Engaging Parents In School…

Though I’m not crazy about the headline in this New York Times story, “Learning To Bridge The Achievement Gap” does tell a nice story of academic progress a school in a low-income neighborhood is making. One of the strategies it’s using is providing three-times-a-week literacy and life skills class to immigrant parents.

The reason I’m not thrilled with the headline is because it perpetuates the myth that schools can bridge the gap. In fact, as education researcher Richard Rothstein has said (and we discuss in our book), most schools can narrow the gap, but not bridge it.

Without recognizing and acting on the reality that so many non-school issues affect academic achievement, we are not going to bridge the achievement gap for most students.  In addition to working on in-school instruction, by working with parents and other instituations, schools can have an impact on those issues of poverty, heath, and safety.

I generally like what syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrete has to say — except when he’s writing about school issues. It seems like he and David Brooks (another columnist I usually like) just “lose it” when they look at education issues.

Today, Navarrete wrote what can only be called a rant against most public schools and teachers. Here’s one quote that sticks-out:

“It’s been my experience that many teachers don’t really care whether parents go to the PTA or help their kids with homework. They just want a constant foil, someone to blame when students flounder and the schools underperform.”

I’m pretty confident that I’ve never met a teacher who felt that way.  And, from the positive response my book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, has received, there are quite a few who feel the exact opposite….

Thanks to This Week In Education for the tip.

A few days ago I wrote about my skepticism and concerns related to the Los Angeles School District’s decision to let parents decide if they wanted their school to be turned-over to a private charter operator (Parents & Schools In Los Angeles). I suggested that if they were really serious about engaging with parents, they would identify a whole lot of other areas where parents could work cooperatively with teachers and administrators — and not just in a questionable “takeover.” I wondered if it was just a move for cheap political cover.

Things seem to be getting crazier and crazier down there, and now the District is backtracking. Check-out Education Week’s piece that came out today and is titled “L.A. Unified Retreats on Parental Power to Trigger Reforms.”

Education Week just announced they’ve put together a collection of articles into a Spotlight On Parent Involvement. It costs $4.95.

It includes some of my pieces, which you can already get for free, but the other articles look good and might be worth the cost.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Education Secretary Duncan spoke at a conference yesterday designed to support the creation of more “community schools” in the United States.

Typically, community schools are ones that host multiple social services, as well as regular school classes.

A report on community schools was released at the conference.

The Harlem Children’s Zone is the most well-known example of this kind of school in the U.S.

I think community schools can be a great benefit to the local community. I also believe that they can be an even greater benefit if they do two things differently from how they usually operate. One, if they look at parents more as partners instead of clients and, two, if they work more closely with multiple local community groups. I’ve written about this issue in an earlier post.

There may be an effort to create a school like this in Sacramento as part of a nation-wide effort to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone. I’ve had conversations with some people who are involved, and they seem open to looking at these two issues and making them a priority in what happens locally. It’ll be interesting to see what develops.

Over the past two days, there has been a lot of media coverage about a recent decision by the Los Angeles School District to “to allow parents to initiate school reforms” (as the LA Times put it).

Here are links to two articles about it:

L.A. Unified to allow parents to initiate school reforms

L.A. Gives Parents ‘Trigger’ to Restructure Schools

Based on what I know about what is going on there (which is not a whole lot — I’m trying to find out more, and would love to get more thoughts from readers in the comment section of this post), I have mixed feelings about this plan.

On one hand, yes, I think it’s good for parents to have more power in school decision-making. One problem in schools is that school staff sometimes feel that power is a finite “pie” and that if parents get some power, that means staff have less. In fact, the more power parents get, the more possibilities and opportunities are created, and the “pie” gets bigger.

On the other hand, based on the articles (correct me if my impression is incorrect), parents are getting the power to do just one thing — if 51% of them in one of thirty schools signs a petition, then an outside operator can come in and turn it into a charter. It’s part of a controversial plan the District announced earlier to turn these thirty schools into private charters. It also sounds like the District may not be doing this in collaboration with teachers and administrators, and, in fact, may not even be working with parent groups on this program — just with charter school operators.

I can’t help but wonder if the District might be doing this to gain a little more political cover for what might be a hasty and unwise move to try to privatize a good number of schools. Why not work with parents and multiple groups with whom they’re affiliated (along with teachers and administrators) on exploring various ways parents can have more power in school-site decision-making, and not just on the charter question?

I can understand a desire to try something like this out at a small number of schools first to work out the “kinks,” but it seems to me if you want true parent engagement, doing something as limited as this in such a controversial context may not be the way to go.

Again, I’m all ears if you would like to differ (or agree)…..

“Parent Academies” appear to be “in” this week…

TIME Magazine has just published an article titled Parent Academies: Helping Mom and Dad Face School Too. This follows on the heels of several other recent media articles on this topic (you can see the last few posts on this blog).

Unfortunately, at least as far as the article describes the programs in various school districts (and I understand that they might not be entirely accurate), it appears that they are missing huge opportunities. They all seem to be bringing parents in to train them on what the districts want to train them on and talk about the topics they want them to talk about it. There is no indication that they are asking what the parents want to do or learn.

The TIME article itself has a particularly condescending comment:

“Of course, there’s no guarantee that the people who need these programs the most will actually take advantage of them — you can’t force parents to care, no matter how many free classes you offer.”

Come on, just because parents who might be facing huge time, economic, family, and health challenges don’t want to come to a meeting to talk about what the district wants them to talk about doesn’t mean they don’t care!

Plus, the final sentence from a Harvard researcher demonstrates what a huge disconnect there is between “parent involvement” (which I would use to describe these types of academies) and “parent engagement” (which I would use to describe what Elisa Gonzalez has done at our high school’s Parent University by asking parents what they wanted to learn about and building the curriculum with them):

“Family engagement is a shared, reciprocal partnership between educators and parents,” she says. “It’s a two-way conversation between home and school.”

Yes, exactly, a conversation. Often, these types of parent academies tend to be more a one-way “communication” to parents as opposed to a two-way “conversation.” That doesn’t make them bad — any kind of further parent connection can help students.

So much more could be possible, though. And that makes them lost opportunities, too.

The Toronto Globe and Mail ran an article today headlined ‘Parent academy’ offers dividends to children.

It focuses on a new effort in Toronto  that has this as its goal:

“In effect, schools would become de facto community centres for whole families, offering programs to help parents with their most pressing needs – from finding work and getting fit to understanding Facebook and navigating the school system.”

It sounds good.  My concern, though, is that — based on what the article says — they’re basing what they do on responses to written surveys instead of upon individual conversations.  Written surveys are never good barometers of genuine interest, nor can they be used to identify potential leaders who have energy to “carry the ball” and who have a “following” in the community.

Community organizers know that writtens surveys are good for one thing — to be excuses to initiate conversations with people.  The real “meat” occurs in the listening and talking.

Without that kind of interaction, whatever is created can become a typical social service program where well-intentioned school staff provide services to parents, which might or might not be their priority community concerns.   Leaders are not developed, and it can easily peter out.

However, I certainly know enough to recognized that the article might not be giving an accurate impression of the parent academy, and the school district might very well be using other tactics to connect to parents besides a written survey.

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.”

Students take charge: Carpenters Middle School expands innovative program is a nice article about one school in Tennessee is using student-led parent/teacher conferences — and other strategies — to connect with parents.

According to a newspaper interview published yesterday, New York City Mayor Bloomberg said:

parents need only be involved in the micro issues of their child’s education, like the child’s attendance, behavior and grades. It does not make sense for parents to be involved in larger issues

If that is an accurate representation of what he said, it’s sad to see that he doesn’t really understand parent engagement.

Popular education blogger Angela Maiers wrote a post earlier this year titled Many “Views” Of Parent Involvement. It includes many thoughtful comments worth considering, as well as several links to additional resources.

One of the links I thought was particularly interesting was to an article that Angela wrote for Education Week’s “Leader Talk” on the same topic. I was struck by two “Wordles” (an illustration showing the most common words used) — one by how teachers described parent/teacher interaction and the other how parents at the same schools would describe it. Talk about living in two different worlds! Check it out.

A Forum For Trading Helpful Hints On Parenting is the headline on a story in today’s Washington Post. It’s about a series of workshops taking place for parents in a Maryland elementary school.

It sounds like they’re at least trying to elicit from parents what they want to get out of the workshops, as opposed to having a cookie-cutter curriculum already pllanned:

“….parents said they would like to learn more about classroom management, behavior problems and financial management. Parents also said they hoped to learn how to make their children understand their financial limitations.”

“Parental Engagement Pays Off” is an article that appeared a few months ago in District Administration magazine.

It’s fairly lengthy gives examples of what schools are doing to connect with parents around the country.

Every year a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll is done on “Public Attitudes Toward The Public Schools.” You can read a summary of the results over at my other blog.

In the poll, local schools were given a grade of an A or B by well over two-thirds of people participating in the poll, but only 19% would give a similar rating to the nation’s public schools.

Well-known education researcher Stephen Krashen has a guest post in the Washington Post blog “The Answer Sheet” and comments on those results, as well as highlighting a quote from Education Secretary Duncan that I missed:

“In a column accompanying the poll, [educational psychologist] Gerald Bracey (”Experience outweighs rhetoric”) gives a logical explanation for this phenomenon: “Americans never hear anything positive about the nation’s schools,” noting that “negative information flows almost daily from media, politicians, and ideologues.”

Bracey’s many columns in the Kappan and his books provide overwhelming evidence that this perception of the quality of the nation’s schools is undeserved.

In an interview in the same issue of the Kappan (”Quality education is our moon shot“) Education Secretary [Arne] Duncan gives his opinion of why people think local schools are better than schools in general: “Too many people don’t understand how bad their own schools are.”

Duncan thinks that parents need to be ‘woken up’ to see that their own children are being short-changed. In other words, they are not to be trusted on evaluating the quality of their own child’s education, despite the fact that they are daily witnesses to the results of their child’s schooling.”

Instead of viewing parents as needing to be “woken-up” and be made to think that their local schools are bad, perhaps it is schools (and leaders like the Secretary) that could use some waking-up to recognize the challenges and stresses in the lives of their student’s families and in the life of the community where they are located.  Maybe then schools (and Secretary Duncan) can also wake-up to considering a possible role in connecting to families and other local institutions (and helping them to connect to each other) and playing a significant role in attacking some of the major problems that affect student achievement that lay outside the schoolhouse doors.

Parents involved in curriculum, policy discussions is the title of a Des Moines Register article about what is happening at two elementary schools in Madison, Illinois.

“We’re not just having the parents come along to support the fundraiser,” [the principal] said. “We want them part of everything we do every day…This includes academic programs and curriculum changes, and the creation of discipline and homework policies and procedures.”

Not a bad attitude to have…though it would be nice if the school wanted to try to be part of what was happening in the parents’ lives, too.

The Academic Institute administers (at least, that’s what I think is the correct term to describe it) a number of parent/school activities and projects, including two which I’ve already posted about in this blog — Families-Schools.org and the School Community Journal.

The Des Moines Register just published an article about their work in East St. Louis titled Involvement plans pay off in test scores.

I can’t speak to the substance of what they’ve done, but I was impressed that, at least based on the what the article says, they definitely began by listening to what parents wanted.

Parents, Who Needs Them?” is the headline of a guest column that appeared in The Denver Post earlier this year. It’s written by a former middle school principal who is now an education consultant.

Though I wouldn’t necessarily agree with all of his suggestions for increasing parent engagement, it’s actually a pretty decent column and is worth a look.

Parental Engagment Pays Off is the title of a lengthy article in the May edition of “District Administration” magazine.

It reviews parent involvement activities around the country.

The Boston Globe ran an article today on a parent involvement effort begun by the Boston schools.

It appears like a typical “Parent University” program that a lot of schools have begun to teach parents about how schools work. However, the article did mention one other focus:

“Parent University will also help parents write résumés and develop career goals.”

The article also mentioned a nearby similar project also provides information on health care.

So, perhaps they understand — at least a little bit — that they need to respond to parent self-interests and not just act out of the school’s self-interests.