Schools’ reasons for nixing parent visits don’t add up

For some parents, watching education firsthand during online schooling has been a rare and welcome learning experience. Until teachers went on Zoom, classroom observations by parents were mostly banned or discouraged in the several decades I have been attending and writing about schools.

Some parents would still like to see what their kids do in class, or even observe the daily routine before enrolling them in a new school. Such requests are usually rejected. Parents are told in-class observations are too distracting, too cumbersome or violate student or teacher privacy — even though few schools ever try them.

When parents complain about being denied a chance to see what’s going on in class, I wonder about the fairness of letting a stranger like me, by virtue of being an education writer, spend time in hundreds of schools taking notes about what other people’s kids, and their teachers, are doing.

Thomas Hatch, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, said he thinks one reason parents rely so much on standardized test scores is because so many schools make it difficult “to go inside schools and see what and how children are learning.”

Some of the people angry at schools these days may find classroom observations neither helpful nor relevant to their complaints. Some educators say such visits are intrusive or will lead to an unmanageable amount of visits.

I said in the Washington Post in 2011 that Arlington County, Va., allowed parents to observe for an hour or so. That did not spark a rush of parents to apply for the opportunity.

Jeremy Gilbert is principal of Highland Park High School near Dallas. Gilbert and I agree on what may be a significant barrier to parents visiting classrooms. Their children, fearing embarrassment, are likely to forbid it. “I threaten my own high-school-aged son that I am going to visit his class when he starts acting up,” Gilbert said.

So perhaps only the bravest parents would ask to sit quietly near the back and learn from what they see and hear. So why not give at least them a chance to do that?