[eudamoniac]

I've never understood something about this phenomenon: why does the school care if the parent flips a shit? What power does the parent actually have in a public school? I always thought it would make more sense for the principal/teacher to give the parent the middle finger in this scenario, but is there some reason I'm unaware of for why that is not realistic?

[bubblewand]

A parent with a certain temperament, which seems to overlap substantially with the sort with stupid expectations and demands, and a lot of time on their hands (which, ditto) can be extremely annoying, raise hell with the media, get the school board involved (some school boards have members who are these kinds of parents, haha) and everybody’s just too busy with actual work to deal with that shit. Enough of it, and they give in just to get them off their backs.

This is why state-level phone bans are so nice, as it keeps these sorts from focusing on school districts, where like five parents can be cause a lot of trouble, and shifts them to focusing on the state level, where a few hundred or a thousand scattered parents with stupid ideas can more easily be ignored and the bar for causing real irritation is a lot higher in terms of time and cost (want to go bother the state legislature, and they’re ignoring your calls? Get ready to travel…)

One super-power of private schools is that they can just tell parents with incompatible ideas of how the school should run to fuck off (and they in-fact do this). Public schools have to deal with them as long as they’re willing to keep poking, which can amount to a surprisingly long time.