Technology, Accountability, and Stalker Parents in K-12: Who's Enabling Whom?

Leslie Madsen Brooks — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 22:57:26 -0500

Graycie at Today's Homework and Ms. Cornelius of A Shrewdness of Apes wrote this week about "stalker moms," a K-12 variant of the college-age student's "helicopter parent." In a comment, Ms. C mentions she keeps an online gradebook, which prompts e-mails such as

"Deer Teechur: Pweshus told me he gave you that assignment. Please change the zero in the gradebook immediately."

I got three of those last week.

In the same thread, roller coaster teacher reported, "My team opted for online grades 3 years ago, and that got old fast, so we opted out. Some team teachers got so fed up, they won't even keep a web page for assignments anymore."

Even teachers who are technophiles often feel overwhelmed by all the technological choices, which too soon become reponsibilities, then burdens. Take, for example, Jane Nicholls, who studies the effects of Web 2.0 tools on oral literacies. In a post simply titled Troubled," she explains why she needs to "reboot."

Parents can feel overwhelmed, too. Stalker moms and dads log onto schools' student tracking systems to monitor their students' progress (usually in the form of grades) every day (or even every hour). Sandy Banks of the Los Angeles Times explains how it all works:

They are ubiquitous at schools today, these e-monitoring notification systems: TeleParent, Parent Portal, Edline, Parent Connect. It's not just for little kids still getting the hang of homework routines. It's used widely for high school students -- and their parents.

Want to know when your sophomore's book report is due? You can find out on yourhomework.com. Worried that your senior's been showing up late to first period math? Sign up for Parent Connect and you can monitor attendance in every class. Wonder if your 11th-grader missed a homework assignment? Expect a phone call from TeleParent.

Today's online educational tools include a computerized debit card for the cafeteria that conveniently lets parents load it with money, then allows them to ban the purchase of snack foods and sweets and dictate how many burritos their child can buy at once.

What's next? Webcams in each classroom, so you can see if your kid is napping in biology?

Banks calls such systems an "online umbilical cord"--one that can be comforting in an age when many parents feel they can't communicate effectively with their teens. Yet she's correct when she says we need to think through our values as parents (and, I think, teachers) when we feel the need to keep track of every point our teenagers earn on quizzes, papers, class participation, and other assignments.

We can try to keep up with all the Web 2.0 tools that might translate into instructional technologies to benefit our students, or we can think about our actual learning objectives or social values and then find the appropriate technologies.

We also need to be sure that teachers and principals who try to innovate beyond online assignments and gradebooks--beyond mere classroom management technologies--are not needlessly shut down.

In understanding what's going on in our kids' schools, are we aiming for transparency or surveillance? And where does transparency end and surveillance begin?

And in the cases Banks describes, who's enabling whom? Are overzealous parents demanding too much access to every detail, or are schools feeding parental anxiety unnecessarily by making such information available?

What's going on, technologically speaking, in your children's schools? Do you know of parents or teachers who you feel have crossed the line technologically? How and why?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks helps university faculty improve their teaching. She's thankful her son is only a toddler and thus has no grades to track online. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toy Box.

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Technology, Accountability, and Stalker Parents in K-12: Who's Enabling Whom?