Washington D.C. -- How do we better involve parents in the education of their children? Answering that question is turning out to be a key area of discussion in this year’s election campaign. One increasingly publicized prescription now being bandied about on the campaign trail is the concept of mandatory parental contracts.

Under this scheme, at the start of every school year parents would be required to sign a contract with their child’s public school obligating the parents to help their children with their homework, attend school meetings, etc. The main problem with this "contract," however, is that it fails to provide a mutual exchange of benefits. While parents are forced to assume a variety of responsibilities, the public school is not required to raise student performance or furnish qualified teachers and competent administrators. Question: Why should the government force contractual duties upon parents when it refuses to require its own schools to deliver contractual results? There is a competing vision of how to involve parents in the schooling of their children.

Rather than mandating increased parental participation, this competing approach seeks to empower parents and give them incentives to become more involved in the schooling process. Much of this alternative viewpoint is embodied in AB 1216, a bipartisan bill making its way through the California Legislature. AB 1216 would create a parental "bill of rights" in education.

Under AB 1216’s provisions, public schools would actually be prohibited from requiring parental contracts which force parents to share responsibility with the school for the educational performance of their child (voluntary agreements would be permitted). Instead of such coercive devices, AB 1216 seeks to involve parents by opening up the educational process to parental inspection and input. For example, in accordance with locally adopted procedures, parents would be given the right to observe any instruction or school activity involving their child. Parents would be allowed to review all instructional materials and assessments. Each individual public school would also have to compile a publicly available annual prospectus that would contain the curriculum, titles, descriptions and instructional aims of every course offered by that school.

AB 1216 would also grant parents and their children various protections including prohibitions against compelling students to reveal, affirm, or disavow particular religious or political beliefs; against pupils being referred for mental, behavioral, or emotional evaluation without parental consent (exception for a child-abuse investigation); and against schools requiring pupils or their families to participate in intrusive programs such as monitoring the quality or character of the pupil’s home life.

Most parents would likely find the parental empowerment strategy of AB 1216 to be much more preferable to the coerciveness of mandatory parental contracts. The ultimate parental right, though, remains the parents’ right to choose the school--whether it be public or private--that their children attend. The most powerful and meaningful parental involvement strategy, therefore, must include a school choice or opportunity scholarship program that gives parents the responsibility of choosing the best school for their children and allows schools to compete to see which can offer the best education and results.

-- By Lance T. Izumi