&gt; The key to succesful education is involved parents. It&#x27;s really that simple.<p>This is glib and easy to say, but I don&#x27;t buy it.<p>When parents try to intervene in their child&#x27;s education, schools are increasingly hostile. They are beginning to treat school children in a manner similar to how the TSA treats travelers.<p>Here&#x27;s an example: my parents have a young daughter in middle school in the Midwest. She is active in a school choir, but also wants to do the science fair and many other activities. My parents are lucky because here is a kid who actually <i>wants</i> to do these things.<p>Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at <i>5:15 am</i> (!) on a Saturday in order to travel 45 minute to a nearby school to do a choir competition at 7:30 am. Further, even though my sister&#x27;s performance is over at 7:45 am, she has to stay with the school until well after 11:00 am and be bused home. <i>The parents are not allowed to pick up the children early or give them a ride a home at all.</i> This is for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.<p>At the same time, my sister is expected to do work on her upcoming science fair project (which must adhere to an egregiously onerous template provided on the school&#x27;s website) <i>and also</i> do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right).<p>When my parents spoke up about the unreasonableness of the school making middle schoolers travel to a competition at 5:15 on a weekend morning, and also disallowing their parents from even picking them up early or anything, the school was borderline militant in their reply. They chewed out my parents, said they had no business questioning the choir director&#x27;s choice of which competitions to attend or what the scheduling was, and basically said that the choice was either to put up or shut up. The school was not willing to compromise or even discuss any of their points about how unhealthy and overly burdensome the whole set of affairs was.<p>In smaller ways, this extends to classroom homework (which is at levels <i>way</i> higher than when I was a child, and yet the kids themselves say (and test scores seem to indicate) that they are retaining less and less of it). If a parent writes in to say the homework is too much, that it is stressing out their 6th grade kid who is staying up until 10:30 pm, crying and self-doubting the whole time, just to keep up with a single day&#x27;s homework, you don&#x27;t get any degree of reasonableness whatsoever.<p>I feel that schools and teachers have way too much authority over how children are treated and evaluated, what they are required to do, and so forth. They argue that they have to make it this way to comply with state and federal standards, and that&#x27;s a big part of the problem. But regardless, it doesn&#x27;t matter if you are a proactive and supportive parent if your attempts to provide a healthy and nurturing learning atmosphere are constantly and aggressively thwarted by the very teachers and school officials you want to try to work with.