The Indiana Partnerships Center is Indiana’s Parent Information and Resource Center (PIRC), and has quite a few useful resources on its website, including a downloadable research brief.
It’s unfortunate that President Obama’s budget proposes that funding for all state PIRC’s would be eliminated.
Needs of ‘Whole Child’ May Factor in ESEA Renewal is the title of an article that appeared in Ed Week today. It reported on a Senate Hearing:
And at a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee last week, lawmakers agreed that the idea of educating “the whole child” encompasses a wide range of support services, which advocates are hoping could be reflected in the rewrite of the ESEA.
Those include dental and mental health, as well as programs aimed at providing prekindergarten and library services, summer and after-school enrichment, mentoring, college counseling, and increased parent and community involvement. The whole-child concept can also refer to making sure schools attend to students’ nonacademic interests, through programs such as the arts and physical education.
That’s great news, though the sense I get from the article is that the speakers’ perspective on the issue was more of providing these kinds of services “to” instead of engaging “with” parents and others to identify the best ways to get these kinds of services provided.
The Engagement Of Low Income And Minority Parents In Schools Since No Child Left Behind: Intersections Of Policy, Parent Involvement And Social Capital is a lengthy dissertation written by Dwan Vanderpool Robinson.
I haven’t gotten a chance to read it completely but, after a quick review, it seems to have some good information.
Debbie Pushor, a Canadian professor who has done a lot of research on parent involvement/engagement, is teaching some graduate courses this summer on parent involvement/engagement, and has posted their designs on her blog.
They appear very well thought-out, and include some great suggestions for additional resources.
The National Education Association just published an article on a conference last week about parent engagement. It begins:
The Tennessee Education Association in partnership with the National Education Association and 22 other organizations in the state, hosted the Tennessee Family/School/Community Engagement Summit this month, a dialogue on policy and practice for improving family engagement in school
You can read the entire article at the link.
Carrie Rose from the Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project attended the conference, and will be writing a guest post about her experience. It will appear here next week.
Parents have been organizing to expand Hawaii’s shortest school year in the nation.
You can read about their latest action here. If you scroll down, you see links to many stories about their previous efforts.
Saving a neighborhood school is an article in the Ventura County Star about an attempt to convert a public elementary school. The interesting thing is that the majority of parents — predominantly Latino — oppose the conversion.
I obviously don’t know all the details, and the article may not tell the full story. It does make me curious though — I oppose the parent trigger law that allows a majority of parent to demand a charter conversion. If this story is true, and if the parent trigger proponents are all gung ho about parent power, why don’t we hear them saying anything about what’s going on in Ventura?
Thanks to Kenneth Libby for the tip.
Lorna Costantini at the great blog Parents as Partners has just written a post titled “Making A Difference In Five Minutes Or Less.”
Here’s what she writes:
Imagine that you have five minutes of a parent’s time to talk about student success. What would you say – what would you do to make a difference in their child’s learning ? I’m in the process of writing a document to speak to parents, please give me your advice. All too often they don’t know what to do to help.
Please go over to her blog and leave a comment with your suggestions…
The South Bend Tribune in Indiana published an article today titled Professor feted for parenting program. It’s about an award Stuart Greene, a Notre Dame professor, is getting to recognize the work he’s done with an organization called No Parent Left Behind.
It’s not clear to me from the article exactly what the group does, but it mentions a book Greene is editing that’s coming out called “Connecting Home and School: Complexities, Concerns, and Considerations in Fostering Parent Involvement and Family Literacy,” — which sounds interesting — and I do like this quote:
“The typical observation about low-income parents is that they just don’t get involved in their children’s learning,” Greene said. “What we’re finding is that they’re actually doing a lot — it’s just not as visible as it could or should be. Our work is helping these parents tell their own stories, opening the way for them to make teachers and administrators aware of their strengths — and their needs.”
Let me know if you have more information on the group.
The Alabama Parent Education Center sponsors the Alabama PIRC, which seems to have a very useful and active blog and Twitter account sharing some excellent resources.
You might want to consider subscribing to both, or at least periodically checking them out.
Claus von Zastrow at Public School Insights just published an interview he did with the National PTA President.
It’s titled Making Parents a National Priority: A Conversation with National PTA President Chuck Saylors.
It offers some good analysis of the Obama Administration’s perspectives on parent engagement and what the PTA hopes to do in the future.
Today, the Learning First Alliance, a partnership of 17 national education associations representing over ten million parents, educators and policymakers, released a statement calling for the Obama Administration to make family engagement a higher priority in its education plans.
You can read the statement at the Public School Insights blog. Here are a couple of lines from it:
“The Elementary and Secondary Education Act should make family engagement a stronger priority.”
“The President’s blueprint for ESEA reauthorization contains only glancing references to the importance of parents and lacks a compelling vision for how the federal government can support family engagement.”
Eric Sheninger is a high school principal in New Jersey who writes a very thoughtful blog.
One of his recent posts, titled “Ideas To Increase Parent Communication In Schools,” had a lot of good points, and it’s worth sharing.
Check it out when you get a chance….
The Alliance For A Better Community, a Los Angeles community organization, has published Engaging Parents in Pico-Union: A Manual for Educators by Educators. It’s a downloadable PDF of ideas that teachers in that L.A. neighborhood offered on how they engage/involve parents.
It’s worth a look.
Thanks to the FIS Education Advocacy blog for the tip.
I’ve written posts about Community Schools and how they can help engage families. Typically, community schools are ones that host multiple social services, as well as regular school classes.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius was the keynote speaker this week at a Philadelphia conference calling for more Community Schools.
Here are some excerpts from a Philadelphia Inquirer article about the conference and Community Schools:
Sebelius, the keynote speaker at the two day Coalition of Community Schools’ National Forum said school buildings should be a cornerstone of the community, housing health clinics, after school programs and family activities.
“These are tax paid institutions, we need to open them up,” Sebelius said. “Community schools will make it easier for families to access the service they need to succeed.”
“If a child is not healthy, they will not learn, they can not learn, they are not equipped to learn,” she said.
A reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would create a $410 million “safe, healthier” grant program for schools.
The funding would expand the approximately 2,000 school-based health centers that servce more than 1 million children and adolescents across the country.
A new international study has come-out once again documenting the huge benefits to children of having books at home. Here’s an excerpt:
“Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books…. In the U.S., the figure is 2.4 years — which is still highly significant when you consider it’s the difference between two years of college and a full four-year degree.
We focus a lot on the importance of a home library in our Family Literacy Project. In addition to providing computers and home internet service, we’ve gotten thousands of great books from the Friends of the Davis (CA) Library to stock home libraries.
This is a major issue with low-income and immigrant families. In my book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, I share the results of various studies that show the average Hispanic family with limited English-proficient children has about 26 books in their home, which is about one-fifth of the U.S. average.
Providing high quality books to parents and students that they could call their own — and that they could help pick — could be a pretty darn effective parent engagement effort.
I’ve previously posted about the excellent organization Parent Involvement Matters.
They just came-out with their March newsletter, and it has a lot of useful resources. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in parent engagement in schools. You can subscribe for free.
School Matters: Parents Must Be Key to Education Reform is an op/ed column from New America Media that gives an excellent critique on the Obama administration’s parent engagement efforts.
It’s definitely worth a look.
The April issue of the Family Involvement Network of Educators has just come-out. Its theme is “Family Engagement Across the Developmental Continuum.”
The newsletter includes a list of recent research on parent involvement/engagement and a compilation of recent news in general about the topic.
Each month, at my other blog, I interview people in the education world about whom I want to learn more. You can see read those past interviews here.
This month’s guest is Carrie Rose, Executive Director of the nationally acclaimed Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project. Our school works closely with Carrie and the Project, I’ve written a chapter about it in my book on parent engagement, and I also wrote an article about it last year for Teacher Magazine.
I posting this interview at both of my blogs.
Can you give a brief description of what the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project is and how it came into being?
The Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project is a unique partnership between a community organizing group (Sacramento Area Congregations Together), a local teachers union (Sacramento City Teachers Association) and a school district (Sacramento City Unified School District). The project developed through an effort to address the cycle of blame that existed between parents and site personnel at several south Sacramento schools where there was a pervasive history of low student achievement, high levels of poverty, and where high percentages of children entered school as English learners. Home visits were identified by teachers as one way to build trust and respect. Community organizers recognized the potential for leadership development through home visits given the similarity to their model of 1:1 interactions. Parents, educators and community organizers came together to develop a training and model for the visits and launched the project in the 1998-1999 school year.
How did you get involved in it, and where do you get the energy to continue being the Executive Director?
My background is in social service and law. In 1999, when my children were very young, I was looking for a more flexible job. The director of Sacramento ACT offered me a part time job as a fund developer and I had to quickly learned to do grant writing and fundraising in the nonprofit world. Luckily, one of my main responsibilities was to raise funds for a new parent engagement project- the parent/teacher home visit effort. As my understanding of community organizing grew, and my participation in the logistics of the home visit project evolved, I experienced a profound shift both personally and professionally.
While I had always been involved in social justice work, community organizing offered new and effective forms of advocacy and leadership development! In 2003, the Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project became a separate 501(c) (3) non-profit organization (jointly governed by representatives from the original three partner groups) and I left ACT to become the Executive Director. Like all non profit directors, there are days when the grind of raising money, adapting to recent policy changes and other stress make me stop and question if I still have what it takes to move forward. To date, I have found a reliable remedy – when I start to have doubts, I either do a home visit or facilitate a home visit training session. As I listen to the “testimony” of parents, teachers or students, I always find the inspiration and guidance I need to move forward.
What are the biggest reservations that School Districts, schools, and teachers typically have about doing these kinds of home visits? How do you respond to them?
There are some common concerns that surface regarding home visits. Funding is always an immediate concern in this day an age of education budget shortfalls. Our partners all believe that staff participation should always be voluntary and compensated because visits take place outside of the scope of the regular work day (nights, weekends, etc). Over the years, participating districts have used various foundation, state and federal grants to fund home visit activity (as most grants have a parent engagement component) but the most sustainable source of funding has been Title I funding (which has a minimum 1% parent engagement mandate).
Administrators and staff also need to be able to talk about their concerns for the safety of staff while out conducting visits, mandated reporting requirements that may be triggered during a home visit, and possible language and cultural barriers that may prevent good home visit communication. Our non-profit provides participating school sites a three-hour home visit training session – led by parents and teachers- that is designed to provide both a clear step by step guide and a frank discussion of possible barriers and solutions to insure the visits are very effective. In a nutshell, I can tell you that no teacher has ever been harmed in the course of our home visits and the incidence of mandated reporting has been extremely rare because our model is specifically designed to insure the safety and voluntary nature- for everyone- of every single visit. Language barriers have been easier than expected to address given the non confidential nature of these conversations that allow for “unofficial” interpretation by other staff, family or community members. As for cultural barriers, teachers often report that the act of stepping into homes has been one of the most effective capacity building experiences of their careers.
Truthfully, in our experience, the real barrier to home visits working at a school is usually connected to the assumptions we hold. In other words, what does the staff already think is true about the students/families/community? What do the families already think is true about the staff and school? We spend a considerable amount of time in our training session addressing this barrier and offering a practical exercise we can all use to “check our assumption”.
You’ve had some evaluations done on the results of home visits. What do they say?
Nationally, there have been decades of research linking effective parent engagement to increased academic and social success for students. Our evaluations have focused on whether home visits are an effective parent engagement strategy. In order to measure that connection and the outcomes for students, there have been several independent evaluations spanning the course our project.
The first evaluation (1998-2001) focused on whether home visits made a difference in Sacramento schools. Dr. Geni Cowan from the California State University at Sacramento found that “Student performance has improved over the three years of the project’s implementation; parental involvement has increased, and communication between home and school has been enhanced.”
The second evaluation focused on whether the model and training were effective in California schools outside of Sacramento. EMT Associates, Inc. found “Widespread implementation of the program, increase in the number of teachers involved per site, successful dissemination of materials and subsequent trainings following initial training sessions. Participants perceiving benefits including increased parental involvement improved parent/teacher relationships and improved academic achievement.”
The third evaluation focused on the adaptation and effectiveness of home visits as a strategy to help increase high school graduation rates. Beginning in 2007, Paul Tuss of the Center for Student Assessment and Program Accountability with the Sacramento County Office of Education found that: students who received a home visit were considerably more likely to be successful in their exit exam intervention and support classes and more likely to pass the English portion of the exit exam; parents reported home visits improved their understanding of key school issues (graduation requirements, exit exam, college entrance requirements), increased knowledge of school resources and support available for their child, and improved their relationship with teachers/school staff; and, attitudinal shifts among teachers and other school staff concerning the needs of at-risk students and the barriers they face to succeeding in school.
A follow up evaluation for the initial cohort of students at Luther Burbank High School (one of the two pilot schools piloting exit exam home visits) found that visited students passed the exit exam by 12th grade at significantly higher rates and earned sufficient academic credits to graduate at significantly higher rates and graduated at higher rates. Then Paul Tuss began an evaluation on a feeder pattern plan to connect schools and conduct visits with students at key times (in elementary, transitioning to middle school and high school, and before and after the high school exit exam? The evaluation showed that these transitional home visits were associated with increased academic performance for middle and high school students.
Our evaluation focus at this time, thanks to the support of the National Education Association, we are involved in a planning process with some of the best nationally known parent engagement experts and researchers to create a common data collection instrument for any k-12 school conducting home visits with our model so that we can begin to build a consistent and meaningful set of data connecting to home visits to outcomes in the area of parent engagement, staff development and, most importantly, student success. This instrument will then be piloted in several areas throughout the country where home visits are used.
What’s happening locally, state-wide, and nationally now with your project?
Locally: There are two very exciting developments for us in our local work. First, even in the midst of budget challenges, Sacramento City Unified School District’s new superintendent, Jonathan Raymond, has prioritized the expansion parent home visits under the district’s parent engagement funding! Second, representatives from five neighboring districts in the our county are working with the Sacramento County Office of Education on a regional plan to increase graduation rates that includes a strong secondary school home visiting component based on our model.
Statewide: The California Teachers Association (CTA) recently awarded our non-profit grant funding that will allow us to expand training capacity to include more sessions on the connection between home visits and building staff cultural competency and individualized instructional skill sets. Additionally, along with another one of our statewide partners, PICO California, we are working on the release of a publication documenting the steps and outcomes of our secondary school home visiting efforts and the connection between this strategy and increased high school success for our students. We expect that publication to be available within the month.
Nationally: Thanks to a vibrant partnership with the National Education Association, most of our growth this past year has been on the national front! Currently, schools and districts in five different states have fully adopted and adapted our model- Ohio, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and Massachusetts. We are also in the process of working with local leaders to plan and launch efforts in schools in Virginia, Louisiana, Washington DC, Maryland and Alaska.
Thanks, Carrie!
Each month I interview people in the education world about whom I want to learn more. You can see read those past interviews here.
This month’s guest is Carrie Rose, Executive Director of the nationally acclaimed Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project. Our school works closely with Carrie and the Project, I’ve written a chapter about it in my book on parent engagement, and I also wrote an article about it last year for Teacher Magazine.
Can you give a brief description of what the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project is and how it came into being?
The Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project is a unique partnership between a community organizing group (Sacramento Area Congregations Together), a local teachers union (Sacramento City Teachers Association) and a school district (Sacramento City Unified School District). The project developed through an effort to address the cycle of blame that existed between parents and site personnel at several south Sacramento schools where there was a pervasive history of low student achievement, high levels of poverty, and where high percentages of children entered school as English learners. Home visits were identified by teachers as one way to build trust and respect. Community organizers recognized the potential for leadership development through home visits given the similarity to their model of 1:1 interactions. Parents, educators and community organizers came together to develop a training and model for the visits and launched the project in the 1998-1999 school year.
How did you get involved in it, and where do you get the energy to continue being the Executive Director?
My background is in social service and law. In 1999, when my children were very young, I was looking for a more flexible job. The director of Sacramento ACT offered me a part time job as a fund developer and I had to quickly learned to do grant writing and fundraising in the nonprofit world. Luckily, one of my main responsibilities was to raise funds for a new parent engagement project- the parent/teacher home visit effort. As my understanding of community organizing grew, and my participation in the logistics of the home visit project evolved, I experienced a profound shift both personally and professionally.
While I had always been involved in social justice work, community organizing offered new and effective forms of advocacy and leadership development! In 2003, the Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project became a separate 501(c) (3) non-profit organization (jointly governed by representatives from the original three partner groups) and I left ACT to become the Executive Director. Like all non profit directors, there are days when the grind of raising money, adapting to recent policy changes and other stress make me stop and question if I still have what it takes to move forward. To date, I have found a reliable remedy – when I start to have doubts, I either do a home visit or facilitate a home visit training session. As I listen to the “testimony” of parents, teachers or students, I always find the inspiration and guidance I need to move forward.
What are the biggest reservations that School Districts, schools, and teachers typically have about doing these kinds of home visits? How do you respond to them?
There are some common concerns that surface regarding home visits. Funding is always an immediate concern in this day an age of education budget shortfalls. Our partners all believe that staff participation should always be voluntary and compensated because visits take place outside of the scope of the regular work day (nights, weekends, etc). Over the years, participating districts have used various foundation, state and federal grants to fund home visit activity (as most grants have a parent engagement component) but the most sustainable source of funding has been Title I funding (which has a minimum 1% parent engagement mandate).
Administrators and staff also need to be able to talk about their concerns for the safety of staff while out conducting visits, mandated reporting requirements that may be triggered during a home visit, and possible language and cultural barriers that may prevent good home visit communication. Our non-profit provides participating school sites a three-hour home visit training session – led by parents and teachers- that is designed to provide both a clear step by step guide and a frank discussion of possible barriers and solutions to insure the visits are very effective. In a nutshell, I can tell you that no teacher has ever been harmed in the course of our home visits and the incidence of mandated reporting has been extremely rare because our model is specifically designed to insure the safety and voluntary nature- for everyone- of every single visit. Language barriers have been easier than expected to address given the non confidential nature of these conversations that allow for “unofficial” interpretation by other staff, family or community members. As for cultural barriers, teachers often report that the act of stepping into homes has been one of the most effective capacity building experiences of their careers.
Truthfully, in our experience, the real barrier to home visits working at a school is usually connected to the assumptions we hold. In other words, what does the staff already think is true about the students/families/community? What do the families already think is true about the staff and school? We spend a considerable amount of time in our training session addressing this barrier and offering a practical exercise we can all use to “check our assumption”.
You’ve had some evaluations done on the results of home visits. What do they say?
Nationally, there have been decades of research linking effective parent engagement to increased academic and social success for students. Our evaluations have focused on whether home visits are an effective parent engagement strategy. In order to measure that connection and the outcomes for students, there have been several independent evaluations spanning the course our project.
The first evaluation (1998-2001) focused on whether home visits made a difference in Sacramento schools. Dr. Geni Cowan from the California State University at Sacramento found that “Student performance has improved over the three years of the project’s implementation; parental involvement has increased, and communication between home and school has been enhanced.”
The second evaluation focused on whether the model and training were effective in California schools outside of Sacramento. EMT Associates, Inc. found “Widespread implementation of the program, increase in the number of teachers involved per site, successful dissemination of materials and subsequent trainings following initial training sessions. Participants perceiving benefits including increased parental involvement improved parent/teacher relationships and improved academic achievement.”
The third evaluation focused on the adaptation and effectiveness of home visits as a strategy to help increase high school graduation rates. Beginning in 2007, Paul Tuss of the Center for Student Assessment and Program Accountability with the Sacramento County Office of Education found that: students who received a home visit were considerably more likely to be successful in their exit exam intervention and support classes and more likely to pass the English portion of the exit exam; parents reported home visits improved their understanding of key school issues (graduation requirements, exit exam, college entrance requirements), increased knowledge of school resources and support available for their child, and improved their relationship with teachers/school staff; and, attitudinal shifts among teachers and other school staff concerning the needs of at-risk students and the barriers they face to succeeding in school.
A follow up evaluation for the initial cohort of students at Luther Burbank High School (one of the two pilot schools piloting exit exam home visits) found that visited students passed the exit exam by 12th grade at significantly higher rates and earned sufficient academic credits to graduate at significantly higher rates and graduated at higher rates. Then Paul Tuss began an evaluation on a feeder pattern plan to connect schools and conduct visits with students at key times (in elementary, transitioning to middle school and high school, and before and after the high school exit exam? The evaluation showed that these transitional home visits were associated with increased academic performance for middle and high school students.
Our evaluation focus at this time, thanks to the support of the National Education Association, we are involved in a planning process with some of the best nationally known parent engagement experts and researchers to create a common data collection instrument for any k-12 school conducting home visits with our model so that we can begin to build a consistent and meaningful set of data connecting to home visits to outcomes in the area of parent engagement, staff development and, most importantly, student success. This instrument will then be piloted in several areas throughout the country where home visits are used.
What’s happening locally, state-wide, and nationally now with your project?
Locally: There are two very exciting developments for us in our local work. First, even in the midst of budget challenges, Sacramento City Unified School District’s new superintendent, Jonathan Raymond, has prioritized the expansion parent home visits under the district’s parent engagement funding! Second, representatives from five neighboring districts in the our county are working with the Sacramento County Office of Education on a regional plan to increase graduation rates that includes a strong secondary school home visiting component based on our model.
Statewide: The California Teachers Association (CTA) recently awarded our non-profit grant funding that will allow us to expand training capacity to include more sessions on the connection between home visits and building staff cultural competency and individualized instructional skill sets. Additionally, along with another one of our statewide partners, PICO California, we are working on the release of a publication documenting the steps and outcomes of our secondary school home visiting efforts and the connection between this strategy and increased high school success for our students. We expect that publication to be available within the month.
Nationally: Thanks to a vibrant partnership with the National Education Association, most of our growth this past year has been on the national front! Currently, schools and districts in five different states have fully adopted and adapted our model- Ohio, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and Massachusetts. We are also in the process of working with local leaders to plan and launch efforts in schools in Virginia, Louisiana, Washington DC, Maryland and Alaska.
Thanks, Carrie!