School Communications Are a Mess
· The Atlantic
With the exception of my husband, no one contacts me as often as my children’s school does. There’s the old-school stuff: a folder that comes home in each of their backpacks weekly, filled with flyers and graded work and tests to sign; a binder with a nightly behavior and reading log, also for me to sign. I get texts and emails with the school’s weekly newsletter, updates from the PTA, and, more than anything else, notifications about posts on the various platforms and apps the school uses.
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That brings me to the new-school stuff: ClassDojo for one kid. Bloomz for another (except for choir information, which is on ClassDojo). Something called PowerSchool, which is meant to be the district’s hub for grades but also—for some mysterious reason—sends me weekly automated emails telling me that the balance in my daughters’ accounts has fallen below $5. (This makes no sense. For one thing, their school lunch is free. For another, school payments are handled on another platform entirely.)
I’d like to think that, given the volume of information I receive, I have a solid grasp of how my children are faring in school. But I have reason to doubt as much. American parents are prone to overestimating how well their kids are doing in school. According to a recent report from Learning Heroes, a nonprofit whose aim is to help parents develop an accurate understanding of their children’s academic performance, about 88 percent of American parents say their child is performing at or above grade level in reading; 83 percent say the same about math. But in most states, the share of students meeting grade-level expectations in reading or math is less than 50 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics’ most recently available compilation of state scores.
This is the strange state of modern school communication: Although parents have access to an enormous amount of information about what their children are doing in school, many struggle to figure out whether their kids are actually keeping up. Having spent recent weeks chatting with parents and teachers in the hope of gaining better insight into where school-to-parent communication is breaking down, I’ve come to the conclusion that parents are receiving both too much and too little information at the same time.
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In my conversations with fellow parents about school messaging, communication overwhelm repeatedly came up. One parent in Rochester, New York, told me that her kids’ school seems to take a saturation approach, bombarding her with information via multiple tools, in hopes that her family will get the message. More than anything, parents complained that schools employ too many apps and online platforms. Joanna Cummings, a mother of four based in Indianapolis, told me that although all of her children go to the same school, she still has four different apps for communicating with teachers, plus a fifth site where certain test scores are posted.
When information is spread and frequently repeated across platforms, it’s hard to know where to look for updates—especially if there’s seemingly little rhyme or reason to what gets announced where. And the sheer volume of communications can make prioritizing difficult. “You have this undifferentiated fire hose of content coming at you from the school, but it’s not stratified in a useful way,” Matthias Schabel, a father of three in Portland, Oregon, told me. Often, important notices are tucked into messages that also contain a lot of fluff—a notification for Pajama Day, a reminder that Chuck E. Cheese is hosting a back-to-school night, an announcement that the district is holding a flower sale at the football game. The paradoxical outcome is that although the school might be sharing essential information with you, you can’t trust that you’ll see it.
Nancy Nayar, a mom of two in Brooklyn, told me that despite the numerous sources of information at her kids’ school—JumpRope and Jupiter for checking on grades and assignments; Google Classroom for daily content; a physical binder with written work; plus many, many papers sent home by folder—she was haunted by the possibility that she had a mistaken impression about her kids’ performance. “In some respects, you think, Well, I don’t have any excuse for not knowing everything that’s going on with my kids’ school,” Nayar said. “But there’s so much about every detail.”
Even streamlined information can be bewildering. Lindsay Meisel, a parent of two in San Francisco, told me that when her son was in first grade a couple of years ago, he fell behind in reading. Initially, she thought that his grades had revealed little reason to worry. Instead of giving traditional letter grades, the school uses a system that evaluates children on a scale from one to four—and when her son got mostly twos and threes, his teacher told her that was normal. When it seemed that her son hadn’t done well on a computer-adaptive test called a Star assessment, which is designed to track a child’s progression toward grade-level expectations, she said she was told to take those numbers with a grain of salt, because lots of younger kids struggle with online testing. That seemed reasonable to her.
Even so, this left Meisel confused about whether she needed to intervene. “The one objective measure that I feel like I can really trust, where he did poorly, you’re saying that actually is not reliable,” Meisel recalled thinking. “But then, what is reliable?” It took a third-party evaluation for Meisel to understand that her son was seriously behind.
This points to a troubling irony: For all of the frustration that parents have with overcommunication from schools, they may not be receiving—or clocking—some of the most crucial pieces of information. “If your kid is bringing home a good grade, you assume that that good grade means your child’s on grade level,” Bibb Hubbard, the founder of Learning Heroes, told me. “That’s inaccurate.”
Misunderstandings about grades are driven in part by rampant grade inflation. As Kelsey Piper recently documented in The Argument, the average GPA of American high schoolers rose from about 2.6 in 1987 to 3.1 in 2019—despite the fact that 12th-grade performance on standardized tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress was stagnant or even falling for much of that period. But grade inflation isn’t the only issue, Hubbard said. After all, grades take into consideration achievements other than mastery of material, including effort, engagement, and assignment completion. The trouble is that schools don’t always share a clear measure of grade-level performance, and even when they do, parents don’t necessarily know what to make of it. They rely on teachers to help them interpret their kids’ scores, but as Hubbard noted, “teachers are not trained or expected to tell parents the whole picture.”
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Meanwhile, many teachers have no choice but to spend their time spamming parents with mass updates. Abby Boruff, a public-school teacher in Des Moines, Iowa, told me that she thinks a lot of teachers would agree that the use of apps for communication is out of control. But that’s not always a problem they are well situated to solve. School tech systems are typically adopted piecemeal. And once they’re in place, they can be hard to remove. “Nobody wants to get rid of the old stuff,” Boruff said. “They want to try new stuff, but we never want to get rid of the stuff that we don’t need anymore.” Plus, individual schools and systems are responsible for communicating a lot of different things, Kristen McQuillan, a former public-school teacher and the executive director of Knowledge Matters, a nonprofit aimed at improving school curricula, told me. Many different parties—the state, the school district, the principal—have a hand in determining what schools ought to be communicating and when.
Different parents also have different preferred ways of receiving information. Catering to all of them necessarily requires duplicating communication. Even trickier is the reality that many parents don’t want to hear bad news about their kid, Boruff said. They can also be hard to reach—or it can be difficult to get them into the school for a sit-down conversation. Data back this up: The share of K–8 parents attending parent-teacher conferences has fallen from 77 percent in 2017 to 57 percent today, according to the most recent data from Learning Heroes. This reluctance or inability to meet in person makes it tough for teachers to convey news about a child falling behind. “If I’m concerned about something,” Boruff said, “that’s not a conversation I want to have on ParentSquare.”
This doesn’t mean that teachers should settle for an easy out. Sometimes, the job requires sharing bad news, and teachers must be willing to deliver it, just as parents must be willing to receive it. Building the mutual trust needed for these challenging conversations may not be something an app can solve. So parents looking for clarity about whether their children are on track may have to dig for it—not in the glut of emails they receive from their kid’s school, but by reaching out to the teacher directly, for a real conversation.