In working with a title 1 school, I have witnessed teachers actually going out and meeting parents at ballgames, bowling alleys, etc, in order to give parents progress reports and to discuss ways they can help their child be successful. I have also listened to teachers lamenting that parents didn't show up or didn't follow through or seemed in some way disinterested.
I don't know what the answer to parent apathy is...
Maybe they had poor school experiences themselves, are overwhelmed with other things in their lives (e.g. keeping food on the table and paying the rent), and/or aren't very smart.
Forty or fifty years ago, the US offered lots of manufacturing jobs that paid a living wage, and people who weren't bright enough to be lawyers or engineers or whatever (or who couldn't afford college) could find a decent job.
Now we've outsourced a lot of these jobs, and we've decided that everyone should just go to college and become a knowledge worker. IMO, this is insane. You can't make people smarter by wishing it so, and the results are predictable. People with college degrees end up working as security guards, at Starbucks, and in other low-skill jobs (but they have huge loans to pay off). We're building an entire economy around a fantasy.
On top of this, we put so much effort into average and below-average students, we forget about the bright students who actually have the talent to be high-caliber knowledge workers. This happens through a combination of ignoring them in elementary school and then watering down math, science, and English courses in middle school and beyond.
And then everyone wonders why things don't improve. We hear that the real problem is that we need to throw more money at the issue, while ignoring
how we spend the money and the fact that the US education expenditures are above average among OECD countries. We even spend more than the much-vaunted Finland as a percentage of overall public expenditure.
Very few people are willing to admit that we're suffering under a failed educational philosophy. Call me a cynic, but I don't think meaningful improvements will happen unless there are some huge systemwide earthquakes.
