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by rngname22 1101 days ago
Disempower the administrators and parents that won't let teachers do their jobs. Vote for school district officials and attend meetings and question why they won't let teachers dictate policy as opposed to administrators, standards-makers, or boards that don't have teaching experience or no longer teach.
2 comments

The administration today is about as untrustworthy as it gets, having become a vector of ideology. Parents are responsible for their children, and their primary teachers, not administrators, not teachers, and so they have more than just a say, but the deciding say; all other authority are deputized. I seriously doubt that parents are the primary reason for the mediocrity of education standards, but even if they were, it is parents that must be convinced that a curriculum is good. This is non-negotiable.

There are also plenty of counterexamples of parents, fed up with the poor quality of the savage factory that is the public school, coming together to form new private schools that surpass the standards of public education. These parents may not be representative, perhaps, but laying the blame at the feet of parents while valorizing administration, I claim, doesn't reflect reality adequately and certainly not constructively. In general, I am favor of more school choice and local initiative which would free parents to pursue models of excellence that could then be copied by other parents and even public schools (fat chance).

Most teachers I’ve talked with wish that parents were more involved in their students education. Doing things like reading to your children starting from birth (or better yet in the womb), reviewing their homework, and discussing the importance of their grades and education in their long term success go a very long way.
If you'd like to hear some of what I'm referring to, check out some anecadata here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/search/?q=parents&restrict...
Do you have an example of parents interfering in teachers ability to do their jobs?
I've read countless, I started spending some time on the /r/nursing and /r/teachers subreddits during the pandemic to understand some of how it was affecting them and you learn quickly that parents often interfere in their children's learning, whether it be preventing punishments, doing their child's homework for them, not feeding them, threatening school districts with lawsuits such that school principals and administration force teachers to acquiesce to whatever the student's parents want, getting mad if the teacher is being a better parent to the student than the parent themself etc.

Doing a search on the sub for 'parents' is a good start: https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/search/?q=parents&restrict...

Wow, that is wild. Thank you.
I have none...well aside from the law that passed in Florida and Texas earlier this year that allows parents to see _and reject_ lesson plans if they don't like them.

My educator wife, however? There aren't enough minutes in the day to enumerate the inane BS she's put up with from students parents!