With the National PTA's Standard for School-Family-Community Partnership as a framework, this guide offers advice for resolving common points of contention between parents and teachers, such as the most productive use of a parent-teacher conference, the best at-home environment for doing homework, the helpfulness of parental rewards for classroom performance, and a teacher's role in supporting a student with an at-home crisis. This solution manual draws from real-world experiences of parents, teachers, and administrators to tackle issues of communication, parenting skills, classroom volunteering, and mutual respect.

The V-chip is a highly significant part of the discussion about whether television (or broadcasting in general) deserves some special attention in terms of its accessibility to children, its particular power to affect conduct, and its invasiveness. But as this notion of filtering and labeling has caught the imagination of the regulator, the legislator, and all those who wish to consider new ways to alter bargaining over imagery in society, the very idea of the V-chip or its equivalent is moving across other technologies, including the Internet. The V-chip issue has also fueled the ongoing debate about violence and sexual practices in society, and how representations on television relate to those practices. Although the initial concept of the V-chip is simple, its flow into the public realm raises so many extraordinary questions that the introduction and production of the chip virtually serves as a case study in problems of law and public policy. The very conceptualization of speech in society is being affected by this issue. Accordingly, the place of the V-chip in this debate is increasingly important; indeed, it may be argued that the V-chip's contribution to legal argumentation may be greater than its ultimate contribution to the relationship between children and imagery. Among the questions the contributors address are: *What research basis is necessary to require a framework for labeling and rating? *What relationship between government and the image-producing industries can be characterized--for constitutional and other reasons--as voluntary as opposed to coercive? *Who should evaluate these images? *To what extent should the evaluation process be centralized and/or distributed? *What assessment is appropriate to evaluate whether the experiment is "successful?" In addition to the V-chip's origin's in Canada and its further evolution in the United States, this book discusses the development of the V-chip and television rating systems in Europe, Australia, and throughout the world. It also includes essays which contrast the very different approaches in Canada and the United States in terms of the role of regulatory agency, industry, and government.

Who holds ultimate authority for the education of America's children—teachers or parents? Although the relationship between home and school has changed dramatically over the decades, William Cutler's fascinating history argues that it has always been a political one, and his book uncovers for the first time how and why the balance of power has shifted over time. Starting with parental dominance in the mid-nineteenth century, Cutler chronicles how schools' growing bureaucratization and professionalization allowed educators to gain increasing control over the schooling and lives of the children they taught. Central to his story is the role of parent-teacher associations, which helped transform an adversarial relationship into a collaborative one. Yet parents have also been controlled by educators through PTAs, leading to the perception that they are "company unions." Cutler shows how in the 1920s and 1930s schools expanded their responsibility for children's well-being outside the classroom. These efforts sowed the seeds for later conflict as schools came to be held accountable for solving society's problems. Finally, he brings the reader into recent decades, in which a breakdown of trust, racial tension, and "parents' rights" have taken the story full circle, with parents and schools once again at odds. Cutler's book is an invaluable guide to understanding how parent-teacher cooperation, which is essential for our children's educational success, might be achieved.