In my experience, it is YOU who are operating from the faulty premise.
Are there parents such as you describe? Of course. Are they the "many if not most of the parents?" Not in my current experience.
It is all going to depend upon the local district. I specifically moved from a district where your premise was much less faulty, to one where your premise is very much faulty. Parent/Teacher "conferences" have been known to be held in the frozen food aisle of the local supermarket or the checkout line of WalMart. Heck, I even had an impromtu one at a local town festival.
“It is all going to depend upon the local district.”
Of course, as well as the specific school and specific classes within that school.
There’s great variation in the quality levels of parents, and it’s somewhat locationally specific. We could debate all day whether it’s some, many, or most who are more interested in daycare or education. I can only discuss what I’m familiar with in my little corner of the planet.
I see the parents who can’t wait to turn their children over to the government schools so they can be rid of them for the day. I also regularly see the results of crummy educational attainment; the high school students whose math skills are such that they can’t make change, and who couldn’t write a paragraph to save their souls. Not to mention the juvenile delinquency, drug use, ad nauseum. Who is to blame? In my view, the responsibility of raising and educating children falls to the parents.
The government schools often don’t help, but as I regularly point out on these threads, every single state in the country has provisions for home education. Use of the governmment schools is voluntary in the sense that there are private and/or home education alternatives.
In fairness, I do see some parents who seem very concerned for their children’s education and who still use the government schools. In my own personal experience, those parents are relatively few and far between.
So while I’m never going to be accused of being an advocate for the government schools, I do recognize that the government schools have something of an impossible task to perform with children who often have little parental involvement or interest.