Hearing from Parents

Last week Educated Reimagined released an interview with Marc Porter Magee, CEO of 50Can and Dr. Felicia Cumings Smith, President and CEO of the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL), focused on a recent 50-state survey of 20,000 parents. Parent attitudes regarding their children’s learning, including those choices their young learners and their families make when it comes to providers, is something ABPTL is interested in covering and providing commentary on.

50Can partnered with Edge Research to release a report titled “State of Educational Opportunity in America.” Here are the highlights of that report:

Parents overwhelmingly want more for their kids beyond academics: career and technical education, dual enrollment, arts, sports, and summer learning top the list. 71% of the parents surveyed say they want career and technical education for their kids, but only 16% report that their children actually receive it.

Income influences everything. For example, tutoring? Just one in four learners from working-class families received it last year, compared to three in four among the wealthiest. Another example, summer camps? Approximately one-third of working-class children attended versus 88% of children from high-income families. Even when the researchers looked at internships or work-based learning, high-income families had 69% participation whereas low-income families reported 15% enrollment.

Income inequalities kept climbing, no matter how the researchers cut the income brackets. The gap didn’t plateau; it just kept widening.

The survey didn’t see the usual pattern where higher-income states perform better and lower-income states lag. Some states traditionally ranked at the bottom of education spending, like New Mexico, did really well on arts and music participation. States do better on those unique choices they decide to invest in.

39% of families with children in conventional public schools said they were “very satisfied.”

Learner-centered environments align with what families say they want – more holistic, personalized, connected learning. The challenge is scale. Too many families still feel their only option is a one-size-fits-all approach.

Finally, parents believe the way we measure school success needs to evolve. Conventional achievement metrics are important, but so are enrichment, mental health, and out-of-school support.

It’s clear low-income parents are dissatisfied with the options and choices available to them when it comes to their children’s learning. Education savings accounts, or vouchers, are mostly a way for public money to be directed to private schools, without many families, especially those who are black, brown, or poor) having the ability to choose something different regarding their child’s learning pathway.

It’s also clear that parents believe that “jumping off points” between traditional public school and alternative forms of learning just aren’t easy enough for them to risk the move. Instead, too many families, again especially those black, brown, and poor ones, feel trapped inside a sucky school without many options in front of them.

To move forward, especially for those families currently assigned to low-performing traditional schools, we need opportunity provisions, both in choice and financial support, so that young learners trapped in sucky schools can see a better pathway to become a smarter and stronger scholar.

In addition, once those options are provided, families need to have the courage to say “hell no” when it comes to sending their children to a bad school. In order for change to happen, to get black, brown, and poor kids in better learning conditions, the adults in those children’s lives will have to take an educated risk – withdrawing their kids from a system that is failing them and enrolling them in a new and smaller system that, even though they don’t have a long track record, is committed to teaching those young learners how to define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB