Spying To Get Into College
Mon May 05, 2008 at 09:05:25 AM PDT
Cross-posted at Fussbucket
New software programs enable parents to learn of everything from their child's daily class attendance and homework completion to test scores and overall grades throughout the semester, according to this article in the NY Times.
Boy am I glad I'm not a kid anymore. What a nightmare. Sorry if you're one of those parents who likes to use these programs, but this seems like an invasion of privacy to me.
The article profiles Nicole Dobbins, a mother of three from Alpharetta, Ga. who regularly logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her children. By the time she sees them after school she already knows what happened because she's been spying on them all day.
When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment. “He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.
Apparently there are a bunch of these tracking programs out there with names like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool. They are being used by thousands of schools, kindergarten through 12th grade, the article says.
Kindergarten? Huh?
But schools do seem to like them. More and more are using them to help teachers communicate with busy parents. Studies have shown that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance and educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents, the article says.
But there has to be a downside.
At an age when teenagers increasingly want to manage their own lives, many parents use these programs to tighten the grip. College admission is so devastatingly competitive, parents say, they feel compelled to check online grades frequently. Parents hope to transform even modest dips before a child’s record is irrevocably scarred. “I tell my son, ‘What you do as a freshman will matter to you as a senior,’ ” Mrs. Dobbins said. “ ‘It will haunt you or applaud you.’ ”
This is fear-based parenting. Is that what we want? To be so terrified of college admissions that we harangue and spy on our kids for four years in a desperate attempt to keep them from fucking up? I don't want to do this.
Kathleen DeBuys, a mother of four in Roswell, Ga., used to check her e-mail first thing in the morning: the ParentConnect alerts would fly in by 6 a.m. The subject line might read, “Claire has received a failing grade. ...”
“And I’d freak out,” said Mrs. DeBuys, speaking of her oldest child, then a high school freshman. “I’d be waking her up, shouting: ‘Claire! What did you fail? What is wrong with you?’ She’d pull the pillow over her head and say, ‘Leave me alone!’ ”
Claire was in the gifted-and-talented program at her school and usually the notices were mistakes due to her missing class either because she had been sick or because she was off being gifted and talented along with the other Harvard-bound kids in her class.
So where's the trust? The kid is in the g&t program? Why doesn't it occur to the mom to ask her daughter about it instead of flying around the house like a lunatic at six o'clock in the morning? “It was horrible,” Mrs. DeBuys admits.
Part of the problem is that these kinds of programs are addictive. You want to know whether your surly sixteen year old handed in his English paper? You don't have to try to pull it out of his reluctant mouth, you can just check your email and find out.
I kind of think that parents use the excuse of competitive college admissions to keep tabs on their kids because it sucks that teenagers shut us out. But isn't that just the way it goes? Aren't teenagers supposed to separate? What do you think of these programs?
