of children in academically struggling schools still believe their child is getting a fine education. They are either unfazed by the lackluster test scores or unaware of them.
What they notice — and what they value — is that their 10-year-old son's artwork hangs in the school hallway or their 15-year-old daughter marches on the field with the band on Friday nights. Parents talk about how hard the teachers work, regardless of how the school's test scores rank with other schools across the state. They feel their children are accepted and encouraged.
In political debates, parental contentment is increasingly accorded as much weight as academic performance.
I've sat through school board hearings on charter school renewals where parent after parent testified how much they loved their school and wanted it to remain open, despite achievement scores below what was promised or what the state deemed adequate.
As states encourage the creation of still more charter schools, parental satisfaction will become more important. For example, the Georgia Legislature created a commission that can override local school boards in creating charters, enabling the schools to collect and spend local tax dollars now denied to them. In the first flexing of the new law — a case likely to end up in court — the Charter Schools Commission earlier this month sanctioned charter schools in Norcross and Statesboro over the objections of the Bulloch and Gwinnett school boards.
Research on charter schools often highlights remarkable levels of parental satisfaction. Unfortunately, those parental satisfaction scores sometimes outshine math and reading scores.
Is parental happiness enough reason to decree a school a success? Are marching bands, art classes and drama programs acceptable surrogates for strong academic performance?
Or is the core mission of any school reading, writing and arithmetic, and everything else extraneous?
It's like a company in which the employee softball team wins the league championship every year. But the softball standings don't do much for the company's stock price. If employees are hitting the balls out of the park but aren't moving any inventory off the floor, no one would declare that company a success.
Certainly, students derive benefits from a marching band or glee club, as do employees from a company-sponsored softball or bowling team. But a sinking company can't climb atop a trophy case of first-place bowling ribbons to stay afloat.
Should a school be measured any differently?
In many struggling schools, bright spots exist — a terrific visual arts program, a clever robotics team or an edgy literary magazine. But despite these islands of excellence, the schools still register abysmal scores, low SATs and poor graduation rates.
There isn't a lot of research correlating parental satisfaction with student achievement.
A 2003 study by University of Texas researchers found that Hispanic and low-income parents were more satisfied than other parents with their schools even though their children had lower achievement. "This finding is significant because many state accountability policies assume that low achievement scores cause parents to become dissatisfied and that this dissatisfaction drives school improvement," concluded the study.
Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, a 1992 federal study also noted a disconnect between actual student performance and parental satisfaction. Despite low scores on a national math test, most parents of eighth-graders felt their child's school was doing a good job in readying students for high school and college. While the disconnect was true for most parents, it was more pronounced among parents of low-achieving students and students attending schools in high-poverty neighborhoods.
The study found that parents typically relied on classroom grades to judge their student's performance, even though grades weren't necessarily an accurate snapshot. Forty-five percent of students who scored on the bottom quarter of the national math test reported earning As and Bs in their math classes.
It's not always a given that parents can tell how well their child is doing in school, even when the parent is attentive and educated.
I know college-educated parents who didn't realize until middle school that their child couldn't read. Somehow, the child compensated and the school didn't catch it.
Other parents assumed that their child was an A student — that's what the report card always told them — until they moved to a new school system and received the dispiriting news that their student lagged in math and reading.
Even when a school is publicly labeled as failing, parents may disagree.
As one mother at a school with consistently poor test scores told me, "The state may say our school is failing, but it's not failing my child."
About the Author
