The Department of Education blog has posed questions about parent-teacher partnerships to its readers, and published the responses today. There are no great insights, but it might be worth a quick look.
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How Parent-Friendly is Your Campus? is a useful post in Ed Week by Stephanie Sandifer. In the broader scheme of genuine parent engagement, I think there are far more important things that schools should be putting their energy into — like home visits and helping parents respond to neighborhood problems that affect both them and [...]
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New Latino Majority Creates New Challenges for CA Schools is the headline on an article being distributed by New America Media. It has several sections on parent involvement in schools, and is worth a read.
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Here’s an excerpt from a report on a new British study titled “Parents’ Effort Key to Child’s Educational Performance.” A new study by researchers at the University of Leicester and University of Leeds has concluded that parents’ efforts towards their child’s educational achievement is crucial — playing a more significant role than that of the [...]
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I’ve previously raised concerns about how the $100 million donation by Facebook’s founder to Newark schools is being used, specifically it’s misguided parent and community outreach efforts. I’m not alone in raising those questions. PENewark outreach to reform Newark schools is a waste of time, money, critics say is a recent local newspaper article describing [...]
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The Chicago Tribune published an article yesterday headlined “English classes help Spanish-speaking parents get involved in their kids’ education.” It doesn’t have any great insights, but it’s just another example of one way schools can connect with parents.
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A newspaper in Tennessee has just published an article about “Parental Involvement Standards” that the state has developed. They are: Standard 1: Welcoming all families into the school community- Families are active participants in the life of the school, and feel welcomed, valued, and connected to each other, to school staff, and to what students [...]
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I’ve previously written about the successful sit-in organized by Chicago parents demanding a school library. YES Magazine has just recently published a nice review and description of what happened. Check-out “A Sit-In Success Story.”
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Building Local Leadership for Change: A National Scan of Parent Leadership Training Programs is the title of an important new report just published by the Annenberg Institute For School Reform. Here’s a short summary from them: The New York Senate recently authorized the City University of New York to create and operate a Parent Training [...]
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“Parent and Community Involvement in a College/Career-Ready Culture” is a new report from the Texas Comprehensive Center. Here’s an excerpt from its introduction: The literature on parent and community involvement is extensive. However, there is little rigorous, experimental research; rather, the literature consists primarily of descriptive case studies or correlation studies, along with numerous studies [...]
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An elementary school in Delaware is getting criticized for having separate meetings for parents from different ethnic groups (see Delaware schools: Race-based approach snarls plan for parental involvement). I’m sure it was a well-intentioned effort to help engage parents, but I think it sends the wrong message. Parents from different ethnic groups might have some [...]
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Walt Gardner at Ed Week has some interesting thoughts in his latest post titled No Bull’s-Eye for Parent Trigger Law (I’ve written many times about my concerns regarding a “parent trigger” made into law here in California. Using a petition drive, schools can be converted into charters). Here are some excerpts: Supporters of the law [...]
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IllinoisParents.Org has a “toolbox” filled with a variety of resources on parent involvement. It’s from the Illinois State Board of Education’s Division of Innovation and Improvement. I haven’t gotten a chance to look through it carefully, but it does seem to have some resources I haven’t seen before…
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I’ve written many times about my concerns regarding a “parent trigger” made into law here in California. Using a petition drive, schools can be converted into charters (of course, the impetus behind the move came from a front group for a charter operator). Susan Ohanian provides an update to what’s happening with it, including a [...]
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From The Department of Education blog: On Tuesday, more than 150 people representing families, communities, state and local governments, philanthropy, federal agencies, practitioners, and support organizations joined the U.S. Department of Education at the National Policy Forum for Family, School, and Community Engagement. At the heart of the forum was discussion around systemic family and [...]
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I thought readers might find it useful if I brought together my choices for The Best Posts On Building Parent Engagement In Schools during this past year. You might also be interested in last year’s edition: My Best Posts & Articles About Building Parent Engagement In Schools — 2009 Here they are (not in any [...]
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I’ve previously posted about my deep skepticism about the “outreach” campaign being done in Newark with the $100 million dollar grant from Facebook’s founder (see Facebook Money Used To Talk To Parents — Uh Oh). I continue to have the same concerns. I did think, though, that readers might be interested in this recent local [...]
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Linda Perlstein from the Education Writers Association makes a great point: In the debate about public release about teachers’ value-added scores, you see a lot of quotes of the “parents would want to know” variety, but not a lot of quotes from parents themselves. Typical of these quotes is one from Eric Hanushek, a proponent [...]
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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 previously posted about graduate classes that Canadian parent engagement researcher Debbie Pushor has offered. She’s refined her syllabi even further, and they are definitely worth a look.
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