Expanding Parent Access to Student Performance

Last week, Allison posted on the increasing use of cell phone notification for parents regarding emergencies, their children’s school attendance and upcoming meetings.

Our verdict: While letting parents know about school meetings by text message is a great idea, being notified about a student’s routine absences may not be the best thing.

This week, the New York Times takes the expansion of parental notification a step further with development of instant, online student grade viewing technologies. Across the country, online programs like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool (now used in more than 10,000 schools in 49 states—including Washington) are allowing parents to find out their children bombed quizzes and tests at the same moment as the students.

Our verdict: I agree that parent involvement and monitoring of their student’s grades is a positive concept—in many cases it raises student achievement. As responsible guardians, parents do need to be aware of how their children are performing. But isn’t that what mid- and end-of-term report cards are for? And, according to the NYTimes, some parents are no longer asking their children, “how did you do today?” and instead reactively demanding to know why they failed a quiz, accompanied by immediate grounding.

This “instant access” in to a student’s world—while appropriate in some circumstances—ultimately robs them of long-term personal responsibility for their own performance. Students should learn to manage their grades on their own, with decreasing—not ever-present—levels of parental involvement. And isn’t one of the goals of education to gradually allow students to take more and more responsibility for their own success? This has certainly been the topic of conversation at several State Board meetings on WA’s new Meaningful High School Diploma I’ve attended lately.

The Bottomline: Everything in moderation. While a summary mid-term report for students (particularly those repeatedly failing) may warrant online access for parents, I would hate to see myself or my children harshly treated for a reaction to one failed quiz.