“There’s nothing punitive about it,” Holloway says. “It’s just a wake-up call for parents, just to say, hey, you need to do better.”
But “doing better” might be an oversimplification for some Mississippi parents. With cyclical poverty as a barrier to parental involvement and student achievement, some worry that the bill could further burden parents having a hard time.
I understand the notion of a "wake-up call" and I'm all for encouraging parent engagement. It is, after all, what The ChalkBird is meant to enable. But the goal of parent engagement is to help create a strong partnership between schools and parents. This seems like a recipe for building an unnecessarily adversarial relationship.