“With the exception of my husband,” Stephanie H. Murray says, “ no one contacts me as often as my children’s school does”:
There’s the old-school stuff: a folder that comes home in each of their backpacks weekly, filled with flyers and graded work and tests to sign; a binder with a nightly behavior and reading log, also for me to sign. I get texts and emails with the school’s weekly newsletter, updates from the PTA, and, more than anything else, notifications about posts on the various platforms and apps the school uses.
That brings me to the new-school stuff: ClassDojo for one kid. Bloomz for another (except for choir information, which is on ClassDojo). Something called PowerSchool, which is meant to be the district’s hub for grades but also—for some mysterious reason—sends me weekly automated emails telling me that the balance in my daughters’ accounts has fallen below $5. (This makes no sense. For one thing, their school lunch is free. For another, school payments are handled on another platform entirely.)
I’d like to think that, given the volume of information I receive, I have a solid grasp of how my children are faring in school. But I have reason to doubt as much.
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When information is spread and frequently repeated across platforms, it’s hard to know where to look for updates—especially if there’s seemingly little rhyme or reason to what gets announced where. And the sheer volume of communications can make prioritizing difficult. “You have this undifferentiated fire hose of content coming at you from the school, but it’s not stratified in a useful way,” Matthias Schabel, a father of three in Portland, Oregon, told me. Often, important notices are tucked into messages that also contain a lot of fluff—a notification for Pajama Day, a reminder that Chuck E. Cheese is hosting a back-to-school night, an announcement that the district is holding a flower sale at the football game. The paradoxical outcome is that although the school might be sharing essential information with you, you can’t trust that you’ll see it.
[…]
The share of K–8 parents attending parent-teacher conferences has fallen from 77 percent in 2017 to 57 percent today, according to the most recent data from Learning Heroes. This reluctance or inability to meet in person makes it tough for teachers to convey news about a child falling behind. “If I’m concerned about something,” Boruff said, “that’s not a conversation I want to have on ParentSquare.”