Teacher’s Pawn : Public School System Loses Credibility in the Eyes of a Parent

As my daughter makes her way through the Los Angeles school system, I’ve been thinking of junior high in southern New Jersey in the 1960s, a memorable time for me.

The standards were tough--I was once sent home because I didn’t do my math homework--and the teachers were tougher. But everyone had their eyes on the ball, and the ball was learning. Learning was the main mission at Ventnor Junior High.

One of the highlights came in the fall. Parents were invited to peek over our shoulders on Parents’ Night.

It was a ritual requiring more creativity than Halloween. I remember students and teachers planning for weeks. Mostly I remember how many parents showed up.

That was then. This is now.

In 1993, I couldn’t see my daughter’s best eighth-grade work at Porter Junior High in Granada Hills because “parents’ night” was held from 1 to 3 in the afternoon. The teachers and administrators changed the program from early evening, when working parents, like me, could logically attend.

It was clear from what teachers told our children that teachers, locked in a labor dispute with the administration, would not work “overtime” without pay.

For a long time I have felt that something is wrong in the halls of education. This event, now entitled Open House, convinced me.

What was once done for the student’s benefit, to help parents help their children learn, had become a vehicle for teachers to increase parental awareness of the plight of teachers. The new goal was teacher respect, power and money. The pawns were our kids.

I understand their position, and even support more pay for teachers. But the teachers were cheating. They were making an expensive point. And in my eyes it diminished the credibility of educators who say they care about teaching but sell out those they teach to make a point.

The Open House concerns me because it indicates a host of educational problems I see. Most of them are not fixable by money.

Because I believe in public education, my daughter goes to public school and has since first grade. I regularly watch in amazement as decision-making is made more complex than necessary. Here are some of my encounters with the schools:

* To an asthmatic child such as mine, missed days are a way of life. I recently called to ask for her homework during one such absence. I was told by a school secretary that teachers would need at least 24 hours to prepare her homework for me.

* Could the office fax hand-written assignments to my office? No. What the school did suggest was calling around to my daughter’s friends to get the work.

* Because of illness, my daughter missed report-card day in December. When I called after the holidays requesting her grades, I was told that they had to be sent from dreaded downtown. I spoke to her school, regional offices, school district headquarters. No one could predict an arrival date. The report card arrived four weeks later.

* Simple requests are greeted coolly. Complex ones are not comprehensible. Last summer, my child was diagnosed as having a learning disability called attention deficit disorder. For reasons having nothing to do with her intelligence or attitude, she finds it hard to pay attention for long. A therapist suggested that she tape-record class lectures, listen at home and take notes at her own speed.

I was informed that was out of the question. Administrators said teachers would not allow it, citing the right to privacy as one reason.

Through the years I have met with teachers, requested feedback and sought ways to partner myself with them. Rarely has it worked. Sometimes it seems that our system has little room for concerned parents, despite teacher complaints to the contrary. But there is room for rule books, bureaucrats to explain them and teachers and administrators to hide behind them.

The idea of breaking up the school district may be worthwhile, just as the LEARN proposal to decentralize it might.

But the problems are more than skin deep. The people inside the district--teachers and administrators--are not decision-makers. They play the education game with rigid enforcement of rules and little awareness of their effect on children, parents and learning. Fixing the schools must go beyond restructuring or shrinking. Independent thinkers are dinosaurs inside the district, and they will remain extinct until these qualities are expected, demanded and rewarded.

Maybe then, regardless of the district’s size and configuration, we can get our eye back on the ball, which is education.

DR, FRANZ BOROWITZ / For The Times