When Parents Cede Control, Schools Seize Command

I was a school superintendent’s kid. I’ve had many schoolteacher friends over the years. As such, I’ve heard the laments about how parents didn’t understand what teachers and administrators were trying to do and how school boards didn’t, either.

When it comes to the plight of professional educators, I’m a sympathizer.

But (you knew there would be a “but,” didn’t you?) it might not be a bad idea for administrators to spend part of the upcoming summer contemplating whether they’ve gone too far in trying to maintain control of their schools.

I’m not going to begin every paragraph by saying educators have a tough job today. Let’s take that as a given. But a spate of recent conversations I’ve had with parents, seemingly unrelated but similar in tone, suggest that many of them think school officials may have turned their schoolhouses into fiefdoms.

I spent some time on the phone recently with a father who was unhappy that his seventh-grade son had gotten beaten up by three other kids at school. What bothered the man even more than his son’s misfortune was that his son, along with the other boys, was suspended for fighting.

I told the man that I probably couldn’t do much for him, in that readers wouldn’t know what role his son played in the fight. He conceded that point, but asked what the logic would be in his smallish son picking a fight with three older boys.

In a follow-up letter, the father was still furious about his son’s suspension: “What judicial process in any other aspect of public law would conclude that a child attacked and beaten . . . should be punished?”

That conversation followed by a few weeks one I’d had with a mother at an elementary school that was debating whether to establish voluntary uniforms for students this fall.

What irked the mother wasn’t so much whether or not students should wear uniforms, but what she perceived as school administrators’ stacking the deck in favor of uniforms. When a parent survey first indicated support for uniforms, the woman spearheaded a move for a follow-up survey that, she said, was more neutral in tone.

The second survey overturned the findings of the first. “My concern was how it was arbitrarily shoved down our throats until we stopped it,” the mother said. Emphasizing that she is “very supportive” of the school in other matters, she said wearing uniforms, even if labeled as voluntary, “is an affront to someone’s civil liberties, telling them what they can and can’t wear.”

What do these instances say about our schools? It suggests to me that power loves a vacuum, and in a society where many parents have ceded control of their children to schools, the schools have accepted that mantle. Sometimes, too zealously.

Today’s campus troublemakers have infinitely more capacity to do harm than troublemakers in my day, and it isn’t surprising that administrators may go overboard in meting out punishment. When we have schools where kids are bringing guns in their backpacks, we can understand why administrators may sometimes overlook the niceties of English common law.

They may well think they’ve handled the problem by suspending a kid who does nothing more than swing back when he’s accosted on the playground. They may think they’re preempting a crisis by pushing for school uniforms.

In both instances, however, they’re taking the quick-fix solution to more vexing problems.

I asked Georgiann Boyd with the county Department of Education to put administrators’ problems in context for me. She pointed out that when it comes to fights, they are often faced with conflicting stories and that a fight can have complex origins. On the issue of uniforms, school administrators “are trying to get a handle on this thing called school violence,” she said. Law enforcement officials like the idea of uniforms, and school administrators may be reacting to that, she said.

I asked if schools are more autocratic than, say, a generation ago.

“Maybe it’s more of a concern because more kids are being expelled than before,” she said. Parents may be more vocal about suspensions because they usually mean that someone has to supervise the child at home, which may be more difficult today because of working parent situations.

Boyd said she thinks school officials try to treat situations fairly and are taught in training sessions that “cutting corners” on things like discipline only leads to more trouble later.

My father loved being an educator 30 years ago. In many ways, he probably ruled as judge, jury and executioner when it came to problems within the school boundaries.

Maybe the difference is that the cases just keep getting tougher and tougher every year.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.