Engaging Parents In School…

A few days ago I wrote about my skepticism and concerns related to the Los Angeles School District’s decision to let parents decide if they wanted their school to be turned-over to a private charter operator (Parents & Schools In Los Angeles). I suggested that if they were really serious about engaging with parents, they would identify a whole lot of other areas where parents could work cooperatively with teachers and administrators — and not just in a questionable “takeover.” I wondered if it was just a move for cheap political cover.

Things seem to be getting crazier and crazier down there, and now the District is backtracking. Check-out Education Week’s piece that came out today and is titled “L.A. Unified Retreats on Parental Power to Trigger Reforms.”

Anne Henderson has been researching parent involvement/engagement strategies for many years, and we cite several of her research findings in our book. She is also the co-author of Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family-School Partnerships. I’ll be interviewing her for this blog in the coming months.

She provided testimony to the United States Senate in 2007 on Effective Strategies for Engaging Parents and Communities in Schools.

It’s definitely worth a read.

Smart Bean has just published an interview with me about our book Building Parent Engagement In Schools. They’ve titled the piece Engaging With Your Child’s School: Q&A with Larry Ferlazzo.

Here’s how Smart Bean describes itself:

SmartBean is a site for parents that aims to help parents make day to day decisions on practical aspects of parenting largely related to K-12 education and formal/informal learning. It aggregates and presents current education news, research and commentary relevant to parents and in a digestable form. It provides links to educational websites and other resources, and also highlights educational products, books, software and other products aimed at holistic development of children in a changing world. Although its primary focus is on empowering parents, several teachers and educators have found articles and links that are relevant to their work.

Education Week just announced they’ve put together a collection of articles into a Spotlight On Parent Involvement. It costs $4.95.

It includes some of my pieces, which you can already get for free, but the other articles look good and might be worth the cost.

Churches, school system look to build partnership is a recent newspaper headline in Maryland.

It describes a meeting held between members of a community organizing group, Partnership for Renewal in Southern and Central Maryland. and a Superintendent of Schools.

This is just another example of the kind of parent engagement we talk about in our book, which has a chapter on schools, parents and community organizing.

I’ve posted in the past about how some schools use student-led parent/teacher conferences as a way to connect better with parents.

This coming Monday, Parents As Partners will be hosting a webcast to help people learn more about this practice. It’s worth a listen…..

A group of parents have begun what they are calling a “Parents Union” to push for improvement in Chicago’s public schools. You can read about it at Parents hope to form a more perfect union in dealing with CPS.

It’s particularly impressive to me because its focus is to improve public schools, and is not allied with private groups that want to create charters, which is the focus of a similarly named parents group in Los Angeles.

All I know about the group is what the newspaper article says. It sounds like it’s a completely independent group, which may make it difficult to sustain over the long-term. I spent nineteen years as an organizer working to build “organizations of organizations” for a number of reasons, including because of the long-term problems involved in creating new groups. Bringing like-minded organizations together that have been around for awhile provides financial stability and relationship “glue” that can help with sustainability.

But, whatever their situation is, I hope the Parents Union has success!

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Education Secretary Duncan spoke at a conference yesterday designed to support the creation of more “community schools” in the United States.

Typically, community schools are ones that host multiple social services, as well as regular school classes.

A report on community schools was released at the conference.

The Harlem Children’s Zone is the most well-known example of this kind of school in the U.S.

I think community schools can be a great benefit to the local community. I also believe that they can be an even greater benefit if they do two things differently from how they usually operate. One, if they look at parents more as partners instead of clients and, two, if they work more closely with multiple local community groups. I’ve written about this issue in an earlier post.

There may be an effort to create a school like this in Sacramento as part of a nation-wide effort to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone. I’ve had conversations with some people who are involved, and they seem open to looking at these two issues and making them a priority in what happens locally. It’ll be interesting to see what develops.

Over the past two days, there has been a lot of media coverage about a recent decision by the Los Angeles School District to “to allow parents to initiate school reforms” (as the LA Times put it).

Here are links to two articles about it:

L.A. Unified to allow parents to initiate school reforms

L.A. Gives Parents ‘Trigger’ to Restructure Schools

Based on what I know about what is going on there (which is not a whole lot — I’m trying to find out more, and would love to get more thoughts from readers in the comment section of this post), I have mixed feelings about this plan.

On one hand, yes, I think it’s good for parents to have more power in school decision-making. One problem in schools is that school staff sometimes feel that power is a finite “pie” and that if parents get some power, that means staff have less. In fact, the more power parents get, the more possibilities and opportunities are created, and the “pie” gets bigger.

On the other hand, based on the articles (correct me if my impression is incorrect), parents are getting the power to do just one thing — if 51% of them in one of thirty schools signs a petition, then an outside operator can come in and turn it into a charter. It’s part of a controversial plan the District announced earlier to turn these thirty schools into private charters. It also sounds like the District may not be doing this in collaboration with teachers and administrators, and, in fact, may not even be working with parent groups on this program — just with charter school operators.

I can’t help but wonder if the District might be doing this to gain a little more political cover for what might be a hasty and unwise move to try to privatize a good number of schools. Why not work with parents and multiple groups with whom they’re affiliated (along with teachers and administrators) on exploring various ways parents can have more power in school-site decision-making, and not just on the charter question?

I can understand a desire to try something like this out at a small number of schools first to work out the “kinks,” but it seems to me if you want true parent engagement, doing something as limited as this in such a controversial context may not be the way to go.

Again, I’m all ears if you would like to differ (or agree)…..

Community organizing is one of the four parent engagement strategies we outline in our book. A recent study by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform highlights its benefits for students, families,and schools.

You can read more about the study here.

You can also view a presentation about it here.

One of the chapters in our book highlights the work of the Industrial Areas Foundation in developing Alliance Schools in Texas. The IAF, as far as I can tell, were the first to begin talking about the difference between parent involvement and engagement almost twenty years ago.

If you’re interested in learning more about them, you can access a draft version of a paper describing the Alliance Schools and its philosophy here.

“Parent Academies” appear to be “in” this week…

TIME Magazine has just published an article titled Parent Academies: Helping Mom and Dad Face School Too. This follows on the heels of several other recent media articles on this topic (you can see the last few posts on this blog).

Unfortunately, at least as far as the article describes the programs in various school districts (and I understand that they might not be entirely accurate), it appears that they are missing huge opportunities. They all seem to be bringing parents in to train them on what the districts want to train them on and talk about the topics they want them to talk about it. There is no indication that they are asking what the parents want to do or learn.

The TIME article itself has a particularly condescending comment:

“Of course, there’s no guarantee that the people who need these programs the most will actually take advantage of them — you can’t force parents to care, no matter how many free classes you offer.”

Come on, just because parents who might be facing huge time, economic, family, and health challenges don’t want to come to a meeting to talk about what the district wants them to talk about doesn’t mean they don’t care!

Plus, the final sentence from a Harvard researcher demonstrates what a huge disconnect there is between “parent involvement” (which I would use to describe these types of academies) and “parent engagement” (which I would use to describe what Elisa Gonzalez has done at our high school’s Parent University by asking parents what they wanted to learn about and building the curriculum with them):

“Family engagement is a shared, reciprocal partnership between educators and parents,” she says. “It’s a two-way conversation between home and school.”

Yes, exactly, a conversation. Often, these types of parent academies tend to be more a one-way “communication” to parents as opposed to a two-way “conversation.” That doesn’t make them bad — any kind of further parent connection can help students.

So much more could be possible, though. And that makes them lost opportunities, too.

The Toronto Globe and Mail ran an article today headlined ‘Parent academy’ offers dividends to children.

It focuses on a new effort in Toronto  that has this as its goal:

“In effect, schools would become de facto community centres for whole families, offering programs to help parents with their most pressing needs – from finding work and getting fit to understanding Facebook and navigating the school system.”

It sounds good.  My concern, though, is that — based on what the article says — they’re basing what they do on responses to written surveys instead of upon individual conversations.  Written surveys are never good barometers of genuine interest, nor can they be used to identify potential leaders who have energy to “carry the ball” and who have a “following” in the community.

Community organizers know that writtens surveys are good for one thing — to be excuses to initiate conversations with people.  The real “meat” occurs in the listening and talking.

Without that kind of interaction, whatever is created can become a typical social service program where well-intentioned school staff provide services to parents, which might or might not be their priority community concerns.   Leaders are not developed, and it can easily peter out.

However, I certainly know enough to recognized that the article might not be giving an accurate impression of the parent academy, and the school district might very well be using other tactics to connect to parents besides a written survey.

Here’s a great post from Patrick Larkin, a high school principal in Massachusetts, with an answer to that question.

It’s a good “read.”

Teachers’ house calls make pupils, parents feel at home is the headline on an article today in the Globe. It highlights some visiting programs in Springfield, Massachusetts and in Boston.

The one in Springfield, initiated by the community organizing group Pioneer Valley Project, is also highlighted in our book.

Building Parent Engagement In Schools, my first book (written with Lorie Hammond), was published earlier this month. You can learn how readers of this blog can get a discount by reading this.

You can read two “previews” of the book:

One is an article I wrote for Public School Insights in April titled Parent Involvement or Parent Engagement?

The other is one I wrote for the Library Media Connection. It was published last month and is titled Family Literacy, English Language Learners, and Parent Engagement.

You can read the first review of the book at The Tempered Radical by Educational Leadership columnist Bill Ferriter.

In September, Joyce Epstein and I were guests at Education Week’s “edchat” on engaging parents. If you’re interested, you can read the chat transcript.

I was interviewed on the Parents as Partners webcast a few weeks ago, and you can read about about the conversation at Irritate or agitate – what’s your parent engagement like? You can also listen to the webcast at the EdTechTalk site.

Renee Moore has an excellent article in Teacher Magazine titled Reaping What We’ve Sown: How Schools Fail Low-Income Parents (free registration is required to access the whole piece, but it’s a quick and easy process).

As John Norton accurately describes it, the article:

“…challenges those who question whether low-income parents as a group care about their children’s education. All too often, Renee writes, it’s not a lack of caring but a community-wide sense that inequities in the system that have been perpetuated for generations will not change.”

Students take charge: Carpenters Middle School expands innovative program is a nice article about one school in Tennessee is using student-led parent/teacher conferences — and other strategies — to connect with parents.

The California Department of Education has an Online Resource Kit for Developing Partnerships to Close the Achievement Gap.

It includes a short piece on the role of families.

I’m not sure how helpful the resource is (though I did learn about the California Parent Center through it), but it never hurts to be able to point to some official wording supporting what you want to do if you’re pushing to connect schools and families.

The Industrial Areas Foundation began making the distinction between parent “involvement” and parent “engagement” during its community organizing efforts in schools during the 1990’s, and Professor Dennis Shirley wrote about it in his 1997 book Community Organizing For Urban School Reform. Even though a chapter in our book focuses on the IAF’s work (I was an IAF organizer for the majority of my nineteen year organizing career), I’d encourage people to read Professor Shirley’s book.

After he published that book, he wrote another in-depth study on the work of just one IAF organization in Texas — Valley Interfaith And School Reform: Organizing for Power in South Texas . If you go to that link, you can see the table of contents and read the introduction. I’d encourage you to do so.