I’ve previously written about a San Jose school district’s ill-advised attempt at requiring parent involvement (see “School to Parents: Volunteer or Else!”) Now author Douglas Fiore has made some good points on the same topic. Take a minute and read his post, titled “Parent Involvement is Essential, but Should it be Mandatory?”
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I began my Engaging Parents In School blog about a year ago to support the publication of my book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools. I’ve written many posts over the past twelve months, and I thought readers might find it useful to see a list of which ones have been “clicked-on” the most: Here, in [...]
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The headline to this post was, I kid you not, asked by a member of the National Press Corps today to Education Secretary Arne Duncan Happily, there were better questions asked than that one, though, overall, I was less-than impressed with their caliber. Secretary Duncan did have some reasonable things to say — both about [...]
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“Engaged Families, Effective Pre-K: State Policies that Bolster Student Success” is a new report from The Pew Center On The States. Early Ed Watch, A blog from New America’s Early Education Initiative, has a very good summary of the report. It sounds like it has some good family engagement ideas for young children and their [...]
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Civil rights leaders, Sec. Arne Duncan talk education reform is the headline of a USA Today article on the same topic I wrote about yesterday. It provides some interesting new information, though, so is worth a look.
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Several national civil rights groups released a proposal for educational policy today, along with launching a National Opportunity to Learn Campaign. Its proposals included a lot of good recommendations related to schools connecting to parents and local communities, including: In our view, the best approach to school turnaround is to reinvent low-performing schools as community [...]
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Educacy is a new group formed by parents in the California Bay Area to influence state education policy. You can read more about it at: Bay Area parents coalesce to work to reform education funding Parents form Educacy, set goal for 2012
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Can Communities And Parents Help Turn Around Schools? is the title of post at the National Journal, which has eighteen invited writers answer the question. I’m not particularly impressed by the answers, but it’s still worth a look.
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The Department of Education has just released a list of the 339 groups that have applied to become “Promise Neighborhoods.” To give you a sense of how connected I am locally , I was surprised to learn that the University of California applied to develop one in Sacramento County. I’ll have to find out more [...]
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Oakland Schools Struggle, but Emeryville May Point a Way Up is the headline of a New York Times article today about an effort to connect schools with social service agencies. I’ve written about these kinds of projects — called Community Schools — previously. They certainly help. My concern, though, about many of them is that [...]
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The House of Representatives is now considering a bill to reduce spending for the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative by seventy percent, according to the Hechinger Report. Promise Neighborhoods is the name given to the effort to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone. Boy, it’s sure been in the news over the past 36 hours.
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Since yesterday, in response to the critical Brookings Institution report, more and more fascinating info has been written on the Harlem Children’s Zone: You can read Geoffrey Canada’s point by point response… Alexander Russo also has a very, very interesting guest post today on the topic.
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ASCD Express just published a piece I co-wrote with Carrie Rose, the director of the Parent-Teacher Home Visit Project. It’s called Home Visits and Hope for the Future. It’s part of a larger issue ASCD has published on Engaging Parents and Community in Schooling, which includes a lot of useful information, including a previous article [...]
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Yesterday, I wrote about several columns appearing in the Washington Post about a just-released study on the Harlem Children’s Zone. Well, another excellent one appeared today. Check-out “Poverty, student achievement, HCZ: Berliner.”
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I’ve written a lot about the Harlem Children’s Zone, including applause for its great work and some concerns, too. The release this week of a Brookings Institute report on the HCZ has prompted some interesting discussion in the the educational blogosphere. Check-out: The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews’ Rare attack on Harlem Children’s Zone. Alexander Russo’s [...]
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Learning from Leadership: Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning is a very important study that was released today. You can read a summary here – Large national study strongly links educational leadership to student achievement. You can read the entire report here — all 333 pages of it! Here’s an excerpt related to parents: [...]
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A few months ago, I began to have PostRank index posts from this blog. Post Rank uses a variety of ways to measure level of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts. I have a constantly updated “widget” on my blog’s sidebar that lists these posts, but I thought a quarterly post would be [...]
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I’ve written a lot about the Harlem Children’s Zone and the federal effort to replicate them (called Promise Neighborhoods). I’ve just learned about a project that has been set-up to support future replication efforts called The Promise Neighborhoods Institute. They also have a blog worth checking-out.
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I recently discovered a lengthy study on parent involvement that appears to have been done for the United Kingdom government. I haven’t gotten a chance yet to review The Impact Of Parent Involvement, Parental Support and Family Education on Pupil Achievement and Adjustment: A Literature Review, which was published in 2003, but will soon.
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In his speech to the NAACP this week, Education Secretary Duncan announced “we will revise our ESEA reauthorization proposal to require parent and community input.” You can read his entire speech here, and news reports about it at Ed Week and the Kansas City Star. There were no specifics and, of course, “the devil is [...]
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