The Best Overviews Of Parent Engagement

There are lots of ideas out there about effective parent engagement/involvement. Here are a few resources that provide useful overviews of the field. You might also be interested in seeing all my parent engagement-related “The Best” lists here.

Here are my choices for The Best Overviews Of Parent Engagement:

Involvement or Engagement? is the title of my lead article in an issue of ASCD Education Leadership.

I wrote Parent Involvement or Parent Engagement? for Learning First.

Solving the Parent Involvement Puzzle is an interview with Anne T. Henderson, who is probably the premiere researcher in the world on parent involvement/engagement issues.

Anne also provided testimony to the United States Senate in 2007 on Effective Strategies for Engaging Parents and Communities in Schools.

The national teacher organization “Teachers Count” published an interview with me that focuses on parent engagement issues.

“Title I and Parent Involvement: Lessons from the Past, Recommendations for the Future” is a new report written by Karen Mapp, one of the authors of the influential parent involvement book, Beyond The Bake Sale. It has a lot of useful information.

Building Local Leadership for Change: A National Scan of Parent Leadership Training Programs is the title of an important new report 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 Center for public school parents that will teach them to more effectively participate in school governance and support students’ educational success — reflecting a growing nationwide interest in parent leadership training.

In this report, Anne Henderson, senior consultant for community organizing and engagement work at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, describes four successful parent leadership training programs around the country, each with a different focus: leadership training, immigrant families, child learning support, and understanding and navigating the educational system. She then examines their structures, curricula, and best practices, and presents the findings of evaluations on their effectiveness.

In her analysis, Henderson offers up six key practices related to program success, as well as recommendations specific to New York City — strategies that can be used by cities and districts nationwide looking to implement similar initiatives.

Anne Henderson, the premiere researcher and writer on parent involvement/engagement issues in the United States, testified before a U.S. Senate hearing on the the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The Senate has posted her testimony. It shares a great list of concrete public policy steps that can be taken to encourage parent engagement in schools.

Renee Moore has an excellent article in Teacher Magazine titled Reaping What We’ve Sown: How Schools Fail Low-Income Parents (free registration is required to access the whole piece, but it’s a quick and easy process). As John Norton accurately describes it, the article:

“…challenges those who question whether low-income parents as a group care about their children’s education. All too often, Renee writes, it’s not a lack of caring but a community-wide sense that inequities in the system that have been perpetuated for generations will not change.”

The Handbook on Family and Community Engagement is a new book that can be downloaded free. It’s been put together by Academic Development Institute and the Center on Innovation & Improvement and looks very impressive. You can read more about it here.

Family-School-Community Partnerships 2.0: Collaborative Strategies to Advance Student Learning is the lengthy name of an excellent report released by the National Education Association. It highlights sixteen family-school-community partnerships, including the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project. Here are important links:

You can access the entire report here.

Here’s an overview of the report.

And here’s some commentary on it from Learning First.

Beyond school councils: Engaging parents to help their children succeed at school is a very good report from an organization called People For Education. It’s located in Ontario, Canada.

“Let’s Read Them a Story! The Parent Factor In Education” is a new book from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The link will take you to a free PDF version of it. The book is pretty impressive — good statistics, great cartoons from The New Yorker, and excellent advice for how parents can help their students succeed academically. It’s a bit weak on advice for teachers, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Thanks to Sheila Stewart, I’ve learned about an excellent report on parent engagements issues from the Ontario Ministry of Education. Their Capacity Building Series: Parent Engagement is a must-read for those interested in parent engagement.

Q & A Collections: Parent Engagement In Schools is my newest post over at Education Week Teacher.

It brings all my posts on…parent engagement together in one place.

The Power Of Parents: Research underscores the impact of parent involvement in schools is a new accessible report from Ed Source (done in collaboration with New America Media.

It provides a well-written summary of a fair amount of parent involvement research, and is definitely one of the best overviews out there. It could have been THE best, but it was a little surprising to me that most of the research it cited (with a few exceptions) was ten years old or more. There have been a fair number of more recent studies (so many, in fact, that I have a lengthy collection to review for a chapter in an upcoming book), and their report could have been the best thing out there if they had incorporated more of them.

Nevertheless, it’s still an excellent piece of work.

Feedback is welcome.

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You might also want to explore the 780 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

One thought on “The Best Overviews Of Parent Engagement

  1. As an educator of 21 years in an urban district, I have
    Experienced a wide range of emotions regarding parental engagement and the lack thereof.
    When I was a classroom teacher, sure I became frustrated at the little ( and large) Ways parents were missing from the academic lives of my high school students. anyone who is truly an educator and denies this is not being forthcoming.
    When I became an administrator my lens widened, and I witnessed poor performances on the part
    Of both the schools and the parents. This new view pushed me to pursue my doctorate, Egbert
    My real research began.
    It all comes down to respect. Are all the partners respected, informed, and accountable? This pushed me to form my organization which advocates for respectful collaborative support for both home and school. Neither side can do it alone.

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