: Want Schools to Work? Meet the Parents by Sandra Tsing Loh

The author is upset because she feels that parents are not included in making decisions about the public education system that their children's are involved in but instead the decision are made by people who do not or are likely not to have the first hand experience of a parent.Her solution is to have the parents getting involved as much as they can in their children's educational system with programs such as the PTA or event he booster programs that some schools have.

I would use technology to enhance the connection between parents, teachers and students in order to allow the parents to feel like they are more apart of their child's daily school life, ranging from academics to extracurricular activities. I would use class wiki's and weblogs to keep parents as informed as possible and also keep their child informed also. The use of a weblog would not only allow the student to remain informed but would also allow the paren to be aware of what their child is doing, what is expected of their child, their child's progress and they would also be able to ask question that could be answered without the need of a cnference for every question they may have.

With personal experience of attending three different types of public schools in one county I have come to realize there are various ways for the school and teacher to keep parents informed. One school I attended would send out mass phone calls and leave messages about the smallest detail that a parent would ( or in some case would not) want to know. Another school would mail out a newsletter every week so that parents could stay tuned with what their child was doing and also what the school was doing as a whole. These things were done before computer were as popular. Within these two school there were PTA's and booster clubs for the parents to join. Once technology became more popular teacher in high school would ask for parents emails so that they could email the parents . The school website would not only have the basic information that every parent would want to know but would also have a newsletter, scholarship bulletin board, all faculties contact infrmation and the various booster/ PTA contact information.