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Comment by judahmeek

18 days ago

You talked about holding the kids accountable & the teachers accountable.

What can we do to hold the parents accountable?

4 comments

judahmeek

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zamadatix  17 days ago

Blame is easy to assign to parents but if you do mean real accountability it is seemingly impossible beyond the most basic things such as student attendance.

Even taking a non-cynical look at certain parents' level of interest/ability/care/etc, we go as far as taking students and teachers out of the rest of the workforce for the express purpose of being able to assign them accountability for education instead. There just aren't levers like that available on the parental side to try to trigger meaningful actions with, nor is there anything close to consensus on how those might be put into place to begin the debate on what parents should be made accountable for with them.

The best chance I've seen to increase the amount of involvement from parents in their child's education is to try to have enhanced their own childhood education well enough to see why it's so important they be actively involved.

  • judahmeek  17 days ago

    I think you might be conflating accountability with enforcement or motivation a little bit.

    Maybe we should start by identifying metrics that enable us to measure the impact that a parent is having on their child's education?

    • zamadatix  17 days ago

      I think we just have different understandings of accountability but, perhaps, the same end desires. I absolutely agree if it's meant to be about also measuring the impact of the parents.

      To me, accountability requires an added component of being held answerable for said impact. E.g. "John was held accountable for the damage to the car" would mean John had to answer for the damage, not just "the damage John had was measured" or "John's actions were found to cause the damage". This answerability to the impact is the only part of accountability which I think we can't realistically do with parents as we are able to for students or educators.