School Communications Are a Mess

The Atlantic · Stephanie H. Murray · 2026-11-06 12:30 UTC

And the apps are only part of the problem.

With the exception of my husband, no one contacts me as often as my children’s school does. There’s the old-school stuff: a folder that comes home in each of their backpacks weekly, filled with flyers and graded work and tests to sign; a binder with a nightly behavior and reading log, also for me to sign. I get texts and emails with the school’s weekly newsletter, updates from the PTA, and, more than anything else, notifications about posts on the various platforms and apps the school uses.

That brings me to the new-school stuff: ClassDojo for one kid. Bloomz for another (except for choir information, which is on ClassDojo). Something called PowerSchool, which is meant to be the district’s hub for grades but also—for some mysterious reason—sends me weekly automated emails telling me that the balance in my daughters’ accounts has fallen below $5. (This makes no sense. For one thing, their school lunch is free. For another, school payments are handled on another platform entirely.)

I’d like to think that, given the volume of information I receive, I have a solid grasp of how my children are faring in school. But I have reason to doubt as much. American parents are prone to overestimating how well their kids are doing in school. According to a recent report from Learning Heroes, a nonprofit whose aim is to help parents develop an accurate understanding of their children’s academic performance, about 88 percent of American parents say their child is performing at or above grade level in reading; 83 percent say the same about math. But in most states, the share of students meeting grade-level expectations in reading or math is less than 50 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics’ most recently available compilation of state scores.

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