I think there are some benefits to letting the child have a part of the conference, but in most schools, that one conference is all there is. We have a second scheduled, but it is near the end of the year and by then it's too late for any real changes to happen. I would guess that with the majority of students, either the parent or the teacher has some sort of concern, but it is left unaddressed when the conferences are structured this way. The parent probably walks away thinking things are fine when they are not. Even before we had these types of conferences, I felt like so much of it was scripted, where the teacher talked about things that so far down the priority list of concerns (like test scores), that there was no time for any questions at all after all of that. I guess it is up to the parent to schedule a separate, longer conference, but if every parent did that, the teacher would be swamped.
