Dear Mr. President...

Dear Mr. President,

Let's be honest: When it comes to improving our nation's 98,000 public schools, the next few years will be very challenging. School budgets will be cut. Class sizes will grow. Dropout rates are likely to remain unacceptably high. Today more than one-third of all high school students don’t graduate on time.

There's a critically important resource, however, that can be employed immediately to help the nearly 50 million public school students do better: our nation’s parents.

Children are deeply influenced by their parents' expectations, attitudes, behavior and support. Many studies show that parents have at least as much impact on their children's educational success as their teachers.

I hope you use the power of your office to unleash the transforming power of this latent resource, and launch a national campaign to draw parents into deeper and more effective involvement in their children's education.

Here are three ideas that can help accomplish this:

1. Work with states to develop national education standards based on a deep understanding of what it takes for young adults to be successful; communicate the importance of these standards to parents and citizens everywhere.
2. Leverage new technologies and partnerships to engage America's parents in ongoing learning about how to support their children's success and what it means for their children to be academically “on track."
3. Help states and districts develop and disseminate easily understood reports that allow parents to not only monitor how their kids are doing in class, but also how they are mastering the skills necessary to be successful after graduation day.

Now is the time to inspire and guide parents to reinforce the lessons of the classroom and engage their children in learning throughout the day. A trip to the supermarket, for instance, provides a quick opportunity to reinforce math skills: "We're buying these four items. Quick — before we get to the cash register — can you guess how much our bill will be? If we give the clerk $20, how much will we get back?"

Parents are our children's first teachers. We must go beyond bake sales and fund-raisers to draw them into a leading role in a national movement for improved education.

Comments

[deepak]

I also like the idea that the Federal Government should be the conduit for creating a set of standards that all schools can look at for measuring their success. This is better then having the government actively involved in driving school policies and controlling them through funding. A centrally controlled and funded school system sounds good on paper, but I think we are seeing that in practice, it doesn't work well. One size can't fit all.

Thanks for the great work, Bill.

[Tim]

Bill,

Excellent article. I like that your ideas were to drive parents to be more active in the education process. I have seen the difference between successful schools and not so successful schools. My daughters first school had a very active parent involvement and the API scores were in the 800's. Her next school, parents were not as involved, and the API was in the 700s.

I also like the idea that the Federal Government should be the conduit for creating a set of standards that all schools can look at for measuring their success. This is better then having the government actively involved in driving school policies and controlling them through funding. A centrally controlled and funded school system sounds good on paper, but I think we are seeing that in practice, it doesn't work well. One size can't fit all.

Thanks for the great work, Bill.