Engaging Parents In School…

Learning To Roar is the title of a recent article in “Teaching Tolerance” magazine.

It shares the story of parents and and schools organizing in a Massachusetts low-income community.

Churches, school system look to build partnership is a recent newspaper headline in Maryland.

It describes a meeting held between members of a community organizing group, Partnership for Renewal in Southern and Central Maryland. and a Superintendent of Schools.

This is just another example of the kind of parent engagement we talk about in our book, which has a chapter on schools, parents and community organizing.

A group of parents have begun what they are calling a “Parents Union” to push for improvement in Chicago’s public schools. You can read about it at Parents hope to form a more perfect union in dealing with CPS.

It’s particularly impressive to me because its focus is to improve public schools, and is not allied with private groups that want to create charters, which is the focus of a similarly named parents group in Los Angeles.

All I know about the group is what the newspaper article says. It sounds like it’s a completely independent group, which may make it difficult to sustain over the long-term. I spent nineteen years as an organizer working to build “organizations of organizations” for a number of reasons, including because of the long-term problems involved in creating new groups. Bringing like-minded organizations together that have been around for awhile provides financial stability and relationship “glue” that can help with sustainability.

But, whatever their situation is, I hope the Parents Union has success!

Community organizing is one of the four parent engagement strategies we outline in our book. A recent study by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform highlights its benefits for students, families,and schools.

You can read more about the study here.

You can also view a presentation about it here.

One of the chapters in our book highlights the work of the Industrial Areas Foundation in developing Alliance Schools in Texas. The IAF, as far as I can tell, were the first to begin talking about the difference between parent involvement and engagement almost twenty years ago.

If you’re interested in learning more about them, you can access a draft version of a paper describing the Alliance Schools and its philosophy here.

The Industrial Areas Foundation began making the distinction between parent “involvement” and parent “engagement” during its community organizing efforts in schools during the 1990’s, and Professor Dennis Shirley wrote about it in his 1997 book Community Organizing For Urban School Reform. Even though a chapter in our book focuses on the IAF’s work (I was an IAF organizer for the majority of my nineteen year organizing career), I’d encourage people to read Professor Shirley’s book.

After he published that book, he wrote another in-depth study on the work of just one IAF organization in Texas — Valley Interfaith And School Reform: Organizing for Power in South Texas . If you go to that link, you can see the table of contents and read the introduction. I’d encourage you to do so.

The National Coalition For Parent Involvement In Education recently posted a report on community organizing and schools.

Here’s their description:

Sara McAlister, a research associate at the Community Organizing and Engagement program at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University: “Does the political will generated by community organizing in low-income, urban communities ultimately enhance the capacity of schools to improve student learning?”