Boosting Parent Engagement Before School Starts is a good post over at Education Week by Michele Molnar. It’s about a project in New Haven, Connecticut. It’s: Jump starting parent engagement before the first day of school involves a get-out-the-volunteer effort that will put up to 100 two-person teams in neighborhoods to raise awareness—and excitement—about starting […]
National PTA Heads to the White House is the headline in this announcement from the PTA. Here’s how it begins: Parent Teacher Association (PTA) leaders representing 41 states, Washington, D.C., and Department of Defense schools in Europe will head to the White House on Friday, August 10th for a day-long briefing with top Administration officials […]
Guest post by Joe Mazza This Week’s Parent-Teacher Chat (#ptchat) on Twitter Creating a Bank of 2-Way Communication Offerings Between Home & School On this week’s #ptchat our conversational goal is to provide educators with as many classroom and school-based two-way (home-school) communication offerings as possible. At the end of the chat, we’ll use those […]
White House Seeks PTA Members for ‘Champions of Change’ Honor is a new post over at Education Week. Here’s the beginning, and I’d encourage you to go over there to read the rest: If you had a few minutes with the President of the United States, what would you say to him about education? Twelve […]
Guest Post by Joe Mazza On Wednesday, June 13th, the #PTchat crew will provide an open chat session to close out the school year and help you create a summer plan to take your family engagement efforts to the next level in 2012-2013. We’ve covered a great deal of topics this school year. Below are […]
Obama Administration Announces Together for Tomorrow is the headline of a press release just issued by the U.S. Department of Education. I’m including some excerpts from the press release at the end of this post. After reading it, I still don’t really have a clue what they’re talking about — except that it has to […]
Parent Engagement: A Paradigm Shift is an article by Marilyn Price-Mitchell that’s worth reading. Here’s an excerpt: Many equate parent engagement to volunteering, school governance, and fundraising. While these activities are vitally important to schools, the kind of parent engagement that affects student success is vastly different. This type of engagement involves parents as teachers […]
I’ve posted a lot about good parent engagement/involvement ideas, but sometimes you can learn just as much from looking at bad examples. You can see lots of good ideas at all my parent engagement-related “The Best” lists here. Here are my choices for The Worst Parent Engagement Ideas: Putting Parents in Charge is a condescending […]
I’ve posted many resources providing parent engagement for teachers, and thought I’d bring them all together in a “The Best….” list. The resources listed here provide practical advice to teachers. You can see all my parent engagement-related “The Best” lists here. Here are my picks for The Best Sources Of Parent Engagement Advice For Teachers: […]
9 Great Articles on Parent Engagement in Education is a collection of recent blog posts, including ones from several bloggers I respect, on…parent engagement/involvement. I can’t vouch for the quality of all of them, but many are worth reading….
Over the past year-and-a-half, I have posted: My Best Posts & Articles About Building Parent Engagement In Schools — 2009 My Best Posts On Parent Engagement So Far This Year It’s been six months since I shared my latest “picks” from my Engaging Parents In School blog, which I began when my book, Building Parent […]
The National Education Association has launched a $6 Priority Schools Campaign which includes a strong focus on parent engagement. You can read more about it at Ed Week’s article, NEA’s Brand of School Improvement. Here’s an excerpt: Q. The scope of these federal grants is three years, but you’ll be reporting back to the Representative […]
I’ve previously written about a San Jose school district’s ill-advised attempt at requiring parent involvement (see “School to Parents: Volunteer or Else!”) Now author Douglas Fiore has made some good points on the same topic. Take a minute and read his post, titled “Parent Involvement is Essential, but Should it be Mandatory?”
A few months ago, I began to have PostRank index posts from this blog. Post Rank uses a variety of ways to measure level of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts. I have a constantly updated “widget” on my blog’s sidebar that lists these posts, but I thought a quarterly post would be […]
Readers of this blog might already be aware of this, but I just learned that the PTA has launched what they’re calling an “Urban Family Engagement Initiative.” Here’s how their website describes it: “… in recognizing that different modalities of parent involvement must be developed to be inclusive of all parents, the National PTA has […]
Here’s another bad idea to promote parent engagement in schools — a Michigan prosecutor wants to make it illegal for a parent to miss a scheduled parent-teacher conference. As I wrote in my post about an equally ill-conceived plan to make parent involvement mandatory in a San Jose school District (see “School to Parents: Volunteer […]
Education leader: Empower teachers, engage parents is the headline of an article that appeared yesterday in the Reno Gazette-Journal. It’s describing a meeting of 600 teachers from the National Education Association. Here’s an excerpt focusing on speaker NEA Vice-President Lily Eskelsen: Bringing parents into the school improvement process is vital, she said, noting that means […]
“Detroit parents want DPS teachers, officials jailed over low test scores” is the headline of a Detroit News article this week. It goes on to say: Impassioned parents demanded jail time for educators and district officials Saturday following the release of test scores that showed fourth- and eighth-graders had the worst math scores in the […]
The Wall Street Journal just reported on a study analyzing effective ways parents can help middle-schoolers. The article says: “The best way to promote achievement in middle school isn’t to help student with their homework, or even to volunteer for school fundraisers. Instead, middle-school students posted the best results in school when their parents stepped […]