High School Teacher Says Parent Conferences Should End

Adam Patric Miller, a high school teacher with 25 years in the classroom, wants his profession to stop holding parent-teacher conferences. In a column published Thursday as a special contributor to the Chicago Tribune, Miller argues that the ritual exhausts teachers and undercuts the independence teenagers are supposed to be building.

His case begins with timing. Miller says his school holds conferences next week, at the end of the quarter, just as early college-application deadlines close in. He describes a student sobbing by his office door after missing a writing conference for a personal statement. Miller rescheduled the meeting for the following week and reminded the student that weeks remained to polish the nearly finished statement before the Nov. 1 deadline.

Independence, Not Intervention

Miller doesn't dismiss conferences across the board. In early grades, he writes, they make developmental sense. High school is different. Most students can drive, many seniors can vote, and they'll soon answer to college professors or bosses who won't be calling their parents.

Grades already tell parents whether a student is progressing, Miller says, and parents can email teachers with concerns. In his view, they shouldn't routinely step in. A parent with a genuine concern can schedule a conference at any time.

His advice to parents is blunt. Skip the meeting if a child has an A or B. He calls it a "victory lap conference." If parents worry about learning, he says, they should ask the student what can be done and contact the teacher only if the student doesn't know. He adds that parents fill every slot when districts present conferences as mandatory.

The Cost to Teachers

Miller lays out what conference week demands. His school runs five hours of virtual 10-minute appointment slots after school and on Tuesday. Then faculty stay in the building to meet parents in person until 7:30 p.m., after a full teaching day. Teachers teach the next day exhausted and recover at home Friday. They've also had a grading day when students stayed home.

That grading day sits awkwardly with what teachers are told, Miller says. Conferences aren't supposed to be about grades. In his view, though, the meetings often focus on grades anyway.

He calls conference week one of high school’s most "inhumane administrative imperatives." Afterward, he says, teachers call in sick and have depleted immune systems.

Public Relations and Power Plays

Miller also questions who the meetings serve. Per-pupil spending and taxes are high, he writes, and conferences give taxpayers face time with teachers who are "presentable, articulate" and demonstrate that buying a home in the school community was a wise investment.

Then there's the leverage some parents try to exert. Miller recounts a parent telling his officemate, who was explaining an essay grade, "Do you know I've published six books?" While teaching honors freshman English in a suburb of Ohio, he recalls parents lining a hallway to meet a teacher who wasn't giving A's in the first quarter. One asked, "Do you know with such a low grade for my son, you're making it impossible for him to get into Johns Hopkins Medical School?" Another asked, "Don't you know the average IQ of students in your class is 130?"

Miller asks why teachers don't collectively refuse the practice. Public-school teachers, he says, are the last people making decisions that affect their own well-being and students' learning. He closes with a line he attributes to a poet: "If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise." After a week of conferences, he says, it feels like a teacher's epitaph.

Miller currently teaches in St. Louis, has taught in three states, and is the author of "A Greater Monster."

Why This Matters:

The column raises a question taxpayers fund but rarely hear asked: what are mandatory school rituals for, and who decides? Miller's own account suggests districts treat conferences as a standing obligation rather than a tool parents opt into, while teachers absorb the cost in long hours and, he says, lost days. His point that parents fill every slot when meetings are presented as mandatory shows how default rules shape behavior.

There's a parental-responsibility angle, too. Miller's case rests on teenagers handling their own academic problems first, with parents stepping in when a genuine concern arises. Whether districts would loosen the practice is another matter, but the debate over teacher time, accountability and student self-reliance isn't going away.