For several years, the public schools of Norton, Mass., a college town an hour south of Boston, have wrestled with low attendance. The students aren't the problem; they're marked present for class an impressive 94% of the time. But their parents are a different story. The district invited 1,000 parents to a drug and alcohol seminar, but only two showed up. The turnout at some parent-teacher conferences can be just as paltry. At a public meeting, where droves of parents joined a heated debate on the future of Norton's middle-school basketball league, the room cleared out when talk turned to Item B on the evening's agenda--the district's scores on the state's tough, new standardized exam. Says Richard Zusman, one of the district's curriculum coordinators: "It really makes you wonder what's important to these parents."
Lois Bean worries about the same thing. An eighth-grade teacher in the upscale Atlanta suburb of Lilburn, she says her problem students have one thing in common: detached parents. Bean's efforts to get their mothers and fathers to attend back-to-school night, help out with research papers or even return her phone calls are often in vain. Those same parents are usually no-shows even at the Little League games that her family frequents. "We end up giving the same kids, who live in beautiful homes, a ride home every night," she says. "These aren't bad parents, but absentee parents."
One of the themes that TIME writers heard consistently while reporting on candidates for our Schools of the Year was that many parents--a minority, but still too many--have virtually dropped out of their children's education. Each school that we have recognized as outstanding has found innovative ways to get parents more involved--but those schools often work against a strong headwind. In a poll conducted earlier this year by Public Agenda, a nonprofit research organization, 70% of parents said they had not volunteered to tutor or coach in the past two years, and 60% said they had not attended a single community event held at their child's school. In a U.S. Education Department survey in 1999, 1 in 4 parents said he or she does not attend parent-teacher conferences.
Recent studies, including one released last week by the University of Michigan, show that kids in two-parent families spend more time with Mom and Dad than kids did 20 years ago. But much of that time is spent on activities like shopping or watching TV together. In a survey conducted last year for TIME and the Nickelodeon channel, 24% of kids felt their parents showed little or no interest in what they studied at school. Says Kim Joiner, a technology consultant at Conway Middle School in Louisville, Ky.: "It's very popular to say we have a problem in education, but it's not very popular to say we have a parent problem."