Abstract
In this regular Kappan column, Phyllis Fagell gives advice to educators. This month, a teacher wants to set better boundaries with parents don’t seem to trust teachers and want to have input on every decision. A principal has noticed that students are only hanging out with kids from their own social class, creating a “haves” and “have nots” culture at the school. Another teacher keeps hearing about colleagues who are looking for jobs in higher-paying districts and wonders if it’s time to jump ship, despite being generally happy in her current job.
It feels like parents trust educators less these days. The home-school partnership is strained at best. I’m not just talking about the disrespectful rhetoric that teachers shirked their duties during the pandemic or that they’re lazy and dumb, though clearly that’s contributing to everyone’s unhappiness. Rather, I’m talking about the blurred lines between home and school. Parents today seem to hold the unrealistic expectation that they should know everything their kids are doing, reading, and learning during the school day. And it’s even worse when students go home with a complaint about another student. From the way parents approach me, you’d think I had insulted their child!
Not that long ago, the boundary was straightforward. We had a curriculum night during which we gave parents an overview of what their child would be learning over the course of the semester. That was their chance to ask questions and discuss how they could support their kids at home. We also had a parent-teacher conference twice a year to brief them on their child’s progress. If a student needed something more — for example, if they needed accommodations or stopped coming to class or were getting bullied — we would of course contact home. But there was a clearly demarcated line; teachers planned the lessons, and parents ensured their kid had the right supplies and hopefully got to class fed and rested.
Parents now want to know absolutely everything, and quite a few feel compelled to second-guess what we’re doing. They’ll weigh in on things like how we assign homerooms, how we cover math concepts, how we pick the books we teach, and how we choose which field trips we take. The home-school line is now totally blurred and it’s exhausting. It’s also a distraction from time I could be using to plan great lessons and meet students’ needs. Beyond being annoying, this behavior is unproductive.
How can I set healthy boundaries for myself? Also, how can school administrators help me and my colleagues reinforce boundaries in a way that still encourages strong partnerships with parents? I want to discourage what at best feels like meddling and at worst feels like condescension and bullying, but I don’t want to cut them off.
It’s not easy to be assertive and set healthy boundaries, particularly during times of heightened anxiety, but you’ll have better luck if you start with empathy and validation. Remember, these are parents who supervised their child’s remote learning and may have gotten used to having their finger on the pulse of everything they do. And if their kid struggled socially or academically during the pandemic, it’s not hard to understand why they might be parenting more protectively. Plus, these caregivers probably haven’t had much face time with teachers, they’ve had less time in the building itself, and they’ve also had fewer organic interactions with one another. In other words, their behavior likely has far more to do with their own stress than with lack of trust in you. In fact, the same boundaries that will help you be more productive will ease the burden on them, too.
Try to think of this as an opportunity to break bad habits and reestablish norms. To help set a new tone, administrators can send home regular communication about things like curriculum nights and parent-teacher conferences, and they can direct caregivers to a website or school handbook where they can find answers to commonly asked questions. They also can invite parents into the school to collaborate in appropriate ways and to clear up misconceptions. After all, what parents are saying may not match what teachers are hearing. When that leads to conflict, an administrator can help. If you think a parent interaction will be fraught, for instance, ask an administrator to join you. They can shut down a meeting if it starts to disintegrate.
You also can direct caregivers to a blog or website where you post updates about what’s happening in your classroom. Regular communication can eliminate misunderstandings and cut down on back-and-forth about minutiae. (I recognize that you’d have more time to post updates if parents weren’t constantly contacting you, but you may have to “over-communicate” as you establish a healthier partnership.) Use your resources, including room parents and PTA members, to help convey realistic expectations and perhaps boost empathy for you. Parents may not appreciate, for instance, the extent to which educators are dealing with more complex behavioral, social, and emotional issues; staff shortages and lost institutional knowledge; budget shortfalls; the threat of violence; and general fallout from years of uncertainty and unrest.
Remember that trust is a two-way street. Parents aren’t trying to make you miserable; they’re trying to advocate for their children. If you want to facilitate more constructive communication and establish better boundaries, stay calm, practice patience, use your resources, and ask questions rather than make assumptions. No one benefits when teachers and caregivers approach one another as adversaries.
Principal wants to encourage more ‘cross-class’ friendships
I’m a high school principal in an economically diverse area, and my school has all the stereotypical cliques — the athletes, the drama kids, the nerds, the Goth kids, and so forth. There really isn’t much mixing among them. But beyond those superficial categories, our rich students seem to hang out with other rich students, and our poor students hang out with other students who are less privileged. This has created a “have” and “have-not” culture that bothers me a lot.
Maybe I’m especially sensitive because I grew up poor and felt excluded from many social and extracurricular activities as a teen. I never felt like I wore the “right” stuff or had the “right” things. It’s painful for me to observe this dynamic among my students and do nothing, especially since I’m the principal and I’ve been receiving more reports of unkindness lately. What can I do in my role as an administrator, in a practical sense, to encourage more interaction between rich and poor students?
As you recognize, students benefit when there’s less “friending bias,” or social segregation. Research backs that up. I spoke to Johannes Stroebel, David S. Loeb Professor of Finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, who collected information from every high school and zip code in the country and found that lower-income children who attend schools with more cross-class friendships experience more upward economic mobility (Chetty et al., 2022).
As a first step, you can search Stroebel’s data, available on the website socialcapital.org. Look for schools that have economic diversity but don’t have much social fragmentation, then contact them to find out what they’re doing and identify best practices. Keep in mind that you can get the ball rolling in the right direction, but you can’t act alone. As Stroebel noted, some practices that lead to social segregation originate at the district or community level. For instance, he said that “sports used to be this unifying thing that brought people together across social classes, but now you have this growth in travel sports, and that gets expensive very quickly.” Gifted and talented programs can have a similar effect, he added. “We think that’s because they’re more likely to attract rich students. Any set-up that segregates students based on academic performance tends to segregate based on income” and other identifiers.
If your school is big, you may want to plan more large-scale events that bring disparate groups together. Stroebel noted, “When you go to a small party, you talk to everyone, but when you go to a big party, you tend to hang out with people who are similar to you. There’s more cross-class mixing in schools that hold pep rallies to foster school spirit.”
Assess whether the physical spaces in your building foster cohesion, too. At Lake Highlands School in Texas, for instance, several smaller schools and buildings were merged into one school. As a result, the school had multiple cafeterias, only one of which served free and reduced-price lunch. Not surprisingly, students had fewer opportunities for organic, cross-class interactions. When members of the Lake Highlands community realized the school’s physical design was leading to spatial segregation, they brought in an architect and rebuilt the school with a central hub. You may not be able to redesign your building, but you can be mindful of creating spaces that lead to less social fragmentation. And while you can’t do this work alone, you can gather data, drum up enthusiasm for the work, and partner with district leaders, teachers, parents, students, and other stakeholders.
Teacher wonders if she should ‘jump ship’ to district with better pay
My colleagues have been talking a lot lately about better pay at nearby districts, and many of them have told me they’re already firing off applications to teach in these other districts. When I comment that the grass isn’t always greener, they say that may be true, but then they may as well get paid more. They’re determined to make a switch and aren’t conflicted about the decision. They also involve everyone within earshot in these conversations, which tend to occur in the staff lounge or at the end of department meetings, so they’re hard to avoid.
This has been creating some internal tension for me. Of course I’d like to make more money. And, like many teachers these days, I also have frustrations related to how my district treats employees, but I’m generally happy at my school. If I weren’t privy to these conversations, I doubt I’d be considering a job shift. At the same time, I don’t want to be short-sighted — the last loser on a sinking ship. How does one determine whether to “jump ship”? How heavily should I be weighing compensation against other factors such as job satisfaction? And how should I respond to colleagues who make dumb comments and make me feel stupid and naïve when I tell them I don’t think I’ll apply elsewhere?
I’ll start with your last question. Determine who has earned your trust and only discuss your career plans with these individuals. Have these talks in private, too. You might conclude, for instance, that there’s no upside to weighing your options with current colleagues. And while you can’t stop someone from firing off a judgmental comment, you can limit their opportunities to make you feel dumb and naïve. You also can try not to internalize their critical statements, which likely reflect their own internal tension. You note that they aren’t conflicted about their decision to apply elsewhere, but if that were true, they wouldn’t be initiating so many conversations about their choices in public forums. Plus, consider the “spotlight effect,” a term psychologists use to refer to an individual’s tendency to overestimate how much others are thinking about them. Research shows that people are far more preoccupied with themselves than with others’ flaws or missteps.
Your first question is more complicated. You wonder if you should leave your school district for the possibility of higher pay when you’re generally happy with your current situation. As you’ve noted, there’s more at stake than money. Higher pay could come with less autonomy, a less supportive principal, or stingier benefits. (On the other hand, it could come with less judgmental colleagues!) Resist the inclination to think in all-or-nothing terms. Whatever you do doesn’t have to be a “forever” decision. You could leave but decide to return to your current district (or go in another direction entirely) at some point down the road.
The trickiest part is tuning out all the internal and external “noise.” That might require walking away from the staff lounge or a meeting when people are talking about this topic. (If you decide to stay, that kind of negativity can bring you down.) Take all the time you need to reflect on your own needs and values. As you consider your goals, keep in mind that change is hard because you know what you stand to lose but not what you stand to gain. It may be less intuitive, but standing still also comes with “opportunity cost,” or the loss of potential gains. For instance, while starting over requires adjusting to new colleagues, expectations, and systems, stretching yourself can open new doors, expand your knowledge, and feel energizing.
There’s no one right answer, which hopefully is reassuring. Allow for shades of gray and avoid false dichotomies. This doesn’t have to be a “now or never” decision. You could spend a year watching how well the transition works for colleagues who leave. You could use the rest of the school year to gather information about other districts, perhaps even shadow a teacher elsewhere for a day or two. You could even fire off applications while you’re considering your options. You don’t have to accept another position, and simply going through the interview process might give you a better “feel” for other places. There are many ways to come to as informed a decision as possible, from making lists of pros and cons to meeting with a career coach. Whatever you do, do it on your own terms. What’s right for your colleagues isn’t necessarily what’s right for you.