Some parents no longer have to wait until their children come home to find out what they did in school that day—they already know. If the school is among the proliferating number of middle schools and high schools subscribing to data services such as Edline, SchoolFusion, and School Center, parents have instant access to their children’s every grade, absence, and quiz score.
But the programs aren’t infallible—just ask Laura Iriarte Miguel. The high school student recently switched anatomy classes, but Edline didn’t immediately register the change. Iriarte Miguel hadn’t told her parents about her decision, so the switch erroneously made it look like she’d been cutting class and scoring zeros on quizzes.
“They wanted to know why-why-why-why,” Iriarte Miguel says. She was able to explain, but the air was still poisoned. The suspicion, she says, “accumulated in the back of their minds during the whole day.”
What do you think? Should parents have up-to-the-second information about what their children are doing in school?
