Remember back when Western-Union mailgrams were considered cutting edge? When you had to laboriously page through a dusty copy of the Reader's Guide to Periodicals to find articles that Google now turns up in seconds? Technology and fresh thinking helped us find better, faster ways to get the job done.

Many newspapers don't even bother to print stock prices anymore because they have come to regard them as a waste of time and paper, understanding that people aren't interested in yesterday's closing prices when they can glimpse the current price on their cell phones. Ditching the stock pages was a realistic response to modern-day realities.

If there is any area that is ripe for some fresh thinking (with a nod toward rapidly changing technological realities in public education and the challenges today's working parents face,) it is the ways schools and parents communicate with each other about how a child is performing in class. The idea of having conferences at set times in the afternoon and early evenings simply doesn't cut-it for families with two working parents (or one working, single-parent.)

With parent-teacher conference season in full swing, it isn't hard to see the kinds of problems that the old-school ways of doing things present. Perhaps it is time to ditch the idea in favor of a 21st Century commitment to improving the frequency and quality of interactions between schools and the families they serve. I'm suggesting a realistic response to modern-day realities.

Where I live, in New York City, parent-teacher conferences present two distinct (and entirely separate, by location) problems. At some schools, to cut to the chase, only the teachers show up. It's hard to have a conference with yourself, but many teachers - especially in high schools - end up having to do just that.

In other NYC schools you have the opposite problem: so many parents show up that it becomes impossible to pull-off meaningful conversations. In many cases, these conferences at the end of the first quarter represent the first real interaction between parents and a teacher. Because time is limited, many schools limit conferences to no more than 3 minutes per family. Sometimes an egg timer is used to justify ending the meeting of the minds.

Neither situation (no parents showing up, or too many parents showing up) is ideal for teachers, parents, or - most importantly - the child.

My wife and I are new to the middle school parenting experience, so we learned the hard way this fall that you have to have a cut-throat system in place to make the most of the 3-minute drills. You show up at least an hour before your assigned time with your entire extended family and anyone else you can convince/bribe to join you. You quickly disperse to sign up for a coveted 3-minute slot on the sign-in sheets on each teacher's door. Then you have your designee camp out outside the classroom until you are one family away from your 3-minutes of educational bliss. At this point, whether by hand signal or text message, the parent is called and rushes to that classroom for the conference. If you are good you can actually hit several teachers over the course of the evening.

We (newbies) got face time (3 minutes each) with only two of my son's seven teachers in two-hours. But we did meet some nice people and burned lots of calories in the process.

Does it have to be this way? A newsletter sent home by my son's co-principals indicated they thought the conferences were a joke. "Absurd" was actually the word they used. They are absolutely correct.

I've seen many public schools where teachers, principals, and parents are working to improve these types things. My younger son's class now has monthly "Family Fridays," sponsored by the local Starbucks, where families are invited to sit in their child's morning classes. Open school week is getting more sophisticated, school newsletters are sent out by email and posted on the Internet.

But by and large, it still feels like individual parent-teacher interactions are stuck in the printed stock price era, in ways that don't particularly respond to the challenges and pressures that today's working families face. It would seem that this is precisely an area where the idea of "having the bureaucratic shackles removed" in charter schools could shed some light on the possibilities.

Buffalo's Enterprise Charter School has an "open policy" and calls parents in as needed, rather than relying on conferences as the main points of contact, said Jill Norton, the school's CEO. "Many of our parents stop by at the beginning of the day or the end of the day and they call frequently," Norton said. "I think the key element for our school is that teachers have common planning time so that when they do need to speak to the parents it is all of the teachers that the child might see as opposed to just the homeroom teacher."

The parent handbook at Rochester's Genesee Community Charter School, for example, notes that teachers send home weekly newsletters with their individual contact information (including their school voice mailbox) and parents are encouraged to contact the school's director by phone, over email, or in person.

At Harlem Success Academy Charter School, executive director Eva Moskowitz said there are so many real-time meetings between teachers/support staff and parents over the course of a typical month that the idea of organized conferences became irrelevant. On the day in late October when we talked to her, Moskowitz had meetings arranged with a handful of families whose kids were reading below grade level in the first weeks of school about what needed to happen to bring them up to speed. All parents at the school submit reading logs for the books they are reading with their children, and cell phones and email addresses are given out. For parents who don't have access to email or computers, the school provides a kiosk (and friendly technical assistance) in the school office for parent use.

Explore Charter School in Brooklyn has maintained its twice-a-year mandatory parent-teacher conferences, but those are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of interaction with parents, said Morty Ballen, the school's director.

"We have a policy that we respond to parents within 24 hours, we all have cellphones and e-mail accounts and we see our roles with parents akin to 'customer service,'" Ballen said. "The idea is that any issue a parent has we are eager to resolve and discuss."

Yes, the idea of giving teachers cell phones is controversial among some who feel it is an intrusion on a teacher's home life. But is that kind of thinking, itself, outdated?

What kinds of things do you do at your school to meaningfully engage parents as partners in the education process of their children? Drop me a line at TheChalkboard@nycsa.org.