Education Nation Book - Chapter 5

This chapter was called the Co-Teaching Edge and it was referring to the involvement of everyone in a child's education, from their parents to their teacher to themselves.  I believe some local schools are on the right track in trying to involve parents in their children's educations by offering an on-line program to keep track of missing assignments, grades and attendance.  However, there is a major downfall with the program and that is that the majority of the teachers are not using the program correctly.  It appears that they have not been properly trained on how to use the system. I have found that when a teacher posts an assignment due on a specific date, but does not enter a grade for that assignment, the student's report will show the assignment as being past due.  I don't believe most of the teachers realize that this is happening.  In my own personal experience, as a proactive parent, I have sent the teacher an email to check on an assignment for one of my kids and have found that my child has turned in the work, but the teacher has not entered the grade, which results in the generated notice of a past-due assignment.  I think it's a great idea of the school district's to use this type of system as a means to keep working parents involved with their children's educations, but the teachers need to be better trained on how to use the program before it is rolled out.  Otherwise, it creates more work for both the parent and the teacher in emailing back and forth to get the assignment issue resolved.  Additionally, I have now became frustrated and lost faith in the accuracy of the system so I tend to disregard notices of missing assignments - it's main purpose was to communicate with parents on these issues.  

Another great concept that has been started by teachers is to create their own websites that parents can go to view what their child is learning in the classroom, and sometimes to view assignments that they should be working on.  Having two kids and 7 teachers for each of them, it gets to be a little unrealistic for me to check each of their web pages to see what is happening in the classroom. 

Communication with parents is key to a child's education, but the sources need to be consistent and accurate or the level of trust is broken.