Dear Schools: Stop Blaming Parents For Your Failures

Sure, parents make choices that contribute to problems children have in school, but their list is short compared to yours.

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It’s trendy to blame parents for, well, pretty much everything wrong with their children—from their inability to read to their poor behavior in school to their political activism on campus. Teachers do it, kids do it, and entire accounts on Instagram and TikTok have figured out how to monetize it. Look, I get it—there is a kernel of truth in all stereotypes, and trends don’t arise in a vacuum—but the knee-jerk impulse to blame parents for everything going wrong with children in America is doing more harm than good.

Blame Is Unproductive

Let’s get real: as cathartic as the blame game might be, it’s utterly useless when it comes to solving problems. Naming is different from blaming. When you name the source of a problem, you’re making an observation of fact, backed up by evidence. Naming the source of a problem also usually serves the purpose of identifying realistic choices and changes parents could make that—evidence indicates—would actually solve the problem.

Blaming, however, is more often than not a form of scapegoating. The completely understandable defensiveness that follows discourages—if not utterly derails—any effective problem-solving. What parent is going to respond well to being blamed for attitudes and behaviors they can’t even see because they’re happening during the eight hours the school has custody of their child? What parent is going to take responsibility for doing a job they are constantly told they don’t know how to do because they are not “certified teachers”?

Instead of blaming, why not take a step back and make two lists: things parents can change and things they can’t?

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Things Parents Control

Inasmuch as schools should stop blaming parents for everything going wrong with their kids at school, the following is a list of things schools can’t control:

Over-Sugared Kids

Parents, this is basic. It is literally your job to feed your children nourishing food that will help them stay awake, concentrate, and remain calm all day long. No matter how low your income, it is not the school’s—or the state’s—responsibility to maintain your child’s physical health at the cellular level. You can complain about the crappy “free” food all you want, but “You get what you pay for” is an adage for a reason.

The research is clear: children who eat highly processed food high in sugar but low in protein, healthy fats, and micronutrients cannot concentrate. They experience insulin spikes and crashes throughout the day, leading to exhaustion, distraction, and emotional volatility. If you’ve been allowing your children to choose their own foods for breakfast and lunch because it’s easier than arguing with them, or if you let yourself off the hook with excuses like “They won’t eat the healthy food”, sorry, but that’s on you. Take a much more active role in setting dietary restrictions and stick to them.

Over-Medicated Kids

If I had to guess, a fair number of children taking ADHD meds would do better to change their diets before taking medications. But even if your child eats a healthy diet, you should still consider whether they really need medication or if you’re using it to appease someone else. Yes, some schools push these on parents when their children are unfocused or struggling in class, but that doesn’t mean you have to comply. You may inadvertently be making it harder for your child to learn if they end up taking a drug they don’t need. Side effects like trouble sleeping, loss of appetite, irritability, and aggression won’t exactly improve their focus or behavior in school. Carefully consider the list of things schools are responsible for (below) before succumbing to pressure to medicate!

Over-Scheduled Kids

Parents, if your child has an activity multiple days or evenings after school and on weekends, and they’re struggling academically or exhibiting poor behavior or attitude, their schedule may be the problem—and that’s your responsibility.

Even if your child wants to participate in multiple activities, prioritize. If a sport or activity is truly their passion and they need to continue for their future college or career plans, seriously consider homeschooling or virtual schooling in a self-paced program. Even the Cleveland Clinic stresses that children need downtime. A structured school day, followed by highly structured, demanding practices or meetings, provides very little of that. It’s your job to ensure your child isn’t on their way to burnout, physically or emotionally.

If you are the one pushing all the activities because you worry they won’t get into a good college without them, remember: You’re not raising a college student; you’re raising a human being.

Over-Stimulated Kids (Unrestricted Screen Time at Home)

I’ve said it a thousand times, and I’m sure I’ll say it a thousand more, but as much as screens at school need to go, parents have to do their part at home too. Even if a school has a no-phones policy, if your child spends all night on devices or playing video games, they will get poor sleep and suffer from dopamine addiction. Teaching a dopamine addict—even with paper books and brilliantly crafted, instructor-led lessons—is nearly impossible.

You will always have my sympathy if you strictly limit screens at home and constantly fight against reliance on tablets and devices at school. But if you don’t even limit screens at home—especially with elementary-aged kids—you’ve lost me (and the moral high ground).

Chronic Absenteeism

Look, I’m one of the most sympathetic people when it comes to parents who’d like their kids to spend less time at school. I’m even more sympathetic to the kids themselves. But if that’s what you want, homeschool. Cut the cord and do it.

I’m not talking about children with serious illnesses (who might also benefit from homeschooling, by the way). I’m talking about kids who consistently bump up against the maximum number of “excused” absences every quarter or semester or who are frequently pulled out early for appointments. The school has no control over whether your child shows up to class. That’s 100% your responsibility—as is making sure they make up whatever they missed.

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Things Parents Cannot Control

If you read the list above and thought, “Sheesh, I thought you said the parents’ list was short! That was five things!”

Yes, and quite a few paragraphs of explanation, too. But it’s still shorter compared to the list of things parents cannot change—but schools must—if they want to rebuild their reputations as institutions of learning rather than “day prisons” or “indoctrination centers.”

Each of the following reflects the new status quo in most American schools (including many if not most private schools).

Reliance on Audio-Books and Graphic Novels

Schools really have one job: to teach children how to read. They also need to teach math, but the child who can read will have an easier time learning math than one who cannot—especially now that math “educators” insist on using so much language to teach math.

The documentary Sold a Story made it clear that schools can no longer pretend it’s someone else’s fault that American kids—even those in college—cannot read.

Parents are constantly told that we don’t know how to teach our own children or that we shouldn’t because we will just “confuse” them or make school “harder” for them. And yet, schools and so-called “educators” have the unmitigated gall to blame parents for the nation’s declining literacy rates? Absolutely not. This is 100% the fault of the schools.

Parents can purchase this book for less than $20 and have their four-year-olds reading fluently in a little more than three months. But most don’t think they have to (or should have to) because they’re paying taxes for schools that are supposed to do it for them—schools that, more importantly, insist they can do it better because they are “qualified,” whereas parents (allegedly) are not. So it’s pretty simple: if you insist you’re the best at doing a job, and you’re getting paid to do that job with money people had no choice but to pay—DO. THE. JOB.

Reliance on Digital Time-Telling

Most parents I speak to aren’t even aware of this one yet. I recommend they do this test: ask a child older than eight to tell time using an analog clock. Then ask them what time it is when it’s “quarter past three” or “half past five,” or how many minutes make up “three-quarters of an hour.” An alarming number of kids won’t know the answers to any of these—and that’s if they can even read the analog clock when it’s not pointing to the full hour.

How is this even possible? Once upon a time, children learned this in kindergarten. Again, there’s no excuse for schools, especially considering how time-bound they are. They cannot complain when students are constantly checking their phones if that’s the only way they can tell time.

Reliance on AI for Grammar

The vast majority of American schools no longer teach grammar. They’ll tell you it’s “embedded” in the “ELA” curriculum or that it will get “covered” through other assignments—except somehow, it never does. Grammar should be taught starting in third grade. If it’s not, and if students are not reading challenging works of fiction (which always use more sophisticated grammar and vocabulary than nonfiction), they will not just “pick it up.”

Even if they were reading constantly, they’d be hard-pressed to absorb grammar intuitively. Any excuses about grammar being “boring” to learn, “too hard” to teach, or—worst of all—“unnecessary because kids have spell-check and Grammarly” are red flags of laziness. So remember this the next time a student has no idea why their sentences are incomplete, run-ons, or randomly switching tense within the same paragraph. They have no idea what those things are. And if some high school teacher suddenly insists they should, they’ll have no choice but to rely on AI because they can’t go back and teach themselves multiple years of English grammar all at once.

Reliance on AI for Writing

Let me put a fine point on this: too many schools are failing to teach students to write—usually because they’re not even trying. Before you protest, let me define my terms: teaching writing and assigning writing projects are not the same at all.

Teaching students to write requires structured lessons on both style and structure. The skills required to write are fundamentally different from those needed to read, do research, take notes, and think critically about what they’ve read and researched. Yet, teachers often assign “writing” projects that demand all of the above—without first teaching the component skills, let alone grammar, vocabulary, or spelling.

There are high school students who think a paragraph is just a chunk of text that “looks big enough” to be a paragraph. They arbitrarily indent a line where they think it “looks” right because they have no idea what a paragraph is supposed to do. There are middle school students who can’t think of alternatives to “a lot” or “very,” so they use them repeatedly rather than consult a thesaurus.

This is all preventable—but only if schools and teachers do their jobs and actually instruct students in effective writing structures and styles.

Reliance on Calculators

An alarming number of schools no longer teach multiplication tables—or even, before that, basic addition facts. As a result, an even more alarming number of children are growing up reliant on calculators for the most basic mathematical calculations. This dependency leaves them unable to even attempt advanced math courses, even if they would have been interested in doing so.

Additionally, calculators are only useful to those who know which operation to apply to a given problem. When students don’t learn basic math facts early and practice them often, they quickly find calculators to be of limited help.

Reliance on Group Accountability

To a certain degree, self-motivation and personal accountability are shaped by both personality and parenting. However, schools have children for a much larger percentage of the day and year than parents do, making their influence far greater.

How can we expect students to be self-motivated when so many schools emphasize “group work” and “shared” grades? When it’s so easy to redistribute effort (and blame) to others, most people will—why would children be any different? For every student with a take-charge personality willing to strike out alone to learn, there are half a dozen others who aren’t willing to take the associated risk of failing alone.

Add to that the way schools micromanage assignments—down to the topic level for every student—leaving them with few, if any, opportunities to think for themselves or take full responsibility for the quality of their own work. Is it any wonder that so many children struggle with personal accountability?

Refusal to Discipline or Remove Disruptive Students

Try to imagine how a school principal would respond if told they had to sit down in a room, face-to-face, with a teacher or staff member who had verbally or physically assaulted them—for a “restorative justice” session. Imagine the principal being forced to listen to the “reasons” their abuser lashed out: problems at home, lack of sleep, resentment toward the principal’s racial identity, or some other factor completely outside the principal’s control. Now, imagine if—rather than being able to fire their abuser or press criminal charges—the principal had no choice but to return to work alongside them, after receiving nothing more than a bag of chips and a half-hearted apology.

Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Yet this is the reality for countless children in America’s schools today.

Rather than removing abusive, disruptive, emotionally volatile, and violent students, administrators insist that they remain in school—often in the same classrooms as the students they have harmed. The same administrators who would never tolerate such treatment themselves expect children to endure it daily. Why should students—or their parents—stand for it? Answer: They shouldn’t.

Lack of Transparency

Considering how quickly and frequently schools blame parents for their children’s struggles, it’s remarkable how stubbornly they resist cooperating when parents try to learn what’s actually happening in the classroom.

Parents are expected to “partner” with the school to “help” their child succeed, often by divulging intimate details about their child’s life and habits at home. Yet, when those same parents ask the school for details about the curriculum, materials, or a teacher’s style and classroom habits, they are stonewalled—or told to submit a formal FOIA request. Is it any wonder that parents increasingly mistrust schools?

Over the past several years, that mistrust has boiled over into outrage. Parents have turned out by the hundreds to school board meetings, demanding greater transparency. Instead of responding with openness, many school districts and administrators have chosen to double down—having parents forcibly removed and barred from meetings, filing lawsuits against them for asking too many questions, and even soliciting the Justice Department to label them as “domestic terrorists.”

Lack of an Opt-Out

Perhaps the most significant problem of all is that parents cannot simply leave and take their children—and their tax dollars—elsewhere. School choice programs don’t solve this because they are just another government-subsidized system, defined, managed, and administered by the same people who run the failing schools.

The ability to leave a school building is not the same as the ability to opt out of the system entirely. Receiving money—especially when it includes a hefty subsidy of other taxpayers’ dollars—still means dependence on the system. Parents have no say in whether the state continues to monopolize education as an institution. The best they can do is find ways to work around it or help their children succeed in spite of it.

And when some parents choose to walk away entirely—even refusing government money—schools treat them like fugitives. Teachers’ unions and school administrators lobby for laws, like Illinois’ recent homeschool legislation, aimed at dragging them back under state control.

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The Wisdom (and Humility) to Know the Difference

It is my sincere hope that schools—and the teachers, administrators, and staff who are paid to work in them—will read these issues with humility and more than a little gratitude. To explain why, I will now speak as a parent, because despite my background and experience as a teacher, I am and will always be a parent first:

We did not have children so they could provide jobs for teachers or administrators.

We did not have children so they could be used to gain political power or social status.

We did not have children so educators could work out their own unresolved childhood issues.

We did not have children so schools could use them to “change the world.”

We did not ask for this system—it was already here.

We did not ask for the so-called “reforms” that have produced the most ignorant, illiterate, innumerate, mentally unwell, and behaviorally unruly generation of Americans in our nation’s history.

We can only change what we can control, and as you can see, that’s not much.

So the next time you’re tempted to blame us for the failure of your students, remember this list—and make damn sure you’ve done everything in your power to change the things you can first.