Parents Behaving Badly

If you could walk past the teachers’ lounge and listen in, what sorts of stories would you hear? An Iowa high school counselor gets a call from a parent protesting the C her child received on an assignment. “The parent argued every point in the essay,” recalls the counselor, who soon realized why the mother was so upset about the grade. “It became apparent that she’d written it.”

A sixth-grade teacher in California tells a girl in her class that she needs to work on her reading at home, not just in school. “Her mom came in the next day,” the teacher says, “and started yelling at me that I had emotionally upset her child.”

A science teacher in Baltimore, Md., was offering lessons in anatomy when one of the boys in class declared, “There’s one less rib in a man than in a woman.” The teacher pulled out two skeletons–one male, the other female–and asked the student to count the ribs in each. “The next day,” the teacher recalls, “the boy claimed he told his priest what happened and his priest said I was a heretic.”

A teacher at a Tennessee elementary school slips on her kid gloves each morning as she contends with parents who insist, in writing, that their children are never to be reprimanded or even corrected. When she started teaching 31 years ago, she says, “I could make objective observations about my kids without parents getting offended. But now we handle parents a lot more delicately. We handle children a lot more delicately. They feel good about themselves for no reason. We’ve given them this cotton-candy sense of self with no basis in reality. We don’t emphasize what’s best for the greater good of society or even the classroom.”

When our children are born, we study their every eyelash and marvel at the perfection of their toes, and in no time become experts in all that they do. But then the day comes when we are expected to hand them over to a stranger standing at the head of a room full of bright colors and small chairs. Well aware of the difference a great teacher can make–and the damage a bad teacher can do–parents turn over their kids and hope. Please handle with care. Please don’t let my children get lost. They’re breakable. And precious. Oh, but push them hard and don’t let up, and make sure they get into Harvard.

But if parents are searching for the perfect teacher, teachers are looking for the ideal parent, a partner but not a pest, engaged but not obsessed, with a sense of perspective and patience. And somehow just at the moment when the experts all say the parent-teacher alliance is more important than ever, it is also becoming harder to manage. At a time when competition is rising and resources are strained, when battles over testing and accountability force schools to adjust their priorities, when cell phones and e-mail speed up the information flow and all kinds of private ghosts and public quarrels creep into the parent-teacher conference, it’s harder for both sides to step back and breathe deeply and look at the goals they share.

Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It’s one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this “the most treacherous part of their jobs.”

“Everyone says the parent-teacher conference should be pleasant, civilized, a kind of dialogue where parents and teachers build alliances,” Lawrence-Lightfoot observes. “But what most teachers feel, and certainly what all parents feel, is anxiety, panic and vulnerability.” While teachers worry most about the parents they never see, the ones who show up faithfully pose a whole different set of challenges. Leaving aside the monster parents who seem to have been born to torment the teacher, even “good” parents can have bad days when their virtues exceed their boundaries: the eager parent who pushes too hard, the protective parent who defends the cheater, the homework helper who takes over, the tireless advocate who loses sight of the fact that there are other kids in the class too. “I could summarize in one sentence what teachers hate about parents,” says the head of a private school. “We hate it when parents undermine the education and growth of their children. That’s it, plain and simple.” A taxonomy of parents behaving badly:

•THE HOVERING PARENT

It was a beautiful late morning last May when Richard Hawley, headmaster at University School in Cleveland, Ohio, saw the flock of mothers entering the building, eager and beaming. “I ask what brings them to our halls,” he recalls. “They tell me that this is the last day the seniors will be eating lunch together at school and they have come to watch. To watch their boys eat lunch? I ask. Yes, they tell me emphatically. At that moment, a group of lounging seniors spot their mothers coming their way. One of them approaches his mother, his hands forming an approximation of a crucifix. ‘No,’ he says firmly to his mother. ‘You can’t do this. You’ve got to go home.’ As his mother draws near, he hisses in embarrassment, ‘Mother, you have no life!’ His mother’s smile broadens. ‘You are my life, dear.'”

Parents are passionate, protective creatures when it comes to their children, as nature designed them to be. Teachers strive to be dispassionate, objective professionals, as their training requires them to be. Throw in all the suspicions born of class and race and personal experience, a culture that praises teachers freely but pays them poorly, a generation taught to question authority and a political climate that argues for holding schools ever more accountable for how kids perform, and it is a miracle that parents and teachers get along as well as they do. “There’s more parent involvement that’s good–and bad,” notes Kirk Daddow, a 38-year veteran who teaches Advanced Placement history in Ames, Iowa. “The good kind is the ‘Make yourself known to the teacher; ask what you could do.’ The bad kind is the ‘Wait until something happens, then complain about it and try to get a grade changed.'” Overall, he figures, “we’re seeing more of the bad.”

Long gone are the days when the school was a fortress, opened a couple of times a year for parents’ night and graduation but generally off limits to parents unless their kids got into trouble. Now you can’t walk into schools, public or private, without tripping over parents in the halls. They volunteer as library aides and reading coaches and Mentor Moms, supplement the physical-education offerings with yoga and kickboxing, sponsor faculty-appreciation lunches and fund-raising barbecues, supervise field trips and road games and father-daughter service projects. Even the heads of boarding schools report that some parents are moving to live closer to their child’s school so that they can be on hand and go to all the games. As budgets shrink and educational demands grow, that extra army of helpers can be a godsend to strapped schools.

But parents, it turns out, have a learning curve of their own. Parents who are a welcome presence in elementary school as library helpers need to learn a different role for junior high and another for high school as their children’s needs evolve. Teachers talk about “helicopter parents,” who hover over the school at all times, waiting to drop in at the least sign of trouble. Given these unsettled times, if parents feel less in control of their own lives, they try to control what they can, which means everything from swooping down at the first bad grade to demanding a good 12 inches of squishy rubber under the jungle gym so that anyone who falls will bounce right back. “The parents are not the bad guys,” says Nancy McGill, a teacher in Johnston, Iowa, who learned a lot about handling parents from being one herself. “They’re mama grizzly bears. They’re going to defend that cub no matter what, and they don’t always think rationally. If I can remember that, it defuses the situation. It’s not about me. It’s not about attacking our system. It’s about a parent trying to do the best for their child. That helps keep the personal junk out of the way. I don’t get so emotional.”

While it’s in the nature of parents to want to smooth out the bumps in the road, it’s in the nature of teachers to toss in a few more: sometimes kids have to fail in order to learn. As children get older, the parents may need to pull back. “I believe that the umbilical cord needs to be severed when children are at school,” argues Eric Paul, a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Roosevelt Elementary School in Santa Monica, Calif. He goes to weekend ball games and piano recitals in an effort to bond with families but also tries to show parents that there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. “Kids need to operate on their own at school, advocate on their own and learn from each other. So in my class, parents’ involvement is limited,” he says.

High schools, meanwhile, find themselves fending off parents who expect instant responses to every e-mail; who request a change of teacher because of “poor chemistry” when the real issue is that the child is getting a poor grade; who seek out a doctor who will proclaim their child “exceptionally bright but with a learning difference” that requires extra time for testing; who insist that their child take five Advanced Placement classes, play three varsity sports, perform in the school orchestra and be in student government–and then complain that kids are stressed out because the school doesn’t do enough to prevent scheduling conflicts. Teachers just shake their heads as they see parents so obsessed with getting their child into a good college that they don’t ask whether it’s the right one for the child’s particular interests and needs.

And what if kids grow so accustomed to these interventions that they miss out on lessons in self-reliance? Mara Sapon-Shevin, an education professor at Syracuse University, has had college students tell her they were late for class because their mothers didn’t call to wake them up that morning. She has had students call their parents from the classroom on a cell phone to complain about a low grade and then pass the phone over to her, in the middle of class, because the parent wanted to intervene. And she has had parents say they are paying a lot of money for their child’s education and imply that anything but an A is an unacceptable return on their investment.

These parents are not serving their children well, Sapon-Shevin argues. “You want them to learn lessons that are powerful but benign. Your kid gets drunk, they throw up, feel like crap–that’s a good lesson. They don’t study for an exam, fail it and learn that next time they should study. Or not return the library book and have to pay the fine. But when you have a kid leave their bike out, it gets run over and rusty, and you say, ‘O.K., honey, we’ll buy you a new one,’ they never learn to put their bike away.”

•THE AGGRESSIVE ADVOCATE

Marguerite Damata, a mother of two in Silver Spring, Md., wonders whether she is too involved in her 10-year-old son’s school life. “Because he’s not in the gifted and talented group, he’s almost nowhere,” she says. “If I stopped paying attention, where would he be?” Every week she spends two hours sitting in his math class, making sure she knows the assignments and the right vocabulary so that she can help him at home. And despite all she sees and all she does, she says, “I feel powerless there.”

Parents understandably argue that there is a good reason to keep a close watch if their child is one of 500 kids in a grade level. Teachers freely admit it’s impossible to create individual teaching programs for 30 children in a class. “There aren’t enough minutes in the day,” says Tom Loveless, who taught in California for nine years and is now director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. “You have to have kids tackling subject matter together as a group. That’s a shoe that will pinch for someone.” Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires schools to show progress in reading and math test scores in Grades 3 through 8 across all racial and demographic groups, parents are worried that teachers will naturally focus on getting as many students as possible over the base line and not have as much time to spur the strongest kids or save the weakest. Some educators argue that you can agree on the goals of accountability and achievement, but given the inequalities in the system, not all schools have the means to achieve them. “A really cynical person who didn’t want to spend any more money on an educational system might get parents and teachers to blame each other and deflect attention away from other imperfect parts of the system,” observes Jeannie Oakes, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA.

Families feel they have to work the system. Attentive parents study the faculty like stock tables, looking for the best performer and then lobbying to get their kids into that teacher’s class. “You have a lot of mothers who have been in the work force, supervising other people, who have a different sense of empowerment and professionalism about them,” notes Amy Stuart Wells, professor of sociology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “When they drop out of the work force to raise their kids, they see being part of the school as part of their job.” Monica Stutzman, a mother of two in Johnston, Iowa, believes her efforts helped ensure that her daughter wound up with the best teacher in each grade. “We know what’s going on. We e-mail, volunteer on a weekly basis. I ask a lot of questions,” she says. “I’m not there to push my children into things they’re not ready for. The teachers are the experts. We’ve had such great experiences with the teacher because we create that experience, because we’re involved. We don’t just get something home and say, ‘What’s this?'”

Parents seeking to stay on top of what’s happening in class don’t have to wait for the report card to arrive. “Now it’s so easy for the parents through the Internet to get ahold of us, and they expect an immediate response,” notes Michael Schaffer, a classroom veteran who teaches AP courses at Central Academy in Des Moines, Iowa. “This e-mail–‘How’s my kid doing?’–could fill my day. That’s hyperbole. But it’s a two-edged sword here, and unfortunately it’s cutting to the other side, and parents are making demands on us that are unreasonable. Yeah, they’re concerned about their kids. But I’m concerned about 150 kids. I don’t have time during the day to let the parent know when the kid got the first B.” As more districts make assignments and test scores available online, it may cut down on the “How’s he doing” e-mails but increase the “Why did she get a B?” queries.

Beneath the ferocious jostling there is the brutal fact that outside of Lake Wobegon, not all children are above average. Teachers must choose their words carefully. They can’t just say, “I’m sorry your child’s not as smart as X,” and no parent wants to hear that there are five other kids in the class who are a lot smarter than his or hers. Younger teachers especially can be overwhelmed by parents who announce on the first day of school that their child is going to be the smartest in the class and on the second day that he is already bored. Veteran teachers have learned to come back with data in hand to show parents who boast that their child scored in the 99th percentile on some aptitude test that 40 other students in the class did just as well.

It would be nice if parents and teachers could work together to improve the system for everyone, but human nature can get in the way. Both sides know that resources are limited, and all kinds of factors play into how they are allocated–including whose elbows are sharpest. Many schools, fearful of “bright flight,” the mass departure of high-achieving kids, feel they have no choice but to appease the most outspoken parents. “I understand, having been a parent, the attitude that ‘I don’t have time to fix the whole system; I don’t have time and energy to get rid of systemic injustice, racism, poverty and violence; I have to get what’s right for my kid,'” says Syracuse’s Sapon-Shevin. “But then the schools do educational triage. They basically attend to the most vocal, powerful people with more resources. They say, ‘Don’t get angry. We’ll take care of this issue.’ And they mean, ‘We’ll take care of it for your child. We’ll get your kid out of the class with the bad teacher and leave the other kids in there.'”

At the deepest level, teachers fear that all this parental anxiety is not always aimed at the stuff that matters. Parents who instantly call about a grade or score seldom ask about what is being taught or how. When a teacher has spent the whole summer brightening and deepening the history curriculum for her ninth-graders, finding new ways to surprise and engage them, it is frustrating to encounter parents whose only focus is on test scores. “If these parents were pushing for richer, more meaningful instruction, you could almost forgive them their obnoxiousness and inattention to the interests of all the other children,” says Alfie Kohn, a Boston-based education commentator and author of Unconditional Parenting. But “we have pushy parents pushing for the wrong thing.” He argues that test scores often measure what matters least–and that even high test scores should invite parents to wonder what was cut from the curriculum to make room for more test prep.

Kohn knows a college counselor hired by parents to help “package” their child, who had perfect board scores and a wonderful grade-point average. When it was time to work on the college essay, the counselor said, “Let’s start with a book you read outside of school that really made a difference in your life.” There was a moment of silence. Then the child responded, “Why would I read a book if I didn’t have to?” If parents focus only on the transcript–drive out of children their natural curiosity, discourage their trying anything at which they might fail–their definition of success will get a failing grade from any teacher watching.

•THE PUBLIC DEFENDERS

By the time children turn 18, they have spent only 13% of their waking lives in the classroom. Their habits of mind, motivation and muscles have much more to do with that other 87%. But try telling that to an Ivy-educated mom and dad whose kids aren’t doing well. It can’t be the genes, Mom and Dad conclude, so it must be the school. “It’s the bright children who aren’t motivated who are most frustrating for parents and teachers,” says Nancy McGill, a past president of the Iowa Talented and Gifted Association. “Parents don’t know how to fix the kid, to get the kid going. They want us to do it, and discover we can’t either.” Sometimes bright kids intentionally work just hard enough to get a B because they are trying to make a point about what should be demanded of them, observes Jennifer Loh, a math teacher at Ursuline Academy in Dallas. “It’s their way of saying to Mom and Dad, ‘I’m not perfect.'” Though the best teachers work hard to inspire even the most alienated kids, they can’t carry the full burden of the parents’ expectations. In his dreams, admits Daddow, the Iowa history teacher, what he would like to say is “Your son or daughter is very, very lazy.” Instead, he shows the parents the student’s work and says, “I’m not sure I’m getting Jim’s best effort.”

When a teacher asks parents to be partners, he or she doesn’t necessarily mean Mom or Dad should be camping in the classroom. Research shows that though students benefit modestly from having parents involved at school, what happens at home matters much more. According to research based on the National Education Longitudinal Study, a sample of nearly 25,000 eighth-graders, among four main areas of parental involvement (home discussion, home supervision, school communication and school participation), home discussion was the most strongly related to academic achievement.

Any partnership requires that both sides do their part. Teachers say that here again, parents can have double standards: Push hard, but not too hard; maintain discipline, but don’t punish my child. When teachers tell a parent that a child needs to be reprimanded at home, teachers say they often get the response, “I don’t reprimand, and don’t tell me how to raise my child.” Older teachers say they are seeing in children as young as 6 and 7 a level of disdain for adults that was once the reserve of adolescents. Some talk about the “dry-cleaner parents” who drop their rambunctious kids off in the morning and expect them to be returned at the end of the day all clean and proper and practically sealed in plastic.

At the most disturbing extreme are the parents who like to talk about values but routinely undermine them. “You get savvier children who know how to get out of things,” says a second-grade teacher in Murfreesboro, Tenn. “Their parents actually teach them to lie to dodge their responsibilities.” Didn’t get your homework done? That’s O.K. Mom will take the fall. Late for class? Blame it on Dad. Parents have sued schools that expelled kids for cheating, on the grounds that teachers had left the exams out on a desk and made them too easy to steal. “Cheating is rampant,” says Steve Taylor, a history teacher at Beverly Hills High School in California. “If you’re not cheating, then you’re not trying. A C means you’re a loser.” Every principal can tell a story about some ambitious student, Ivy bound, who cheats on an exam. Teacher flunks her. Parents protest: She made a mistake, and you’re going to ruin her life. Teachers try to explain that good kids can make bad decisions; the challenge is to make sure the kids learn from them. “I think some parents confuse advocating on behalf of their student with defending everything that the student does,” says Scott Peoples, a history teacher at Skyview High School outside Denver.

Student-teacher disputes can quickly escalate into legal challenges or the threat of them. The fear of litigation that has given rise to the practice of defensive medicine prompts educators to practice defensive teaching. According to Forrest T. Jones Inc., a large insurer of teachers, the number of teachers buying liability insurance has jumped 25% in the past five years. “A lot of teachers are very fearful and don’t want to deal with it,” says Roxsana Jaber-Ansari, who teaches sixth grade at Hale Middle School in Woodland Hills, Calif. She has learned that everything must be documented. She does not dare accuse a student of cheating, for instance, without evidence, including eyewitness accounts or a paper trail. When a teacher meets with a student alone, the door always has to be open to avoid any suspicion of inappropriate behavior on the teacher’s part. “If you become angry and let it get to you, you will quit your job,” says Jaber-Ansari. “You will hate what you do and hate the kids.”

•THE CULTURE WARRIORS

Teachers in schools with economically and ethnically diverse populations face a different set of challenges in working with parents. In less affluent districts, many parents don’t have computers at home, so schools go to some lengths to make contact easier. Even 20 minutes twice a year for a conference can be hard for families if parents are working long hours at multiple jobs or have to take three buses to get to the school. Some teachers visit a parent’s workplace on a Saturday or help arrange language classes for parents to help with communication. Particularly since a great goal of education is to level the playing field, teachers are worried that the families that need the most support are least able to ask for it. “The standards about what makes a good parent are always changing,” notes Annette Lareau, a professor of sociology at Temple University, who views all the demand for parent involvement as a relatively recent phenomenon. “And it’s middle-class parents who keep pace.”

Lareau also sees cultural barriers getting in the way of the strong parent-teacher alliance. When parents don’t get involved at school, teachers may see it as a sign of indifference, of not valuing education–when it may signal the reverse. Some cultures believe strongly that school and home should be separate spheres; parents would no more interfere with the way a teacher teaches than with the way a surgeon operates. “Working-class and poor families don’t have a college education,” says Lareau. “They are looking up to teachers; they respect teachers as professionals. Middle-class parents are far less respectful. They’re not a teacher, but they could have been a teacher, and often their profession has a higher status than teachers’. So they are much more likely to criticize teachers on professional grounds.”

And while she views social class as a major factor in shaping the dynamic, Lareau finds that race continues to play a role. Middle-class black parents, especially those who attended segregated schools, often approach the teacher with caution. Roughly 90% of teachers are white and middle class, and, says Lareau, many black parents are “worried that teachers will have lowered expectations of black children, that black boys will be punished more than white boys. Since teachers want parents to be positive and supportive, when African-American parents express concerns about racial insensitivity, it can create problems in their relationship.”

Finally, as church-state arguments boil over and principals agonize over what kids can sing at the Winter Concert, teachers need to be eternally sensitive to religious issues as well. This is an arena where parents are often as concerned about content as grades, as in the debate over creationism vs. evolution vs. intelligent design, for instance. Teachers say they have to become legal scholars to protect themselves in a climate where students have “rights.” Jaber-Ansari was challenged for hanging Bible quotes on her classroom walls. But she had studied her legal standing, and when she was confronted, “the principal supported me 100%,” she says.

Perhaps the most complicated part of the conversation–beyond all the issues of race and class and culture, the growing pressures to succeed and arguments over how success should be defined–is the problem of memory. When they meet in that conference, parent and teacher bring their own school experiences with them–what went right and wrong, what they missed. They are determined for it to be different for the child they both care about. They go into that first-grade room and sit in the small chairs and can easily be small again themselves. It is so tempting to use the child’s prospects to address their own regrets. So teachers learn to choose their words with care and hope that they can build a partnership with parents that works to everyone’s advantage and comes at no one’s expense. And parents over time may realize that when it comes to their children, they still have much to learn. “I think that we love our children so much that they make us a little loony at times,” says Arch Montgomery, head of the Asheville School in North Carolina. He winces at parents who treat their child as a cocktail-party trophy or a vanity sticker for the window of their SUV, but he also understands their behavior. “I think most parents desperately want to do what is right for their kids. This does not bring out the better angels of our natures, but it is understandable, and it is forgivable.” –With reporting by Amanda Bower/New York, Melissa August/Washington, Anne Berryman/Athens, Cathy Booth Thomas/ Dallas, Rita Healy/Denver, Elizabeth Kauffman/ Nashville, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines

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