Category Archives: reports

“Parent and “Community Engagement in NYC and the Sustainability Challenge for Urban Education Reform”

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“Community Engagement in NYC and the Sustainability Challenge for Urban Education Reform” is a lengthy paper by Jeffrey R. Henig, Teachers College, Columbia University, and several others.

I haven’t gotten a chance to look at it at length yet, but I like the introduction:

In New York City, the Bloomberg/Klein administration’s approach to parent and community
engagement was framed in contradistinction to the Community School Districts (CSDs) that
predated it; CSDs were rooted in a vision of a more collective and aggressive form of
engagement in which parents and communities directly set priorities, selected policies, and
shaped implementation. The administration considered this preexisting system to be
fundamentally flawed in both concept and practice.

In place of engagement at the community level, the administration’s approach centers on
engagement at the level of families and schools. In place of involvement in setting goals and
priorities, it focuses on engagement in implementation of policies. In place of emphasizing
political voice as a way for communities to exercise their demands, it puts a strong emphasis on
exit—giving families the option to choose a different school if they consider it a better fit for
their child than they one they are assigned. Finally, while the CSDs provided education‐specific
agenda‐setting venues in which parents and teachers were influential actors, the
administration’s position on mayoral control of schools deliberately shifts authority for agenda
setting and policymaking to general purpose politics and mayoral elections, where other issues
compete for priority, and where most groups do not have a direct stake in public education.

“Building Local Leadership for Change: A National Scan of Parent Leadership Training Programs”

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Building Local Leadership for Change: A National Scan of Parent Leadership Training Programs is the title of an important new report just 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.

“Parent and Community Involvement in a College/Career–Ready Culture”

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Parent and Community Involvement in a College/Career–Ready Culture is the title of a briefing paper from the Texas Comprehensive Center.

It’s designed to provide potential answers to these questions:

What are some examples of underachieving schools that have involved parents and community partners to increase student achievement through building a focus on college and career readiness? How do they solicit community response and what contributions have parents/community members made to support a college and career readiness environment? What does the research say about this topic?

You might also be interested in reading about what we do at our school to connect with students and their parents about college.

“Engaged Families, Effective Pre-K: State Policies that Bolster Student Success”

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“Engaged Families, Effective Pre-K: State Policies that Bolster Student Success” is a new report from The Pew Center On The States.

Early Ed Watch, A blog from New America’s Early Education Initiative, has a very good summary of the report. It sounds like it has some good family engagement ideas for young children and their parents.

Interesting Effort In Boston To Connect School/Community

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The Public School Insights blog has an interview with the leaders of a project in Boston called City Connects. It’s designed to help connect students to both school-based and community resources, and has resulted in higher student achievement.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview — both the question and its answer:

Public School Insights: In many policy debates recently, attempts to talk about the way in which out-of-school factors impede learning are often characterized as attempts to let schools off the hook, to make excuses for very poor schooling. Do you ever run up against that characterization?

DiNatale: I was a principal in Boston for 26 years. As the school leader it was my job to look at the root causes of the deficiency in scores of some of our students. And I did not want the faculty to put heavy emphasis on what I call blaming the student or blaming the family. We have to be realistic and know that as schools and as educators, we need to do much more and to accept more accountability for student achievement.
At the same time, we are educating whole children. Children who live in neighborhoods that are very impoverished in many ways, and we know poverty has an impact on student achievement. There are growing numbers of families not able to provide the opportunities that more affluent families can. Sometimes children’s health needs are not addressed in the way they need to be for them to come to school and sit in a classroom and learn.

We cannot negate any of that. We have to put systems in place to ensure that every child has his or her maximum opportunity to learn. And we should not blame anyone. We just say we know students have strengths and needs and that we must account for that if we want every child to achieve high standards.

Can The Brookings Institution Really Be That Clueless?

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The Brookings Institution just came out with a major report on schools called The 2009 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?. It’s divided into three sections. I am dumbstruck by the second one, which is what led me to write an uncharacteristically strongly-worded headline on this post.

That part is titled “Do Schools Ever Change?” You can read an Associated Press news report summarizing its conclusions. It basically says that most schools in California twenty years ago are still there now, and most that were near the top remained there, as well. I don’t think that conclusion is a particularly surprising one to most people.

Here’s a quote from the study’s author that appeared in the AP story:

Loveless, who taught in California public schools for nine years, said the “persistence of school culture” — created by teachers, administrators, parents and students — could help explain why so few low-performing schools become high performers.

“We don’t know how to sever this link between past and future,” he said. “We need to learn a lot more about how schools create their cultures.”

You may be wondering what I’m so upset about.

Their data seems quite accurate. Their conclusions, however, demonstrate that they seem to be..clueless.

Nowhere in the study does it even elude to the fact that conditions outside the school might have some impact on the lack of change — it’s all focused on what happens inside the schoolhouse walls. As Richard Rothstein writes, schools may be able to narrow the achievement gap, but they can bridge it. I’d wager that the socio-economic (God, how I hate that phrase) conditions in the neighborhoods surrounding those schools have not changed much or, if they have, it’s been for the worse.

One possible effective response is for schools to connect with parents and other community institutions to work and confront issues like neighborhood safety, affordable housing, jobs, health etc. Perhaps if those problems were alleviated a bit we might see more profound change in local schools.

P.S. to Mr. Loveless: I’d recommend stop trying to compare how multimillion dollar professional sports teams successfully achieve turnarounds with how schools in low-income communities can do the same (as you do in the report)….

Two New Studies Point Out That Schools Can “Narrow” Achievement Gap But Not “Bridge” It On Their Own

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As I highlight in my book, a major reason schools need to engage parents is to develop allies and respond to the many issues outside of the schoolhouse walls that affect academic achievement within them — health, unemployment, safety, etc.

Two new studies have just come-out reinforcing that view. You can read about them in these two articles:

Health Problems Fuel Achievement Gaps, Study Says comes from Education Week.

‘Education Does Not Begin Or End At The Schoolhouse Door’

Schools And Food Stamps

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According to the United States Department Of Agriculture, only 48% of Californians who are eligible for food stamps actually got them last year.

The California Budget Project recently released a report called FOOD WITHIN REACH: Strategies For Increasing Participation In The Food Stamp Program In California. The report’s recommendations don’t include schools working more closely with county and state agencies on outreach to families, such a strategy could be one way schools could connect better with parents, respond to a direct family self-interest, and help ensure students don’t come to school hungry (or, at least, less hungry).

Other states also have large numbers of qualified people not participating, so such a strategy would not have to be limited to California.

What Americans Believe Is “The Number One Factor In Keeping Schools Moving On The Right Track”

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Every year a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll is done on “Public Attitudes Toward The Public Schools.” This year’s results were released a couple of months ago.

This is one question that was included:

I am going to read several factors. For each, tell me how important you think that factor is in keeping public schools moving on the right track?

People were then given a list of these options to choose from:

More Funding

Better Teachers

Better Use of Technology

More Parent Support

More School Choice

“More Parent Support” was identified as the most important factor in keeping schools moving on the right track.   85% of respondents identified it as “very important.”

You can read more about the results of the poll here.

“Online Resource Kit for Developing Partnerships”

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The California Department of Education has an Online Resource Kit for Developing Partnerships to Close the Achievement Gap.

It includes a short piece on the role of families.

I’m not sure how helpful the resource is (though I did learn about the California Parent Center through it), but it never hurts to be able to point to some official wording supporting what you want to do if you’re pushing to connect schools and families.

‘Many “Views” of Parent Involvement’

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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.

Conditional Cash Transfers, Parents, And Schools

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We’re all going to be hearing a lot more about “Conditional Cash Transfers” (CCT’s) as a “poverty-fighting” tool. In fact, this past week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at a big conference in New York about them. If you don’t know what they are, I’ll share more about them in a moment. I personally think there are probably better ways to combat poverty, but, for the most part, I can’t be that opposed to getting a few more bucks into the hands of low-income people — in most circumstances.

Unfortunately, however, we’re also going to hear more about them as a tool to push parents to be more involved in schools, and as a way to push students to get better grades and do better on tests. This is where I really have a problem with CCT’s.

First, let’s start with an overview of what these Conditional Cash Transfers actually are.  Here’s a recent newspaper article that gives a short summary — Latin America makes a dent in poverty with ‘conditional cash’ programs. Basically, families are provided incentive payments for behavior the program views as beneficial to families and to society — such as getting health exams, vaccinations, regular school attendance, higher test scores, grades, attending parent/teacher conferences. They’ve been used extensively in Mexico and Central and South America, and programs have been started in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.

These kinds of programs appear to have had positive impacts on some aspects low-income families’ lives.  However, research has shown that their success with anything related to schools has been negligible — both in New York and in other countries.

I’ve written in my other blog about my objections to paying students for increased test scores. I’m all for applying financial resources to encourage parent engagement in schools, including with the academic lives of their children. But instead of using them to support a program that doesn’t work, let’s use them for efforts that do, like supporting teacher home visits to listen and build relationships, and connect parents with others who have similar concerns so they can act together on them; like supporting family literacy projects initiated and led by parents; by supporting the development of parent/school community gardens; and by supporting parent and school participation in community-wide organizing efforts to improve neighborhoods.

Let’s not use CCT’s as a “red herring” that sounds “sexy” and can be used to divert attention from real solutions to a problem.

“A Toolkit for Title I Parental Involvement”

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SEDL (formerly Southwest Educational Development Laboratory) is a well-respected nonprofit “think-tank” on education issues. Their research on parent engagement/involvement in schools is highlighted in our soon-to-be published book, “Building Parent Engagement In Schools.”

The SEDL National Center for Family and Community Connections with Schools recently published a free Toolkit for Title I Parental Involvement.

This is their description of the resource:

“In this toolkit, SEDL provides detailed explanations of the Title I, Part A parental involvement provisions as well as thirty-three tools to assist state departments of education, districts, and schools in meeting these requirements. Both the explanations and the tools are designed to help educators increase parental involvement and provide opportunities for parents to engage in and support their children’s academic achievement. The toolkit includes information on the following topics:

* Policy, Planning, and Building Capacity
* Communication, Notification, Reporting, and Information Sharing
* Parent Rights and Options
* Meaningful Involvement and Decision Making
* Fund Allocation”

“Our Children, Our Schools”

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Our Children, Our Schools: A Blueprint for Creating Partnerships Between Immigrant Families and New York City Public Schools is an impressive report issued in March of this year by Advocates For Children Of New York.

A lot of it relates specifically to New York, but there’s also quite a bit that would be useful to people anywhere.

Here’s a very short article describing and summarizing the report.

Does Community Organizing Help Schools?

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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?”

Report On “Promising Practices” For School/Family Engagement

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The Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) and the National Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) have recently issue a report titled Seeing is Believing: Promising Practices for How School Districts Promote Family Engagement.

They describe it this way:

“Seeing is Believing: Promising Practices for How School Districts Promote Family Engagement spotlights how six school districts across the country have used innovative strategies to create and sustain family engagement “systems at work.” Our findings point to three core components of these successful systems: creating district-wide strategies, building school capacity, and reaching out to and engaging families.”