Parents (and the community) are no longer important... They are critical to school survival

by Tony Townsend
Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia

Governments all over the world have recognised the importance of parental involvement in education. New policies that restructure schools have moved key decisions about policy, funding and staffing to the school community through school councils. However, there are concerns that parents, although willing to play a part in their child's education, are now finding that governments are running backwards faster than they can run forwards. The cuts to funding of public schools, together with government determinations to have students raise test schools in basic skills, have also hit some of the curriculum, with art and music, in particular, suffering. Some parents who see these areas as valuable to their children are now forced to take private lessons for them to be covered.

Such reports are worrying for a number of reasons. First, we all know that volunteer labour is not shared equally among parents. Some are involved in everything, others in nothing. A real concern that all the extra requirements placed at the local level may burn out, sooner rather than later, those willing workers currently serving schools so well. It reminds me of the plight of the Solomon Islands. The government sold the trees to the Japanese or Koreans (thus raising 25% of their GDP), with some of the money going direct to villagers. But ten years later there were no trees left (hence no money) but also no top soil (washed away), no clean water (top soil in rivers) and no fish (dirty water kills coral...fish go somewhere else). Where would schools be
when the volunteers say, enough??

Second, the increase in volunteer work is directly attributable to government decisions. If education was properly funded, it would be reasonable to expect some input from parents, but not at the level of complexity that is demanded at the moment. If parents have to do more of the cost of running a decent program, where does that leave schools that can't?

Third, and perhaps the biggest danger of all, is the shift in emphasis in the curriculum. If we let art and music be siphoned off from the regular offering of the school, it may indicate to the government that these are not seen to be important and, somewhere in the future, they simply may be dropped altogether. If this can happen, it could also happen to other subjects as well.
We may find the time emerging when school only offers literacy and numeracy as a matter of course and everything else costs extra. This is the fate of many schools whose lack of resources lead to a very narrow curriculum and one
could argue a very narrow society at the end.

We must question, and perhaps resist, some of the things that are happening to education in the rationalist perspective of the world painted by our politicians, and the best way of doing that is through parents, not as volunteers, but as voters. It is more critical now than ever before, that schools approach parents, and the wider community as well, with open arms, to be full partners in any attempt to change the current downward spiral that education is facing. Why the wider community? The current demography of Australia suggests that around 30 per cent of voters have a child in school. We also should consider that:

• substantial proportions of adults do not see their school years as particularly fulfilling and probably have only visited their local school when they were required to, to discuss their own child's progress;

• two of the groups (under 25s and over 55s) are more likely to be concerned about issues of employment and/or health;

• many people only go into school when they have to, for parent-teacher interviews and the like. Once this stops many never enter a school again.
  

This means that most members of the community do not know about the many wonderful changes that have occurred in schools and classrooms. A decade ago I interviewed a number of parents. I asked them "Knowing what you know about schools today, would you have preferred to go to school today or when you did?"? Half of them said "Today, because schools are such wonderful places these days"? and the other half said "Back then, because I'd hate to be a kid growing up today".

Governments can (and do) advertise to the sixty or seventy per cent of voters who don?t have a child in public education what a good job they are doing, but blame schools when anything goes wrong. Unless public schools encourage their communities (not just parents) to see what is happening in schools, and the difficulties that principals, teachers and students face, the voting public will not know any different.

It could be argued that if schools are to survive into the longer term, then they need to change. Not only do they need to recruit whole communities as their supporters, but they also need to recognise the changes that have happened in our society. Encouraging a more active exchange of information between public schools and their communities may be the best way to support ongoing change.