How to build parent demand for academic quality

Today, some thoughts about the answer to last week's question of the week: how can we build parent demand for academically stronger schools?

One answer, I believe, is to make standards more tangible and tie them more clearly to the "basic" and "proficient" labels used in state and district testing systems.

Some districts and states are taking initial steps to make standards more accessible to parents. The Oregon Department of Education, for example, provides sample or "anchor" papers that show varying levels of performance in fourth grade writing. These samples help students, teachers, administrators, and parents learn what the expectations are for writers at grade 4.

But the typical parent never sees this stuff and is unlikely to have much insight into what "proficient" work would look like in their child's classroom.

To be fair, parents have limited time. They cannot be expected to be curriculum experts.

But...what if we started with just one subject, writing, and worked really hard to educate parents about what "proficient" and "basic" writing looks like at each grade level?

Let's take a look at one of the Oregon fourth grade writing samples. (This is the one labeled "medium-high" among the "narrative" samples.) Let's say that this sample represents "proficient:"



And let's say that this next sample represents "basic:"


What if fourth grade parents across the nation were exposed over and over again to samples of student work like this - to help them understand what fourth grade writing proficiency really means? They'd be much better prepared to encourage and support their child to bring home work like this.

They'd also be much more likely to pay attention to what is going on in writing in their child's fourth grade classroom. Does the student work look more like "proficient" or more like "basic"? They might well question teachers who give an "A" grade to students who bring home papers that look more like "basic."

And with ongoing exposure to student work that represents "basic" and "proficient" at their child's grade level, they'd be more likely to consider various school improvement ideas through the lens of "will this help more kids in our school become proficient?"

Then we'd be on the right track: building parent demand for writing excellence one homework assignment, one test, one classroom at a time.