KQED News Mind/Shift – Linda Flanagan
“This failure to communicate between teachers and parents appears to be the norm. In a 2012 study conducted by the National Household Education Surveys Program, 59 percent of parents with children in public school reported having never received a phone call from a teacher. A mere 49 percent of parents who had been contacted by school staff reported being “very satisfied” with the exchange. And although more parents received emails from schools than they had a decade before, much of that increase went to families living above the poverty line. Matthew Kraft, who carried out the research, calls that discrepancy an “income-based email communication gap,” one of many holes in the ways teachers and parents exchange information. Kraft is an assistant professor of education and economics at Brown, and he has spent years studying the lapses in parent-teacher communication. Students suffer most from the lack of quality communication between the two camps, Kraft says. “Our intuition that teacher communication with parents is a good thing is exactly right,” he told me. Several studies corroborate that claim.”(more)