I Hate School!
Too much time spent on homework and pizza parties. Too many pleas for money to make up for cuts in state funding. Too much worry over whether my son is learning enough. I want to be involved in his education, but the demands teachers and principals place on parents these days are ridiculous. That's why, I'm sorry to say . . .
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In this way I was introduced to the world of what's known as "parental involvement," a term that, like "flight attendant" and "administrative assistant," has been devised to make people feel better about work that can be difficult and thankless. Early on, I could see that this was not going to be my mother's volunteer work, which involved little more than bringing cupcakes on my birthday, canned goods at Thanksgiving, and an ornament for the class Christmas tree. Somehow, between the time my mother became a parent and the time I became one, all that had changed.
The parental ideal, in the eyes of professional educators and professional school parents, can be found on the PTA Web site. "Every day offers a fresh opportunity to get involved with your child," pta.org insists. In a brochure titled "100 Ways for Parents to Be Involved in Their Child's Education," suggestions include: "Know school staff's extensions and office hours"; "Request that information be available in all relevant languages"; "Help establish a parent center at school and use its resources"; "Assist in developing parent support programs/groups and attend them"; "Help create and/or contribute to a school newsletter on parenting"; "Start a parent book club to discuss current publications"; "Build a child file with medical records, pictures, fingerprints, etc"; "Talk with your child's teacher on creating home learning games and activities." Start a parent book club? Who has the time to read with all the effort that must be devoted to school? Home learning games and activities? Wasn't I doing enough of that for Oliver's assigned "family homework"? Baseball bingo to teach math facts, tiny puzzles to improve hand-eye coordination, family autobiographies to get down to business on those writing skills? As he progressed through elementary school, I began to notice that I was spending less time enjoying my child and more time educating him. I reminded myself of those severe, demanding Puritan proctors I'd read about in books about early American education.
Not at first, of course. When Oliver entered kindergarten, being involved in his school life seemed like a wonderful idea. I believed the PTA gospel that "decades of research show that when parents are involved, students have increased motivation, better self-esteem." (Now I read that and think, "If only childrearing were that easy.") Though I had a full-time job, I worked at home with what I told myself was a flexible schedule. I imagined that I could be some sort of hybrid mom who could maintain a demanding job and still be one of those caring parents who show up at school on a moment's notice. It wasn't that hard to alter my day, at the school's request, to read to Oliver's kindergarten class for half an hour once a week, especially because it followed his twenty-minute lunch period, where I was also encouraged to visit, oh, four times a month. It wasn't that hard, either, to stock the class gift basket for the annual auction. Or to pull weeds in the school garden. It appealed to my sense of community; the parents were nice, the teachers appreciative, and I loved being with the kids, especially my own. If I became a little more stressed—going back to work at night, after Oliver went to bed, to make up time lost during the day—well, being a parent involved sacrifice. But I did begin to wonder just why I was so involved with his schoolwork and his school.
Some of this, no doubt, has to do with competitive parenting. Most women I know want to be better moms than their own mothers, and most men are happy to let them labor—fruitlessly—under that illusion. In the era of hyperparenting, there are also concerns that didn't exist in the early sixties: about drugs and alcohol, about health (childhood obesity), about safety (guns), about college admission. Adults worry about their own uncertain economic futures and project those fears onto their children, pushing them to perform at a level that will get them into Stanford, or at least UT.
I also have concerns about whether, in their insistence on parental involvement, professional educators are overstepping their bounds by trying to off-load some of the societal difficulties that wind up in the classroom, trying to solve, from eight-thirty to five-thirty, what they regard as epidemics of apathy among parents and low self-esteem among children. They are trying to eliminate bad parents by forcing them to be good parents, which won't work but may have the effect of turning good parents into bad parents because they are stretched too thin. (What happens to families when working parents really cannot leave the office, store, or factory to make that morning recital?) It would be nice if issues of self-esteem could be solved by having Mom read to the class, but they can't. Whatever happened to the days when children developed healthy egos by trying things on their own and learning from their failures? When kids were mortified to have their parents show up at school? I know Oliver's teachers wanted to teach instead of remake society. I'm on their side.
Finally, I have concerns about money. The state has cut our school district's budget by $90 million in the past three years, so making up the difference falls to those parents willing and able to write grant proposals and cadge donations from other parents and local businesses. I have had the opportunity to witness what cuts in public education mean day to day. When Oliver was in the fourth grade, for instance, the administration decided his class could save money by using work sheets instead of math books. When we complained that we couldn't help Oliver with his homework—I didn't remember, offhand, how to multiply fractions—his teacher suggested that we buy an instructor's manual for $300 or borrow hers and copy each page. My husband gave up an afternoon of work to do the latter. When the school couldn't afford to bring in a special writing program for third and fifth graders, a parents' group raised the money for it; we also raised money to buy additional computers, digital cameras, new playground equipment, and more.
Every once in a while, my husband and I would visit a school in a wealthier part of town for a performance, lecture, or concert, and my heart would sink: There would be the sunny, well-stocked library of my childhood, along with the acoustically perfect music room and the beautifully appointed auditoriums. How could the disparity between public schools in various school districts be so enormous, I once asked a member of the school board. "Parents," was the doleful answer. "They make up the difference."
As Oliver progressed through elementary school, the parents, the administration, and the PTA found a handful of corporate sponsors to take up some of the financial slack, but not without a price. Anyone driving by could see from the enormous banner that a multinational corporation sponsored the school garden. Thus were five-year-olds enlisted in the lifelong battle for brand loyalty. Other kids enjoyed the fruits of a soft-drink machine planted just outside the cafeteria door. In that case, the school district received enough money to build a new high school stadium by being amenable to product placement, while our kids—many from poor families—got a jump on childhood obesity and diabetes.
Still, we persisted. As one education expert told me, "Getting your child educated is a team sport." But by the fifth grade, the parents had all grown a little testy. A close friend volunteered to create and run the haunted house for the fall carnival and asked me to help out. There was a lot at stake: Every year, fifth-grade parents tried to outdo their predecessors by converting the school's second floor into a scary—but not too scary—celebration of horror and death, in hopes of raising lots of money. My assignment: Go to the pet store and buy a dozen mice to stock a Plexiglas bridge the kids could walk over. Some instinct—a panicky aversion to rodents, a fear of PETA picketers on the playground—caused me to refuse. The hurt silence on the other end of the line was as foreboding as the blue norther predicted for carnival weekend. Suddenly, I could envision my hard-won Girl Scout reputation curdling into the Mom Who Wouldn't Buy the Mice. I would mortify not just my own child but also this entire group of fifth graders and their parents, who would fail in their attempt to beat the previous year's bowl of lychee eyeballs. I sent my husband out for mice.
By the end of that year, I felt part of a family that was slowly coming unraveled, and I don't mean my own. I had grown close to many school parents over time; they had helped raise my child, and I had helped raise theirs. But just as school was ending, civil strife broke out over the planning of the graduation trip. The well-meaning PTA president had hired a consultant (yes, there are now school-trip consultants), who came up with a journey that featured a twelve-hour train ride to Big Bend. The parents' meeting in the cafeteria reminded me of a Thanksgiving dinner that went on a little too long. The veneer of civilization began to crack, as old hurts surfaced and long-repressed fury came to the fore. Parents were outraged about the vacation time they'd have to sacrifice for a school function; parents were outraged about the choice of hotels (too cheap or too expensive); parents were outraged because they had already been there and done that. Squished onto my tiny cafeteria stool at my tiny cafeteria table, it occurred to me that the source of all this rage was not the actual trip but six years of "parental involvement" finally coming to a close. It was hard to think about celebrating. We were too wiped out.
My Library
