Digital Smarts - Parent Alerts Work!

You can sign up for text alerts for everything from bad weather to shipping updates, so why not a text alert for when your kid skips class? New studies show that text alerts to parents regarding students' academic performance and absences do work and increase parental engagement. Peter Bergman and Eric Chan of Teachers College at Columbia University recently found that among middle- and high-school students whose parents received such texts, course failures were down 39% and class attendance was up 17%.