Engaging Parents In School…

Though I’m not crazy about the headline in this New York Times story, “Learning To Bridge The Achievement Gap” does tell a nice story of academic progress a school in a low-income neighborhood is making. One of the strategies it’s using is providing three-times-a-week literacy and life skills class to immigrant parents.

The reason I’m not thrilled with the headline is because it perpetuates the myth that schools can bridge the gap. In fact, as education researcher Richard Rothstein has said (and we discuss in our book), most schools can narrow the gap, but not bridge it.

Without recognizing and acting on the reality that so many non-school issues affect academic achievement, we are not going to bridge the achievement gap for most students.  In addition to working on in-school instruction, by working with parents and other instituations, schools can have an impact on those issues of poverty, heath, and safety.

I’ve posted in the past about some of the challenges we’ve had in our home visit conversations with parents when discussing college possibilities for their children. In that same point I shared how we were responding to those challenges, and the plan I wrote about is going quite well.

Education Week has just published an article about research and a book highlighting some of the particular issues facing schools connecting to parents in middle and high school.

The article is worth a visit. It identifies some of the same issues we’ve found in our conversations with parents.

The Sacramento City Unified School District declared this week to be “Parent Engagement Week.” Today, which is considered to be National Parent Involvement Day, our new Superintendent, Jonathan Raymond, held a news conference today highlighting parent engagement efforts in our district.

He was kind enough to recognize my book and have me speak at the press event.

Every year a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll is done on “Public Attitudes Toward The Public Schools.” This year’s results were released a couple of months ago.

This is one question that was included:

I am going to read several factors. For each, tell me how important you think that factor is in keeping public schools moving on the right track?

People were then given a list of these options to choose from:

More Funding

Better Teachers

Better Use of Technology

More Parent Support

More School Choice

“More Parent Support” was identified as the most important factor in keeping schools moving on the right track.   85% of respondents identified it as “very important.”

You can read more about the results of the poll here.

I’ve posted in the past about how Education Secretary Duncan has spoken condescendingly about parents in relation to  schools.

Today on Meet The Press he sounded a bit better:

“We all have to take responsibility: parents, teachers, principals, school board members, students themselves, most importantly. We all have to step up. Parents matter tremendously. Parents are always going to be our students’ first teachers, and they’re always going to be our students most important teachers. That’s never going to change. Parents have to be full and equal partners with teachers. When that happens, great things happen with children. When that doesn’t happen, when the adults fight, when there’s adult dysfunction, guess what, children lose.”

It would be nice, though, if he encouraged and supported schools taking a more active role in encouraging those kinds of reciprocal partnerships…

I’ve been reading more lately about a campaign called Be There, which appears to be provided by a public relations agency to school districts (supposedly at no cost) and is designed to promote “parent involvement.”

Based on what I have read, the main focus seems to be a fairly glitzy media campaign of posters, public service announcements, and videos.

I’m sure that everybody is very well-intentioned — both the provider of the campaign and the school districts participating. However, I’m always concerned about efforts like this that are focused on media talking “to” people, instead of of emphasizing a priority of genuinely developing reciprocal relationships of people talking “with” each other.

The beginning of our book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, speaks to this point in this way:

The Jay And The Peacock

A jay venturing into a yard where peacocks used to walk, found there a number of feathers which had fallen from the peacocks when they were molting. He tied them all to his tail and strutted down towards the peacocks. When he came near them they soon discovered the cheat, and striding up to him pecked at him and plucked away his borrowed plumes. So the jay could do no better than go back to the other jays, who had watched his behavior from a distance; but they were equally annoyed with him, and told him:

“It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.”

(from Aesop’s Fables )

This fable is about a bird who thought that a few feathers could make him be something he was not. This book is about why and how it is in schools’ self-interest to have a parent engagement strategy that does not settle at having a few parents on a school site council, or even a large number coming to a Back-to-School night… This book is about providing specific ways that schools can avoid the same trap as the jay. Tempting as it may be, and as challenging as it may be to do more, a few parents (or even many of them) coming to a meeting or periodically turning-out large numbers of parents to a school event and calling it parent engagement does not make it an effective parent engagement strategy.

I might add that a media campaign doesn’t make it one, either.

Wordle is a free and easy web application that lets you paste text into it and then produces a “word cloud” illustrating the words that are used most with their size showing their frequency of use.

It’s pretty neat.

Here is the link to the Wordle for our book, “Building Parent Engagement In Schools.” I was having some difficulty resizing it to fit in this blog, which is why I’m just posting the link to it.

It certainly gives an accurate representation of what the book is all about.

The New York Times just published an extensive article on the report I posted about earlier today.

It’s much more extensive than the Wall Street Journal article I wrote about it. Check out Job Woes Exacting a Heavy Toll on Family Life.

The Critical Connection Between Student Health and Academic Achievement:How Schools and Policymakers Can Achieve a Positive Impact is a report recently issued by the California Endowment, a major health-related private foundation in California. It’s the first in a series of reports the Foundation is developing. The purpose of these reports is “to develop a framework for injecting health—physical health, mental health and developmental health—into the state’s education reform dialogue.”

I’ve got to say the research in this first report is really to-notch. It’s very accessible, and I’d recommend you read it. The information certainly bolsters what we write in our book about the need for schools to look at how other issues affect the lives of students and their families.

The report’s recommendations for action, on the other hand, seemed a bit disappointing to me. They were all great ideas, but except for sharing a story about how the teacher’s union cooperated in signing up kids for the state’s health insurance program (a similar effort might really come in handy if health reform passes), they mostly seemed to me nice-sounding goals with no effective strategies offered on how to accomplish them.

Of course, as I quoted, their stated focus was “to create a framework” for discussion, so offering practical strategies might not have been one of their goals. I hope they offer more of them, though, in their future papers.

Nevertheless, The Endowment has definitely performed a service to those of us who are pushing schools to look at other issues. Such clearly written research is unfortunately all too rare….

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new research paper that highlights the impact of the recession on student achievement. The article is titled “As Unemployment Rises, Kids’ Future Dims”. It provides more evidence supporting one of the key points of our book — that as part of a parent engagement strategy, it makes sense for schools to work with parents on issues beyond the schoolhouse walls.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

A parent’s job loss increases the probability that a child repeats a grade in school by roughly 15%, according to a new paper from two economics professors at the University of California, Davis.

It goes on to say:

“More attention should be paid to the potential role of external factors in affecting school level outcomes,” they [the report's writers] conclude. “Schools in areas with large concentrations of displaced workers…may face particular challenges in maintaining achievement standards during times of economic hardship.”

Parent Involvement Matters is an organization (and website) that has a lot of good resources on parent involvement/engagement issues. There are some pretty impressive people involved with it, and it also has an email newsletter.

It’s definitely worth a visit, and I’m adding a link to their site on this blog’s sidebar.

In case you’re interested, Education World just published a short piece I wrote titled “A Parent Engagement Model That Works.”

It gives a brief overview of my book.

I generally like what syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrete has to say — except when he’s writing about school issues. It seems like he and David Brooks (another columnist I usually like) just “lose it” when they look at education issues.

Today, Navarrete wrote what can only be called a rant against most public schools and teachers. Here’s one quote that sticks-out:

“It’s been my experience that many teachers don’t really care whether parents go to the PTA or help their kids with homework. They just want a constant foil, someone to blame when students flounder and the schools underperform.”

I’m pretty confident that I’ve never met a teacher who felt that way.  And, from the positive response my book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, has received, there are quite a few who feel the exact opposite….

Thanks to This Week In Education for the tip.

Here are a series of 21 videos demonstrating how schools are connecting to parents in the United Kingdom.

Some of them seem quite interesting.

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…..