Survey Says Many Teachers Willing To Make Home Visits

I’m a big advocate of teachers making visits to their students’ homes, and include a chapter on the nationally-acclaimed Parent Teacher Home Visit Project in my book. In fact, I’m doing an interview with Carrie Rose, its director, that will appear in this blog next month.

Scholastic and the Gates Foundation recently released a report that surveyed 40,000 teachers in the United States. It’s called Primary Sources: America’s Teachers On America’s Schools. It has some interesting information regarding home visits. Here is what it says:

Forty-five percent of teachers are willing to have parent/teacher conferences
at their students’ homes to strengthen the school-to-home connection, and
the number increases to 51% for elementary school teachers.

While teachers are committed to building the school-to-home connection across all
income levels, this is even more true of teachers in low-income communities. These
teachers are more likely than are their counterparts in high-income communities to
provide students with their personal phone number or email address (51% vs. 41%),
and to be willing to have parent/teacher conferences at their students’ homes (54%
vs. 35%).

That seems like a pretty impressive number to me….

Now, the question is — will school districts take advantage of that willingness by providing financial support (for example, our district offers small stipends) for teachers to make those visits so you’re not trying to “squeeze blood out of rock.”

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