Teachers say parent management is a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. In this week’s TIME cover story, "What Teachers Hate About Parents," Nancy Gibbs reports on the growing frustrations teachers have with parents. It’s one reason, says the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers are gone from the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050221/story.html

"If you could walk past the teachers' lounge and listen in, what sorts of stories would you hear?
An Iowa high school counselor gets a call from a parent protesting the C her child received on an assignment. "The parent argued every point in the essay," recalls the counselor, who soon realized why the mother was so upset about the grade. "It became apparent that she'd written it."
A sixth-grade teacher in California tells a girl in her class that she needs to work on her reading at home, not just in school. "Her mom came in the next day," the teacher says, "and started yelling at me that I had emotionally upset her child."
A science teacher in Baltimore, Md., was offering lessons in anatomy when one of the boys in class declared, "There's one less rib in a man than in a woman." The teacher pulled out two skeletons—one male, the other female—and asked the student to count the ribs in each.
"The next day," the teacher recalls. . . "

Federal Arithmetic and Reading Test

In response to President Bush's Federal "No Child Left Behind Act" (NCLB), it is proposed that students will have to pass a test to be promoted to the next grade level.
In the hope that this proposal will be uniformly adopted by all of the states, the new test will be called the Federal Arithmetic and Reading Test (FART).
All students who cannot pass a FART in the second grade will be retested in Grades 3, 4 and 5 until they are capable of passing a FART score of 80%. If a student does not successfully FART by grade 5, that student shall be placed in a separate English program known as the Special Mastery Elective for Learning Language, or SMELL.
If, with this increased SMELL program, the student cannot pass the required FART test, he or she can still graduate to middle school by taking another one-semester course in Comprehensive Reading and Arithmetic Preparation, or CRAP.
If by age fourteen the student cannot FART, SMELL, or CRAP, he or she can earn promotion in an intensive one-week seminar known as the Preparatory Reading for Unprepared Nationally Exempted Students, or PRUNES.
It is the opinion of the Department of Instruction for Public Schools (DIPS) that an intensive week of PRUNES will enable any student to FART, SMELL, or CRAP.
This revised provision of the student component of the House Bill 101 should help "clear the air" as part of "No School Left Standing."