Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, calls this the parent trap, with many parents part of the problem rather than the solution. The trap is a trap door many parents fall through. If you think the answer is different for parents of children in private schools, you're wrong. Most parents criticize American schools in the abstract, but not their children's schools. If this attitude is a rationalization, it's one that's hard to change.
Busy parents like to think if their schools are good, they can leave the teaching to the teachers.
But they're failing their children. No matter how good a teacher may be, parents who don't pay critical attention to what their children are learning in school, and how they spend time after school, contribute to lower academic standards. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, studied how American teens spend their time after school every week. With so much talk about school reform, an anti-intellectualism continues to haunt American parents and children. The white nerd with a slide rule and leaky pens in his shirt pocket is not a glamorous figure either, although computer whiz kids may be turning that image around.