3
Watchdog
Our least favorite job is acting as a watchdog. Our ideal situation is to be on good terms with all of the schools, because a good relationship helps us work WITH the school to best serve the families. For example, we can ask the management how best to help a child with learning disabilities, or (in rare cases) how we can improve a failing student's marks. We do not consider ourselves adversaries of the schools.
Unfortunately, many schools fail to follow RTE rules and norms. Our organization has witnessed schools deploy a number of tricks to circumvent the law: bogus lotteries, making closed door deals with parents, selling seats, charging "facility fees," screening candidates, not posting admissions results, claiming general admissions students are RTE students, intimidating families from applying by claiming their children will never adjust... in 5 years of doing this work, we've seen it all.
In such cases, we compile the experience of the parents, meticulously document a timeline of events, cite the specific rules violated, and then file a report of the school's conduct to the appropriate authorities. We also help draft letters for aggrieved parents as a way of creating a formal record. Our organization does these important tasks knowing how daunting it is for parents to act on their own. Many times, parents do not know where they should go, and are shunted from one office to the next. They waste valuable time and forgo their daily wages trying to find an official who can fix the problem, only to reach closed door after closed door. Avenues for recourse exist, but parents have difficulty finding them.
In addition, we act as a watchdog knowing the intimidation parents face if they have to go alone. They are often worried about what coming forward with a complaint may do to their child's well-being. Parents are also concerned a powerful, well-connected school may come after them personally. If this sounds far-fetched, it's really not: Some schools have threatened to jail parents "if they lie," and others have threatened court notices. While institutions may abuse their position of power and bully an individual parent, it is significantly harder to do so against our organization coming forth with the experience of several parents. (If a school threatened us with a lawsuit, as the daughter of a lawyer I'd probably laugh and look forward to the legal discovery process).
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We also act as a watchdog to initiate a culture of compliance. In our experience, when one school gets away with flouting the norms, other schools replicate the same tactics knowing they can get away with it. In 2014, a school correspondent secretly shared with me, "I follow the RTE rules and all of the other schools make fun of me for it. Skirting the quota it is an open joke." The climate has since changed, but calling out a school's abhorrent behavior through the press or by bringing it to the government's attention are the single most effective ways of getting all of the schools to fully adopt the quota. Though we recognize our organization cannot single-handedly enforce compliance (nor is it our job--that's the government's!), we can try to do our bit and call out illegal behavior when parents bring it to our attention.
