Learning From CNN'S Online Article: What Teachers Really Want To Tell Parents - Parent-Teacher Wars

When parents and teachers gather and interact online, fireworks are bound to happen. Freed of the restrictions on "polite" adult conversation, parents let fly their opinions about teachers, and teachers do likewise about the challenges of teaching in today's school system.

Truth to tell there's a lot of finger pointing and blaming, and much of the "interactions" entail rants from one side or the other.

CNN: What Teachers Really Want To Tell Parent

In September, 2011, CNN published an article online, written by award winning teacher, Ron Clark, entitled "What Teachers Really Want To Tell Parents". The article itself is not that significant, but what's really instructive are the comments. The battles still rage, as there have been 3,650 comments, many from parents reacting to the article.

Since our website goal is to build bridges between home and school, and facilitate communication between parents and their school systems, our interest in this online discussion lies in the question: What can we learn about the parent-teacher wars? The issue isn't about who is wrong about what, but to better understand the rather tenuous relationships between home and school.

Our Commentary Series On The Parent-Teacher Wars

We decided to tease out article comments, both from parents and teachers, that we feel are particularly instructive, with the goal of helping educators understand some of the basic issues that exist between home and school.

From this page you can access some of the comments on the article, along with commentary about what the comments suggest.

Parents Ranting At Teachers - It Sure Gets Dirty: Can you win by arguing with parents about their long held negative opinions, often stemming from childhood, about schools and teaches? The answer is obvious yet, it's understandable to want to argue and change these kinds of parental stereotypes.

Teachers Fight Back: Teachers respond to the criticisms of parents, often in ways as destructive as the original comments.