Perfectly valid…although not all feedback is of the same quality. Let’s go back to my case in the OP: there are multiple possible scenarios. It’s possible that the parent has a wide network of friends with much experience in the school, and the consensus is that the teacher in question is a Bad Teacher.
Alternative scenario: the parent has a friend whose kid is a moron and/or a troublemaker, and blames all his problems on the teacher.
Having had 3 kids in 3 different schools, I know all about not getting around to all the teachers. For my older kids, I ask them what classes they think I should visit–there is a Parent night next week for the HS-and I try to get there. For the youngest, I went to his PN, but didn’t stay. I asked the teacher (who I knew from previous kids) if I needed to stay. He said no-I knew the drill. Keep in mind, I also (as I do every year) had called this teacher at the start of the year, along with youngest’s reading and math teacher, to introduce myself and establish a relationship. I email the HS teachers frequently. This is part of my job as a parent.
In Kindergarten, though, it’s all new. I don’t care if it’s your 10th kid-it’s new to that kid. How Kindergarten is treated in a family says much about how the family views school, IMO. I have no problem whatsoever if you can’t make Kindergarten PN. But you need to have contacted that teacher. You need to express interest in the art project your Kindergartner brings home, and expressing disappointment to him/her because you can’t be there wouldn’t hurt.
I cannot believe that in an entire class–some 20+ kids, NO parent or responsible adult was available for at least one child. I call BS on that–and say that their absence reflects very badly on their community and on their kid’s future academic prospects.
Not showing up for PN doesn’t make you “uncaring” (where did that come from?)–it’s irresponsible if the entire class’ parents are no-shows. AFAIK, none here were in that school district and didn’t show up for this one PN. That is what I’m talking about.
When did you go to school? It used to be very different. I graduated HS pre-Columbine and when I went back to do my student teaching I was depressed/disgusted/other bad feelings when I realized that the schools felt like jails.
My dataset is skewed, admittedly, but out of all the people I know who started out as a teacher, only one is still doing it. The rest either ran screaming into the night or screaming into grad school (as I did). I’ll teach again, but it’ll be college-level NOT public school.
No arguement there with your alternative scenario being possible. We have a polling group of 4-7 that we check with (and we also work with the current teacher to see what their recommendations will be as well).
It is also tough for teachers coming off of a bad year (we had one teacher who earned a terrible reputation the year she went through a bad divorce, the next year she turned it around).
Teacher turnover rate is big concern, mostly because good, experienced teachers are so hard to find. Beginning teachers and teachers in poor schools are especially likely to leave the profession. Frankly, based on what I hear from my husband and other family members who are teachers, it’s a wonder that anyone stays, not that so many young professionals leave. (Not necessarily because of the kids, but because of the administration and general working conditions.)
Is 15% high turnover? Honest question, I really don’t know. I know that the average years teaching experience in the Chicago Public School District is 13. In the posh suburban school district down south, it’s 9.9. They’re both paid about the same (average salary in the $63,000 range - these are high school numbers I’m comparing).
Even within my same district, one of the “good schools” has an attendance rate of 94.2 and 55.6% low income. “Bad school” (my son’s - although believe me, there are worse yet) has an attendance rate of 84.5 and a low income rate of 90.4%. “Good school” has PSAE test scores of Mathematics: 87.1, Reading: 78.9 and Science: 59.8% meeting or exceeding standards; “bad school” has Mathematics: 33.7, Reading: 27.0 and Science: 19.6% meeting or exceeding.
If we are to believe that low income correlates highly with a lack of parental involvement (which makes sense - if one is working three low paying jobs and can’t get a babysitter, one can’t be involved much) it’s clear that reflects on the school’s attendance and test scores. Of course, there are other factors, like nutrition and early childhood development, but parental involvement cannot be overemphasized.
And, back to the OP, yeah, there are significant differences between schools, even within the same school district.
By the way, the two Chicago public schools (in the second paragraph above) both spend *more *per pupil than the posh suburban school with barely any low income and commensurate parental involvement. Money doesn’t replace parents.
I found the numbers on the Interactive Illinois School Report Card.
Teacher turnover is a bi-modal curve, I would assume.
You have 50% turnover in the first 5 years, which then I would assume drops as teachers get tenure (and the ones who hate teaching wash out).
http://www.capitolweekly.net/news/article.html?article_id=1243
My older daughter had one teacher for English, and she was terrible. My younger daughter had the exact same teacher for German, and she was wonderful. (My daughter had her for several years in a row since she was the only German teacher.) It turned out that she was forced by the school to teach English, wasn’t good at it, and didn’t want to.
Your other explanations are possible also. And some teachers are just bad.
I wonder if she is in the district my kids went to school in. A few years back, because of over-crowding, one elementary school was to be redistricted away from the “good” high school to a less good high school. You’d think the district was proposing to gas the kids. I went to one meeting where the parents opposed to the change were downright scary, shouting down people they didn’t like and waving signs. The funny thing was, they judged the schools solely on test scores. The physical plant of the “good” school was poor, and the teachers no better than in other schools. The school was in an area of rich Silicon Valley workers, so the kids generally speaking had higher test scores.
Oddly, I was on the board of a GATE parents advocacy group, and in general the parents from this high school catchment area get less involved than parents from others.
I’d wager that the most obnoxious parents are not the ones volunteering at the school in any way, right?
A great idea, of course :). Yes, we’ve definitely done that and I know I’ve given a lot of my clothes to the female students to wear (it seems like they have a harder time to find appropriate clothes than the boys who can just wear slacks, a shirt, and a tie).
The vast majority of the funds we raise go towards getting the kids clothes. I wait until there is a big, huge sale at somewhere like Kohl’s (or I take them to TJ Maxx or Ross) and then I take the kids in to get clothes. Usually for $20 a kid we can get them each one nice outfit (I am a master shopper, since an entire outfit is pants, shirt, tie (if necessary), and shoes!).
I also regularly peruse the Goodwill in the part of town I live in (other side from the high school, the nicer part of town), since the Goodwills in the nicer parts of town usually are loaded with REALLY nice suits for about $5. Then, if anything needs to be taken in, we have an available parent hem things.
It’s definitely hard, but it can be done!
Just as an aside…I’m a graduate of one of the “best colleges”. Within 2 years of graduation, no one in the real world gives a rat’s ass whether you went to Harvard or Middle Tennessee State. (not to pick on any particular school, of course). It may look good on a resume, but that’s about it. And I work side-by-side – same job, same salary – with people from a wide variety of educational backgrounds: great, mediocre, graduate degrees, bachelors.
My point: perhaps the child’s formative years might be better off doing some things occasionally other than grinding towards an academic goal. Like, enjoying their youth, having friends, playing outside, developing social skills.
I teach multiple subjects in middle school, and this is the start of my fifth year. I almost became one of the 50% drop-out statistics due to the school I was in at the beginning of my fourth year. The school was in Dallas Independent School District, which has a constant stream of never-ending scandals concerning financial abuse, administrator and teacher misconduct, and student failure.
Here’s what I ran into in the one semester I taught there:
the principal told us we were not allowed to fail any students for the first six weeks. (My philosophy has always been that I don’t fail students; they fail themselves.)
as the new teacher on staff, I was assigned the lowest of the low students with the most behavior problems. Consequently, the only time I got any teaching done was when the worst six or seven out of a 30+ class were all suspended on the same day.
at least one of my 12 year old girls was openly wearing a birth control patch. Advertisement?
one of my students was sexually assaulted by another of my students on the recess grounds. He grabbed her and groped her chest. He was suspended for three days. It took me telling the parents they could go to the police for the boy to be expelled from school and sent to an appropriate facility. His last day at school, he was allowed to play in a football game.
I got in trouble with the Dean because I reported a student to CPS because the student told me there were no grown up where she was living. Turned out, she said that in an attempt to get me to leave her alone about homework. CPS knew all about her, and told me what was going on. The mother, pissed because CPS had bugged her, yelled at my Dean because it was none of my business (never mind that I’m required by state and federal law to report any potentially abusive situations). My Dean, in turn, yelled at me.
my Dean also kept trying to write me up and evaluate me (with bad scores) before I’d had the district mandated evaluation training. She falsified dates, tried to file reports without my signature, and held me to a different standard than the other teachers.
when half of my students earned failing grades, and I turned in their grades. I was called on the carpet and told I was a poor teacher. Then, the principal reverse my grades without my knowledge or consent.
one of the hall monitors at the school raped a thirteen year old girl on the premises. Turns out that when they ran the background check on him, they didn’t bother to check all 50 states. He was a registered sex offender in one of the states they skipped.
while the rape was in the news and a camera crew hung out across the street from the school, the principal made daily announcements telling the students how concerned he was that they not speak to those reporters. Not a word was said about the attack on one of their classmates. He freely admitted to the faculty that he was glad he wasn’t allowed to take part in the investigation.
the last straw, for me, was when I heard a ruckus outside my classroom, went outside and found that a very small student had attacked a very large teacher. The teacher put him in a restraining hold and started talking to him in a soft, calming voice - “now, I’ll let you go when you calm down. You just tell me when you’re calm, and I’ll let you go.” Of course, because it was a fight, students started running from all quarters to watch, and the crowd started getting ugly. I stepped in to do crowd control - keep the kids from crowding the teacher - and when I turned to check on the teacher, a student six inches taller than me and a hundred pounds heavier hit me across the back of the head as hard as she could. I saw stars and had a headache for that day and the next. The campus police (not Dallas PD, but a group hired and paid by the district) refused to tell me how to press charges. The girl was suspended for ten days.
After that, I informed the district that I was so very sorry, but my father was ill, and I had to relocate to California over the Christmas break to take care of him. I turned in my resignation, put up with two more weeks’ bullshit and got the hell out of there. I visited my parents for Christmas and took my dad out for breakfast.
Where was my union in all of this? Promising they’d bring up my issues at their monthly meeting with DISD admin. I didn’t discover until much too late to do anything that I could have filed an official complaint with the Texas Education Agency over my principal’s conduct.
Where was DISD admin in all of this? Good question. I sent six certified return receipt letters to the superintendent, assistant superintendent, legal counsel, deputy superintendent, head of administrators, and board member for my school’s district outlining what had happened. The next school year, the Dean was still in the same position, and the principal had been transferred to be a vice-principal at a high school in the area.
It took me well over a year to recover from those five months and feel like I could walk into a classroom again. I went through a bout of stress-related depression, took a long hard look at how public schools are run, and vowed to never teach in a public school again. I found a job this year at a private school. While there are some irritants, it is heaven compared to DISD.
Man, you beat me to the Goodwill suggestion - my boyfriend gets tons of suits there. The thing is, you gotta wait until some old guy in your size dies, evidently, and then you buy everything.
That’s one thing I’ll give California schools. This sort of thing is illegal. I am the one who issues grades, and they cannot be changed without my consent.
Fine. Let the admin and union agree to fire (or retire) the abusive teachers and I’ll stop supporting letting parents try to protect their children from psychologically damaging teachers. If that’s not possible, maybe they could at least fucking discipline the teachers when there are witnessed cases of verbal and emotional abuse.
Until that happens, I’m going to say that it’s not unreasonable, in many cases, for parents to insist that their children avoid a given teacher. Yes, there are problem students, and problem parents who enable them. There are also problem teachers who shouldn’t be allowed near children.
I now have this mental image of your boyfriend greedily wandering hospital wards, scoping out and eventually taking measurements from the older, dying guys. 
Diosa, wouldn’t he have to go around asking the soon-to-be-bereaved family members what their loved one’s measurements had been while they were healthy? No one’s at their best after protracted illness, after all.
Even more ghoulish! I love it! 
Around our league, if any coach has a father die, the suits are usually up for grabs a few tournaments later. You outfit your own kids first, then bring the remainders to a tournament to see who else needs something. If the father was a professional and wore suits often, you can outfit a half-dozen teams in (new) clothes.
Oh, it’s illegal in Texas too, but apparently, you only have sixty days to file a complaint with TEA, the district refuses to police itself, the teacher’s union was whipped, and the only other place I could think to go was the media, and I did want the possibility of some day teaching again.
in Cartman’s super sickeningly sweet, obviously fake voice
“Oh. . . Oh, hey guys. . . yeah, man. … that’s really sad what happened to your dad/husband/father/lifepartner/uncle/neighbor. Man, that’s like, so, so SO sad. I can’t imagine what it must be like to watch the air taken from his lungs like that, I mean, what? He must have been about a 42 inch chest before? Man, without the air, I’m sure he’s a lot smaller than 42, right? Here, have a cookie. Anyway. . .”