Detroit schools are trying to encourage parents to participate more with schools by offering a discount card to area businesses if they do so. I’m not impressed. You can read why I’m not in favor of these kinds of incentives at my Washington Post piece, Why paying parents to attend school events is wrong.
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Lorna Costantini at Parents As Partners is organizing an online discussion about “including parent in planning for education improvement” on Monday November 1, 2010 at 9:00 PM. You can read more about it at Valuing Parent participation and leadership – Parents as Partners Monday November 1, 2010.
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I’ve said it before (see Not A Good Message Via Comic Strip (Or Any Other Medium)), and I’ll say it again — teachers have got to stop reacting to all the recent teacher-bashing by, in turn, bashing parents. A recent piece in The Huffington Post titled Dear Davis Guggenheim, Sec. Arne Duncan, et. al falls [...]
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From The National Education Association’s “Opening Bell:” The Gaithersburg (MD) Gazette ) reports that residents in District Heights, Maryland, are participating in the NEA’s Community Conversation. According to Brenda Vincent, an NEA senior policy analyst, the “public engagement project began in 1997 as a way for communities to meet and identify whether family and community [...]
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Transforming Schools Through Family, School, and Community Engagement is the title of a recorded webinar that can be viewed for free online. The presenters are: * Jim Shelton, Assistant Deputy Secretary, Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education * Anna Hinton, Director, Parental Options and Information, Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department [...]
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Lyn Hilt has written a summary of yesterday’s online discussion at Connected Principals on engaging parents as partners. Here’s an excerpt: Parent involvement vs. engagement was a common theme throughout the session. We may have compliant students in our classrooms, but this does not necessarily mean they are engaged learners. Similarly, we have many parents [...]
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Leigh Dingerson has an excellent article in the most recent issue of ReThinking Schoolsdescribing Michelle Rhee’s history as Chancellor of Washington, D.C. public school. I was particularly struck with her section on parent engagement/involvement. I’d encourage you to read the whole piece, but here’s one passage: “She creates lots of opportunities for people to learn [...]
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ETS Achievement Gap Conference Focuses on Families and Academic Development is the title of an article reporting on a recent conference hosted by the Education Testing Service. It doesn’t seem to have much that would be new to most readers of this blog, but it is interesting that they hosted this kind of meeting.
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The Chicago Sun-Times published an editorial praising the Chicago parent sit-in that I’ve written about in the past. Their editorial was titled Sit-in at field house shows activism works. Thanks to Mike Klonsky for the tip.
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I’ve previously posted about a Michigan prosecutor who has proposed sending parents to jail if they don’t attend conferences with their child’s teacher (and I’ve commented about why it’s such a ridiculous idea). Happily, the idea continues to go nowhere, but she doesn’t seem to stop talking about it. You can read updates at Worthy [...]
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Connected Principals, a group of administrators from the United States and Canada for whom I have the greatest respect, are sponsoring a free online discussion this Sunday afternoon on: …the importance of parent engagement in our school improvement efforts. The Connected Principals believe strongly that the only way we can have meaningful change is to [...]
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Building Stronger Relationships Between Families, Schools and Communities is the title of a post at the National Education Association’s Priority Schools blog. The post includes a video where “Kim Oliver Burnim, a National Board Certified Teacher and a former Teacher of the Year….. shared how to engage parents more meaningfully.”
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I’ve previously written about a long-term parent sit-in at a school in Chicago where they were demanding a library be created. It looks like the parents got what they wanted for the school, and are just waiting for the school board to approve the agreement in late October.
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Rahm Emanuel gave an interview with the Chicago Tribune on Monday and spoke a lot about his plans for schools. They were all pretty bad, including his idea about parent engagement: The city could reward schools with greater parental involvement by giving them more money, he said. Chicago Public Schools could track how many parents [...]
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Lorna Costantini has developed an excellent presentation on how schools can use technology to connect with parents. Check-out her Digital Parent Engagement – k12Online Conference 2010 presentation. This is how she describes it: This video shares some of the best practices of innovative teachers and parents who are using digital technology to form strong positive [...]
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Family Tree is a comic strip drawn by Signe Wilkinson which is often funny and insightful (coincidentally, thirty years ago she and I met several times in Philadelphia when I was an intern at the nonprofit where her husband worked). Her comic strip today, though I’m sure well-intentioned, communicates a message that I think is [...]
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Parent Revolution, the charter school affiliated group behind the faulty and ill-conceived “parent trigger” mechanism in California the facilitates charter school takeovers of schools, has produced an awful video to publicize this “trigger.” It begins with this: Our schools are failing because they are not designed to succeed. They are designed to serve the needs [...]
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I’ve previously posted about teacher/parent/student conferences that are led by students. “Student-led conferences benefit parents, kids” is the headline in a Yakima Herald article about a local effort to do them.
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You can now purchase a Kindle edition my book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools. You can read excerpts from the book here.
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My View From the Ground: A Public School Parent’s Perspective by Sharon Higgins is piece recently published at the Huffington Post. She’s a founder of an organization called Parents Across America.
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