FACILITATING THE PARENT VOICE IN EDUCATION DECISION-MAKING May 17, 2012
Ever since the teacher unions gained legal voice through collective bargaining parents have been shunted to the side. The PTA was no longer useful. Education decisions increasingly were made by and between bureaucrats and the unions.
Parents as a class never had much voice and as individuals it was the most ardent and persistent individual families who got anywhere with the public schools.
Compulsory schooling and monopoly public schools effectively usurped parents from the role Nature endows them with — the duty and instincts to safely bring up their children.
It is in times of crisis that parents feel most alarmed and anxious that their children’s’ well-being is being threatened. This current teacher strike — nearly nine months already — illustrates just how robbed of voice parents have become.
So, in this age of communication, parents, as the ultimate educators of their children, find themselves gagged.
Thus we can see how this website, Where Is My Kids Report Card? has proved so profoundly effective.
1. Without the complaints about missing, blank, scanty Report Cards here on this site it is unlikely we would have seen the LRB and BCPSEA and the Ministry in concert to restore some legal sanity to this matter.
2. Without this site frequently using the word “pawns” it is unlikely that so many people would now be using that term as a regular term for those hostage kids caught in the middle. See: “Most vulnerable are hurt the most by BCTF strike”, May 09, by a retired superintendent: http://blogs.theprovince.com/…/geoff-johnson-most…/
This quote is precious:
“Using those kids as pawns in a political dispute is so wrong it defies description.”
3. This site and others (Janet’s Report Card, Parents Saying NO, etc.) are providing a most welcome voice to muzzled and browbeaten parents, suffering far too long at the command of “the establishment”. Productive and positive results have already been seen. Long may these sites thrive !
[comment on Facebook site Where is my Kid’s Report Card?]