Boston Leader Connects Parents to Learning is a pretty interesting article about the person in charge of the Boston school district’s parent involvement program.
Here’s an excerpt:
This laser focus on broader districtwide goals means Boston has avoided the pitfalls of similar family-related offices in many other districts, where schools become caught up in what experts call “random acts of family engagement,” says Karen L. Mapp, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the director of its education policy and management program. “In Boston public schools, we really see that family engagement is a strategy toward whole-school improvement,” Mapp says.
Brooks’ first step when taking her position was to define “family and student engagement” as the work of everybody in the district: administrators, teachers, support staff, custodians, and bus drivers.
The school system adopted the National PTA’s six standards for family-school partnerships, and measures schools and teachers against them. “We measure ourselves to those standards, too,” Brooks explains.