1. If Smith’s students send their teacher only one e-mail per week, that’s 168 messages. In addition, if each parent (even assuming only one parent per family does the e-mailing) sends an additional weekly e-mail, then Smith has 168 more messages to read for a grand total of 336. Of course, most will need responses. That’s a few hundred more messages. A typical teacher might have fewer students than Smith, but the numbers are still likely to be in the hundreds. Is this really what we want our teachers doing?

2. Would teachers’ e-mails to parents be considered official DOE correspondence? Most of us can relax somewhat when sending e-mail at work. We can write quickly, use a sort of shorthand, even make the occasional typo or spelling blunder, knowing that this is common in 21st century electronic communication. But woe betide any teacher who slips on an e-mail to a parent. Remember that one of New York’s daily newspapers is openly hostile to public education, and both tabloids love to pounce on faux pas such as the Stuyvesant High School diploma error a few years back. Headlines, anybody? “City Teacher Needs Spelling Tutor, Parents Complain.”

3. Most of us who work in offices can start the day by answering a raft of overnight e-mails and take periodic breaks from other duties to respond to those messages that come in during the day. How would we educate parents to understand that most teachers have to TEACH during the first period of the day? Even homeroom is not free time for teachers, as there are routine tasks, announcements and unforeseen problems raised by students. Yes, a typical teacher could answer a few messages during a preparation period, but when does that weekly quiz get written and duplicated? Suppose the teacher has time to answer five messages during a free period, but the sixth, unanswered, is an urgent request from a parent who innocently thought the teacher would tend to the matter immediately, perhaps with a return message?

4. Doe is bothered by a reference to the unions and perhaps by implication to the teachers’ contract. I too have often been frustrated by the extent to which New York’s public schools are bound up by complex rules. But we have just been presented with an excellent example of an issue that cries out for an organized expression of the teachers’ point of view. What better vehicle for that expression than the agent the teachers themselves have chosen to speak for them?

Providing for better communication between teachers and their students and the students’ families certainly is a net plus for any school system. But it’s not a simple matter to be imposed from above with the assumption that teachers should just go along and embrace a new responsibility.

But my original post wasn’t really about this topic. It was about a contract that allows our employers to add extra work without having to negotiate with our union even though many outsiders believe we have a powerful union that has a great deal of control over the terms and conditions of our employment. I realize that we’ll always have to do a significant part of our jobs at home. But if I’m going to be up late at night doing work, I want to be planning lessons or grading homework rather than editing a message to a parent to make sure it sounds OK or deciding whether to help out an irresponsible student who didn’t write down the homework or explaining to an angry parent that her child is not telling the truth. With a stronger union, this work (and the class web page, etc.) could be done at school and be part of a Circular 6 assignment.