I’ve written about the so-called “helicopter parents” in
this space before – people who constantly hover around their children,
attempting to do everything for their offspring long after this has ceased to
be appropriate (or even sane). In recent years this has become a popular topic
for Internet humor and scorn, as we all seem to enjoy reading about people who
have gone completely off the deep end in their efforts to be the ultimate
parent. Some of the worst of it occurs in education, where we’ve seen confirmed
cases of parents trying to lobby teachers for better grades for their children –
when said children are college seniors and Federal privacy laws prevent their
teachers from telling the parents anything…
I’ve been spared the worst of this in my own experience; my
communications with parents have been limited to making arrangements for students
who have been injured or hospitalized (or in once case detained) to make up
work or exams. I’ve had a few arguments with students over grades I’ve given –
including one rather surreal experience in which I had to explain that all
essays are graded subjectively, based on the grader’s opinion on how well they
answered the question – but even those are fairly rare. I remember what
arbitrary and opaque grading is like for the student, and I try to make mine as
transparent as I can. But apparently this isn’t always the case…
A story off the Albany Patch website tells the story of a
high school junior whose parents are suing the school after a teacher decided
to drop his grade for the year from an A+ to a C+ after he missed a single
chemistry lab to attend a family event. Prior to that point, the student’s
grade in the class had actually been above an A – it was a numeric 106%
including extra-credit work – and the absence was excused in advance. Of
course, the teacher and the school both claim that the student also failed the
final exam, but curiously the actual exam papers seem to have vanished – and the
school is refusing to allow the kid to re-take the exam, since it has been too
long and he could have been preparing this whole time…
Now, if that wasn’t enough to convince you to call
shenanigans on the whole thing, you should also know that the teacher in our
story was “requested” to take an early retirement last year, following a number
of similar complaints over the past few years. It doesn’t help that the parents
in our story were repeatedly assured by the school and later the school
district that this was a minor administrative matter, and it would all be
cleared up internally – right up to the point where they refused to do anything
about it or permit any compromise solution (like a re-test). It’s almost enough
to make you believe that they’re trying to cover something up…
I can’t speak for anyone reading this post (assuming that
anyone is reading this post), but if that was my kid being screwed over by the
school district I would exhaust every other avenue there was, and if none of
the others worked I’d call a lawyer, too. And I’d look into the possibility of
criminal charges (fraud and conspiracy are both criminal offenses; so is perjury),
which is much worse than the parents in our news story are doing. I don’t know
if they’ve got a case – I will caution anyone who might be out there again not
to take legal advice from bloggers without a license to practice law. But I
wouldn’t call these folks helicopter parents…
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