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False Conflicts
The Achilles Heel of American Debate
In 2011, Kelli Stargel, a Republican Florida state representative, wrote a bill that required public school teachers to grade parents of students in kindergarten through the third grade. According to Stargel, there was accountability for students, teachers, and administrators, but parent accountability was the missing link. A parent grade of “satisfactory”, “unsatisfactory”, or “needs improvement” was proposed to go along with student report cards.
Steve Perry, the founder of Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford, Connecticut, didn’t care for the bill. He said a good education was based on what a child learns in the classroom and not what a parent might know. Perry also said, “There is nothing in any teacher’s training that would put them in a position to be able to effectively judge the parenting of one of their students.”
Perry was right. The bill didn’t pass.
Since politicians are rarely proactive, what exactly was Stargel’s bill an overreaction too?
That same year, Psychology Today published an essay called: A Lack of Parent Engagement Helps Create Failing Schools. The author wrote, “For the first time in history, a generation of American students will be less well-educated than their parents. Teachers are getting the blame [but] not much is…