A review of the book The Home-School Connection: Lessons Learned in a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Community has just appeared in the journal, education review // reseñas educativas.
It’s about a family literacy project based in Chicago that serves Latino immigrant parents and is called Project FLAME. I had never heard of it before, and it sounds interesting….
Readers of this blog might already be aware of this, but I just learned that the PTA has launched what they’re calling an “Urban Family Engagement Initiative.”
Here’s how their website describes it:
“… in recognizing that different modalities of parent involvement must be developed to be inclusive of all parents, the National PTA has identified ten cities, with 5 additional cities to be selected in 2010 to develop new models of parent engagement to ensure opportunity and equity for the students in each city. The cities include: Atlanta, Albuquerque, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and Philadelphia. These new strategies will be locally-driven and will mobilize volunteer leaders to address needs important to each community.”
I don’t know if any of these efforts have begun yet, or what they might look like. If you do, please leave a comment.
With the on-going effort to force parents to be involved with schools or face punitive action, it was interesting today to read about an attempt two years ago in Washington, D.C. to require TANF (welfare) recipients to attend PTA and parent-teacher meetings.
Susie Cambria writes:
Welfare and education advocates alike educated the CM [Council Member] about the real reasons for poor parent engagement (including the failure of schools to make attempts to engage parents) and convinced him there was a better way to achieve the policy and practice goal.
One can only help that advocates can have similar luck in Detroit..
I’ve previously written several posts about community schools. Typically, community schools are ones that host multiple social services, as well as regular school classes. Some of them, but I suspect not most, work with parents to design and structure their efforts. But even if they’re done through the lens of looking at parents as “clients” instead of “partners,” they are an honest effort at recognizing that schools need to be pro-active at responding to the issues outside their walls that affect students.
Providence’s Bailey Elementary School combines education, community outreach is the headline of an article today about community schools in Rhode Island.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
“In our urban districts, we know that when kids come to school, they come with a whole lot of baggage,” said Rebecca Boxx, program director at Dorcas Place, an adult literacy center in Providence. “The educational system can’t handle that on its own. This is an effort to unite community partners and school districts behind one targeted goal: to increase academic achievement by providing family support.”
Last week, Bailey was one of seven schools statewide (and the only Providence public school) to come off the state Department of Education’s sanction list — those schools that have failed to make adequate yearly progress.
Brady and others are convinced that the “wraparound” social services available at Bailey helped the school meet more than 20 academic targets two years in a row.
Last month, I wrote about a Michigan prosecutor who had the ill-conceived notion of jailing parents who didn’t attend a teacher conference in their child’s school.
Unfortunately, he’s moving forward with it. Read Jail For Parents Skipping Teacher Conferences in Detroit?, an AP story.
As I’ve written previously:
Why not make something mandatory… instead of putting energy into building trusting and reciprocal relationships with parents; learning their concerns, visions for themselves, and visions for their children; helping families find the energy and capacity within themselves to want to act; and then working together to do something?
Here are some responses from Michigan public officials to the proposal.
Parent Involvement In School: Engaging Immigrant Parents is a report from the Wilder Foundation.
It’s accessible, and has some decent recommendations for what schools can do. It also includes citations for newer research.
Based on this article about Philadelphia’s effort to engage parents in making decisions about the future of their schools, I wouldn’t suggest we look at their process as a model for parent engagement:
The unintended result was a process that often seemed to be guided by rules that were being made up on the fly. The tight timeline for making the matches only exacerbated the confusion.
It sounds like the District wants to learn from their experience. I hope they’re learning the right lessons and will implement them effectively.
If anybody knows more about what’s going there, please leave a comment…
Leonie Haimson & Julie Woestehoff have written a commentary on the Ed Week site titled “Shutting Out Parents: Obama’s Disappointing Blueprint for Reform.”
It’s worth a read.