How can parents be encouraged to care about their child's education?
This is at the heart of the proposal from the Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals that parents be required to sign a "contract" with their child's school. The agreement would cover matters such as parents guaranteeing to attend parent-teacher interviews, ensuring that their child's homework is completed, and committing to take an "active interest in their children's learning".
Parent "contracts" are already in place in some state government and private schools, and the Liberal Party may include the suggestion in its education policy for the next election. The proposal is an understandable reaction from school principals. Their job is getting increasingly difficult as families, either deliberately or not, shift the task of parenting on to teachers.
The education function of schools is being replaced by a welfare function. Having parents acknowledge their role in their child's education is one way of putting responsibility for bringing up children back onto families.
The question is whether contracts between schools and parents are the best way of achieving this. And the answer is no -- for three reasons.
Firstly, the parents at whom this initiative is aimed are unlikely to have their behaviour influenced by being forced to sign a contract. Certainly there will be some parents who may be encouraged to act differently, but they will be relatively few. As Principals Association president Andrew Blair said: "We are seeing more and more kids in a terrible state of repair turning up to school". Parents sending children to a school in this state are likely to be known to the school and to welfare agencies and will probably already be receiving help and counselling.
For a variety of reasons, some of those parents will simply be incapable of providing their children with the sort of support required under an education contract. Parents who fail to help their child's learning are likely to fail their children in many other ways.
Secondly, there's the matter of consequences when the contract is broken. The most serious sanction is expulsion, and a student from a disadvantaged background is only going to be punished further if he or she must change schools because a parent has breached the contract. And it would be unfair to penalise a student if a parent refused to sign a contract.
It would also be a mistake to think of contracts as being one-way. If schools do not fulfil their side of the bargain, it is unclear what sort of redress parents would have.
If, for example, by the end of primary school, a child was unable to read and write, who should be held accountable -- the school or the parents? In theory, there's no reason why contracts shouldn't be available to all parents at a school. This potential for an administrative and legal nightmare leads to the third argument against contracts in this context.
A successful educational experience for a child is the result of a partnership between the child, the family and the school. This partnership is based on shared assumptions and understandings, and fundamentally it centres on trust. Parents trust teachers to apply their professional judgement and skills in the classroom, and teachers trust that parents will ensure that when children arrive at school they are able and ready to learn. This trust can't be captured in a contract.
Regulating social relationships, whether by contract as in this case, or through government legislation in other situations, is rarely the solution. The application of bureaucratic and legalistic rules to relationships has as much chance of destroying relationships as it has of strengthening them.
At first glance it might appear that a contract between a parent and a school would help clarify the expectations of each to the other. However, no piece of paper can cover every possible contingency and, regardless of what is written, ultimately the parties are going to have to rely on common sense.
If parents came to believe that their obligation to their child's education started and ended with what was contained in the contract with their school, the cause of encouraging parents to undertake greater responsibility might even be set back.
Contracts and regulation are the easy way out to the problem of what to do when parents can't or won't care for their child's education. Principals and teachers are confronted daily with the consequences of dysfunctional families, and most of the time principals and teachers are left to fend for themselves.
The real challenge is to change the attitude and behaviour of parents -- and this is not the role of schools.
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