July/August 2007

Meeting of the Minds

The parent-teacher conference is the cornerstone of school-home relations. How can it work for all families?

by Laura Pappano

Agnes Jackson isn’t proud to admit it, but last year she didn’t attend a single parent-teacher conference for her youngest son, who just completed third grade at the Thomas O’Brien Academy of Science and Technology in Albany, New York.

It’s not as if she didn’t try. Jackson did respond when the school asked her to select a time for a face-to-face meeting. “They asked me what time could I be there and I told them, but they said, ‘Oh, somebody already took that,’” says Jackson, a single mother of three who works nights as a certified nursing assistant. She made several impromptu visits to the school, whose website touts it as a “nationally recognized Blue Ribbon School of Excellence,” but each time her son’s teacher was unavailable. “They’d say, ‘You need to wait until school is over,’” she recalls.

The parent-teacher conference may be the most critical, yet awkward, ritual in the school calendar. It is treated as a key barometer of parental involvement, so important that a Texas lawmaker earlier this year proposed fining parents $500 and charging them with a Class C misdemeanor for skipping one. New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wants to pay poor families up to $5,000 a year to meet goals, including attending parent-teacher conferences.

Yet, in practice, these conferences can be ill-defined encounters whose very high-pressure design—bringing together a child’s two most powerful daily influences for sometimes super-brief meetings about academic and social progress—make them a volatile element in home-school relations. For schools, parent-teacher conferences can be a nightmare to organize and may leave teachers spinning after hours of quick encounters. For parents, sessions can feel more like speed-dating than team-building and may encourage snap judgments.

The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.

In Search of That "Third Thing"

Education Programs strive to define--and develop--the professional dispositions that make a good teacher

by Mitch Bogen

In a memorable scene from the 1970s film The Paper Chase, Dr. Kingsfield, the imperious Harvard Law School professor, halted a class discussion, reached into his pocket, and said to the film’s student protagonist, “Here is a dime. Go call your mother and tell her you will never become a lawyer.” Impressive, sure. But is this tendency to insult and intimidate students the kind of disposition that would qualify him to teach in a public school classroom?

Most people think of dispositions in the psychological sense, as innate personality attributes like cheerfulness or irritability. But in the world of teacher education, “dispositions” refers to the personal or interpersonal qualities that a candidate needs to develop in order to become an effective teacher. Mary Diez, a professor of education at Alverno College in Wisconsin, who has long been involved in the effort to set standards for teacher certification, describes dispositions as that “third thing” beyond skills and knowledge. She and others argue that the development of appropriate professional dispositions—such as open-mindedness or sensitivity to all children’s needs and strengths—is an essential qualification for would-be teachers.

In recent years, states have begun to include dispositions along with skills and knowledge in the standards they set for teacher licensure. Accrediting organizations now require that teacher-education programs assess candidates’ dispositions along with other professional qualifications. As a result, these programs are grappling with ways to define, assess, and develop candidates’ professional ¬dispositions—efforts that have proved challenging and sometimes hotly controversial.

The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.

Youth Organizing and School Improvement

by Kavitha Mediratta, Amy Cohen, and Seema Shah

City Schools: How Districts and Communities Can Create Smart Education Systems (Harvard Education Press, 2007) lays out a vision for a “smart” education system, one that links a highly functioning and effective school district with a comprehensive and accessible web of supports for children, youth, and families. In this excerpt, Kavitha Mediratta, Amy Cohen, and Seema Shah describe the role of youth organizing in creating and maintaining such a system.

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