Member Insights

This area of the FINE website offers a space for member opinions and provocative ideas. We welcome your contributions. Please email FINE with your opinions at fine@gse.harvard.edu. For each contributor we need: name, position, organization, city, state, and website.

Choose a question to find out what FINE members said:

• Why and how do you link family engagement practices to learning?
• How can grandparents be involved in their grandchildren's learning?
• How can early childhood settings encourage parents to advocate for their child?
• What have you learned from evaluating school-family-community partnership programs?
• How can parents be engaged in students' transition from middle to high school?
• What do you think of having teachers “grade” parents on their support of their children's learning?
• Are schools doing enough to learn about families?
• How can we prepare teachers to work with culturally diverse students and their families? What skills should educators develop to do this successfully?
• A Public Agenda survey (People's Chief Concerns, 1999) claims that 55% of the public consider lack of parent involvement a “major problem” facing public schools. What is your opinion and how does your work address this issue?
• Does the workplace hinder family involvement in children's education?
• Does family involvement in high school matter?
• Is teacher preparation key to improving teacher practices with families? What are the alternatives?

Why and how do you link family engagement practices to learning?

Dr. Karen Mapp, former Deputy Superintendent of Family and Community Engagement in Boston Public Schools and co-author of Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family–School Partnerships,1 describes the highlights of the book's chapter entitled “Linking to Learning: How Will Involving Parents Help Your Test Scores?”

1. How do you define family engagement that is “linked to learning?”

Our conception of being “linked to learning” started when Anne Henderson and I were working on our first book, A New Wave of Evidence.2 We looked at the research on family engagement and its impact on a range of outcomes, including academic achievement, attendance, and attitudes about school. The research told us that those family engagement practices that were linked to learning seemed to have a greater effect on student outcomes.

In my practice-based experiences, I have noticed that many family engagement activities are anything but learning-centric. For instance, there are always efforts to involve families in fundraising and school procedures and policies. Sometimes families are exposed to conversations about the academic plan for the year or, in high school, parents receive a syllabus. But these practices alone are not substantively linking families to their children's learning. In our new book, we give examples of how to strengthen the link to learning in family engagement activities. For example, school newsletters should always have some tips and tools to help parents to support their children's learning.

When we talk about being linked to learning, we're talking about engaging with families in a way that will support the learning process for each student. Also—let's face it—we often have to sell the concept of family and community engagement, and administrators and policymakers need to realize that this is an important strategy to help support student learning. Engaging families should not be seen as something extra that school staff engage in “when they have time.” Just as you have particular curricular strategies, such as instructional coaching and professional development, linking family engagement to learning focuses this work on improving and enhancing the instructional core. Richard Elmore, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, talks about how any school reform initiative should affect the instructional core,3 and engaging families can absolutely make this impact. This is part of Urie Bronfenbrenner's ecological model4 as well. Having partnerships with families means that various systems—student, family, and school—are aligned and working in concert to support learning.

2. What advice would you offer to schools that struggle to get families to participate in their programs, such as workshops for improving parenting skills and training to understanding standards and assessments?

I encourage educators to do a self-diagnostic. The first thing you have to ask yourself is what kind of relationships you have with families. Do families know you—the principals, the teachers—and have you built a solid relationship with them? If their first contact with you is a flyer or notice about a parenting class, it's not surprising that you have trouble getting people to attend. Through interviewing parents at schools that have strong relationships with families, I've found that parents like to come in when they know and feel respected by the school staff. Dr. Steve Constantino, founder of Family Friendly Schools, tells a story of when he was a principal and used to sit at a local Denny's every Thursday night to meet and talk with families. Parents would go because they wanted to see what was going on and because they felt a connection to him. The parents said that they would attend other programs that he initiated because they knew that he was invested in them. In my past work, I've emphasized the joining process, which consists of welcoming parents and honoring them—in other words, meeting them where they are and then connecting with them around issues of student learning. The relationship piece is key because, without the relationships, parents won't be compelled to attend even the best and most useful family engagement programs.

Another simple way to engage families is by focusing on making engagement in their child's learning fun. For example, this year at the Orchard Gardens Pilot School in Boston, school staff changed the name of a program previously entitled “Curriculum Night” to “Family Fun Night.” In addition to infusing the new program with activities that were fun for parents, the new name signaled a new awareness about marketing these family events. Oftentimes, activities that start as pure fun gain momentum among parents, and parents are then more likely to show up to other events as well.

The last piece of advice I would share with schools and districts is that they have to offer programs that parents want. It is important to do some sort of survey or needs assessment of parents before planning begins. Don't make assumptions about what families need and want without asking them first. You not only have to ask about the content of workshops and trainings, but also what supports parents need in order to attend those events, such as child care and translation services. This lets families know that you are serious about getting them engaged.

The bottom line is that you should do the same to engage families in school as you would to invite a guest in your home—you want to welcome them, build a relationship with them, and you want to offer information and experiences in which they are personally interested.

3. What are some ways that educators can improve open houses and parent–teacher conferences in order to help families support their children's learning in a more meaningful way?

In this chapter of our book, we provide a number of suggestions to school staff on how to construct their open houses, classroom visits, and parent–teacher conferences in ways that are more meaningful and are linked to learning. On page 84, there is a table that lays out what school staff should do more or less of to engage families. For example, something you can do more of is to display student work. When I was working as Deputy Superintendent in Boston, I visited the Murphy School and noticed that they had wonderful bulletin boards all over the school that used student work to explain their math curriculum. I spent 20 minutes looking at the bulletin boards, which featured explanations of how the kids arrived at their answers. These displays of student work were engaging for me, and I could see how they could be engaging for parents as well.

For parent–teacher conferences, we recommend that students lead the conferences. Sometimes this happens in middle and high school, but I have also seen it used effectively with younger children in the elementary grades. Of course, teachers and students have to be trained to make these effective, but student-led conferences allow for a much richer conversation among parents, teachers and and students. Sometimes, particularly with teenagers, we find that this is a good opportunity to build a contract between student, teacher, and family as to what can be done by each person to encourage student learning.

1 Henderson, A., Mapp, K., Johnson, V., & Davies, D. (2007). Beyond the bake sale: The essential guide to family–school partnerships. New York: New York Press.
2 Henderson, A., & Mapp, K. (2002). A new wave of evidence: The impact of shool, family, and fommunity connections on student achievement. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. Available at http://www.sedl.org/connections/resources/evidence.pdf
3 Elmore, R. F. (2004). School reform from the inside out: Policy, practice, and performance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
4 Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Karen L. Mapp, Ed.D.
Lecturer on Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Gutman 452
Cambridge, MA 02138
Email: karen_mapp@gse.harvard.edu

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How can grandparents be involved in their grandchildren's learning?

Dorothy Rich, founder and president of the MegaSkills Education Center of the nonprofit Home and School Institute in Washington, writes:

My grandchildren are still at ages (6 and 4) when coming with Grandma back to her house is something they want to do. Grandmas and grandpas know well that this is a limited moment. All too soon, the kids will say: “Aw, I want to play with my friends instead” and “Do I have to?” Lucky enough to live near my grandchildren, I take each boy separately on his own with me to my house once a week. We don't go anywhere. We stay home on purpose.

Home is where we do the activities that I write about. What I encourage others to do, I do myself. So every week, the little boys and I teach and learn in the kitchen, in the yard, in the car, wherever we happen to be, using whatever we have with us. I believe in laying the base for academics but not by using materials that come packaged at the store. Reading, writing, math are organic in the world around us. This is the time to build the connections for children to the academics in the world, not just in the classroom.

In the car, we read all the signs at the side of the car. “Stop” is a longtime favorite. We read signs together. We count them. We talk about the sign shape and color. No basal reader can compete.

We notice. We go on walks around the block, each of us carrying paper bags to be filled with treasures. At first, it's anything that appeals, a leaf, a smooth stone, a sharp stick. Next we do alphabet walks: “Let's find or identify something that starts with A, all the way to Z.”

This summer, we planted a tomato plant and watched it grow, watering it, caring for it, measuring, picking the fruit off the vine, knowing that's it our work that made this miracle happen.

We do carpentry, nailing boards together into designs, measuring them, making designs, writing all over them for posterity.

We send each other notes, room to room, getting the joy of receiving a response almost immediately. We dial relatives and friends on the telephone, with children reading the dial and making the telephone connection on their own.

We cut sandwiches into a variety of shapes and fold napkins into intricate fractions. In short, this house, this neighborhood, just like everyone else's, is a mecca for learning.

Last Friday was especially sweet. With the 4-year-old, who has had some listening problems, we played Listen and Do. It's an old classic ever new. You give three or more directions. The child listens and then follows them: “Walk slowly to the kitchen. Pick up the kitchen towel. Bring it back, walking fast to the living room.” Then we exchanged who gives directions. My grandson was delighted to tell me what to do and found that he had to correct some of Grandma's mistakes.

With the 6-year-old, we opened a big map. I am a great lover of maps and now he is too. Maps of the world and the United States hang at his house and in mine. A map is one of the most remarkable teaching tools. With marker in his hand, we went from city to city, figuring out how far we traveled, what the map legend markings meant. He found the railroad that bordered the Mississippi.

This was a wonderful experience, not just because he was learning the intricacies of the map but because I felt this sense of passing on to him a joy about maps that I have always felt.

It was an intergenerational moment. I hope that there will be many more of them. In any event, I have to savor and use these now. The message is this: Give the gift of your time. Don't bother to go the store for one more toy. Save your money. Bring yourself and your ideas. Pleasure and learning are right there in front of and around you. Create your magic moments. They don't come packaged in a box.

Dorothy Rich
Founder/President
Home and School Institute
MegaSkills Education Center
1500 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20005
www.megaskills.org

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How can early childhood settings encourage parents to advocate for their child?

Six early childhood education experts—Sandy Baba, Joni Close, Jerri Helmreich, Frederick Ferrer, Roberta Weisman Malavenda, and Deborah Strahorn—share their insights:¹

We believe there are different levels at which to consider advocacy. First is participation. Families advocate simply by being present and able to begin a relationship with the staff. The second is entering into a dialogue with the staff. Participation starts the relationship and dialogue really deepens it. That's where parents begin to articulate their needs, desires, and dreams for their child. The third level is to advocate in the more formal sense. If there is something a child needs that she is not getting or something happening that needs to change, then parents use their first two strategies and take action. As a parent those three levels go back and forth depending on the situation and how welcoming the setting is.

Participation

Provide a Welcoming Environment
It is up to the early childhood setting to provide a welcoming environment, and it is up to the parent and the early childhood staff to a develop a relationship. This is a missing piece in a lot of early childhood settings. Early childhood professionals are often so focused on the child that they forget the parent. And we know that there are many ways to make the environment more welcoming and engaging for families.

Consider Family Contexts
We need to take a holistic approach to working with parents. For example, one of us who worked among homeless families found many parents were disoriented because of their current situations and didn't know where to find support. Parents can't advocate adequately for their children until they are self-sustaining. They need to be able to take care of themselves first before they can take care of their own children.

In our experience with low-income ethnic communities advocacy translates in terms of protection. Parents' first and foremost role is to make sure their children are safe. Community issues around violence and safety are the primary concerns when parents first bring their children into an early childhood setting. Who will be taking care of my child? If something happens, how you will get a hold of me? Second, the family looks at advocacy in terms of “who is it that is actually taking care of my child?” Here language capacity and cultural competency of the staff comes in. Parents have to be able to develop trust with a provider and feel like their needs, desires, and wishes can be heard. The initial discussions about safety help build the beginnings of trust and a caring relationship.

Dialogue

Be Proactive About Sharing Information
Information is key. This is the starting point of dialogue. Parents can't begin to advocate if they don't have information about what is happening in their child's development. A lot of times parents don't know what to do or what to ask. When the caregiver talks with parents about how their child is progressing, the family feels more competent in knowing how to advocate for their child. If parents know where a child will be at a particular level and activities they can do with their child, then they feel better about their parenting roles and are able to ask more questions. Parents are hungry for information on brain research, reading, and getting their children ready for kindergarten. This is a real interest of families across income levels.

Encourage Questioning
We need to open the doors and encourage parents to ask questions about their child's learning and care. If we do this on an ongoing basis, parents will become open and ask the questions that need to be asked. This practice is critical, because just because parents don't say anything doesn't mean they don't have an opinion or aren't thinking about it. But that is a mistaken notion. It's just that parents are not comfortable or don't believe they should be questioning these relationships. The practice of asking over and over again is critical. It's only when you make the practice articulated and evident to the families that they begin to learn the messages you communicate. This is the modeling that is so important to take place because when children enter school parents are then comfortable and familiar with that model and see it is a tool they can use in the school system.

Don't Discount Informal Opportunities
Casual contacts offer a way to foster dialogue with a parent who seldom speaks out. Parent advocacy happens in more informal settings, for example, at a dinner meeting or at corner conversations with a director or a teacher. This is as effective as a sit-down face-to-face conference, which can be intimidating for some parents.

Recruit a Diverse Staff
Having a team of staff in the early childhood setting that is reflective of the population has a great deal to do with building trust with the families. They feel more comfortable and engaged in situations if staff members are representative of their culture.

In terms of male involvement, one of the best strategies we have seen is the actual presence of males in programs. A male needs to walk into an activity and see other males. Gender becomes a critically important point. The absence of it sends the unintended but understood message that men are not welcome.

Formal Advocacy

Turn a Problem Into an Opportunity
Unfortunately, not all children are in provider homes and programs where the teachers and directors are knowledgeable and sensitive. If parents are in a situation where changing centers isn't an option, they can throw a fundraiser or create an event to get the attention of the director and teachers about a problem. Parents can make themselves part of the solution. They can be positive and powerful advocates to change the tone and practices of an early childhood setting.

¹ The six featured experts participated in a dialogue on family advocacy in early education with FINE on February 26, 2004.

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What have you learned from evaluating school-family-community partnership programs?

Harriet Feldlaufer and Judy Carson of the Connecticut State Department of Education, Wendy Harwin of CT Parents Plus, and Alex Nemeth from Holt, Wexler & Farnam write:

We evaluated school action teams that had participated in Connecticut's School-Family-Community Partnerships Training Program.¹ A School Action Team consists of teachers, a building principal, parents, and community members. Action teams use Joyce Epstein's Framework of Six Types of Family Involvement² as a guide to developing partnerships in support of student success. The six types of involvement include parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making, and collaborating with the community.

We collected data from over 40 teams throughout the state via phone surveys and site visits. Five schools identified by the survey as having successful action teams hosted focus groups.

From our evaluation we found that teamwork is essential. Action teams that started with a small, dedicated group and built over time were the most successful. Our evaluation also suggests that team members must be empowered to act and should be thanked often. Action teams ought to have opportunities for off-site meetings and provide avenues by which others in the school can contribute to their work. Most importantly, action teams should have fun working together.

Communication with families is also critical to team success. Successful teams take a family strengths approach. For example, teams might conduct surveys of family desires and skills at the outset of the work. Action teams must take care to send clear, consistent messages to parents that they are important, and that the school needs them in order to be successful. Using fellow parents as messengers, conducting home visits, making phone calls, using bilingual staff, and presenting to the larger community helped to establish two-way communication for many teams.

¹ An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Chicago.
² Epstein, J. L. (1995). School, family, community partnerships: Caring for the children we share. Phi Delta Kappan, 77, 701–712.

Harriet Feldlaufer and Judy Carson
Connecticut State Department of Education
Bureau of Early Childhood, Family and Student Services
25 Industrial Park Road
Middletown, CT 06457

Wendy Harwin
CT Parents Plus
United Way of Connecticut

Alex Nemeth
Holt, Wexler & Farnam, LLP

School-Family-Community Partnerships Project website: www.state.ct.us/sde/deps/Family/SFCP/index.htm

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How can parents be engaged in students' transition from middle to high school?

Eugenia Ambrocio, advocacy team and parent outreach coordinator of the ENLACE y Avance Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, writes:

When parents are empowered to advocate for their children and collaborate with schools, they become more engaged in students' transition to high school and the process of preparing for college. ENLACE (Engaging Latino Communities for Education) is an initiative funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to increase opportunities for Latino students to enter and complete college and to boost the involvement of Latino parents in local schools.

In our project we work mostly with Latino, Spanish-speaking parents, and we engage them as leaders. Parents are natural leaders by themselves. However, often Latino parents don't feel comfortable in the schools, or have so much respect for these institutions that they don't questions their performance. They don't know that they have certain rights. We provide parents with information and tools to navigate the school system. For example, this year we began our first Parent Leadership Initiative.

The Parent Leadership Initiative is a 16-week training where parents can acquire a deeper knowledge of the school system and learn about parental rights and responsibilities, ask meaningful questions, and take action for individual children and the Latino community as a whole. We use a curriculum developed by the Mexican American Legal Defense Education Fund (MALDEF) called the National Parent School Partnership. The topics we cover include the differences between the school system in the United States and Latin America, the politics of education, the structure and function of the different committees in the schools, the importance of meeting with teachers, administrators, and counselors, and what questions to ask in a parent-teacher conference. We also discuss making presentations, university requirements, how to access the media, and responsible leadership.

Another way to engage parents in the transition to high school is by involving them in community projects. For example, one project involves parents working with a junior high school principal to create a bilingual glossary about what incoming parents of seventh grade children need to know about junior high.

From our point of view, if parents question their school administrators, counselors, and teachers, or work in collaboration with them regarding their children academics, then they are exercising leadership. This engagement will help them become informed to help their children to transition from middle to high school.

Eugenia Ambrocio
Advocacy Team Coordinator & Parent Outreach Coordinator
ENLACE y Avance Project
Center for Chicano Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
research.ucsb.edu/ccs/enlace/index.html

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What do you think of having teachers “grade” parents on their support of their children's learning?

Leah Mundell and Gretchen Suess of Research for Action in Philadelphia write:

The Philadelphia school district is issuing student report cards this year that will rate parents on the quality of “home support” given to children. Our response to the new report cards is based on conversations with parents and teachers impacted by the change. All in all, we support the inclusion of a teacher-parent dialogue on report cards, but propose that parents play a more equal role. As it stands, the parent “grading” system threatens to trigger a cycle of conflict and blame. The report card requires teachers to hold parents accountable for student learning without providing an opportunity for parents to hold teachers accountable. In today's environment of high-stakes testing and educational reform, “accountability” carries with it an implicit assumption of blame. Thus, merely providing an equivalent grading system of teachers by parents would not eliminate this cycle.

We propose an alternate report card that encourages a dialogue between teacher and parent. Components would include: (1) teacher's perspective on what child needs for learning, including supplies and home support; (2) parent/guardian's perspective on what child needs for learning, including knowledge of school resources, cultural respect, and clear, challenging homework assignments; and (3) a joint parent and teacher action plan to address these issues and needs. This proposal would best be implemented through face-to-face report card conferences. The teacher and parent each complete their respective portions of the report card prior to the conference, then devise an action plan together.

Teachers and parents with whom we consulted felt nervous and defensive about the implicit blaming of parents that the current report cards may foster. All expressed concern that the information would not lead to greater support for student learning and questioned the lack of follow-up. Yet all agreed that strong communication between parents and teachers is essential to support student learning. Our proposal uses the report card format to foster dialogue about student success rather than perpetuate blame for student failure.

Leah Mundell, M.A. and Gretchen Suess, M.A.
Research for Action
3701 Chestnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104
www.researchforaction.org

Related Reading
Snyder, S. (2003, September 18). Parents to get “grades'” from Phila.s' teachers. Philadelphia Inquirer.

Michael Hayen, assistant principal at Mt. Faulkner Primary School, writes:

I can see how it might be intuitively attractive to suggest that we should measure and report on parental involvement. After all, research clearly shows that parental involvement plays a significant role in enhancing student outcomes, and don't we want to encourage this?

One way to think about the issue is to consider it from the parent perspective. If schools want parents to be accountable for their involvement, then shouldn't schools first be accountable to parents and communities in real ways?

At one level, it cannot be denied that U.S educators are accountable like never before. They have No Child Left Behind (NCLB) with attendant state and district policies mandating adequate yearly progress targets, the threat of school closure, and so on.

While I don't want to get bogged down in U.S educational policy, the existence and nature of these federal, state, and district accountability provisions raise two issues in my mind. Do mechanisms like NCLB hold schools accountable to their parents and local communities in constructive ways? If not, can schools take a more proactive stance in the debate and show communities that they can be accountable to them independently of government intervention?

Taking the first question, I am not convinced that the answer is yes. Under No Child Left Behind, for example, parents can vote with their feet and demand a transfer if their child's school fails to meet annual improvement goals. Similarly, some districts are shutting down schools that are failing students. But under either of these measures, what is the guarantee that a student's new school will stay open and meet increasingly improbable targets as 2014 approaches? And why should students be the ones dislocated from their school because of the failings of educators? Even more problematic is what do parents do in small districts where there are no real choices?

The role of community organising in education would also suggest that, despite the existence of federal and state accountability mechanisms, communities still don't always feel that schools are accountable to them or serve their needs.¹

A distinction also has to be made between being accountable and having governance provisions in place. NCLB requires Title I Parent Councils and many districts have school site councils that seek to include parents in decision making. In many cases, however, these fail to make schools accountable to parents in a meaningful way.²

As an Australian educator observing the U.S experience, I consider the second question to be particularly important. I believe we are seeing an upping of the accountability debate in my country and that educators will need to be proactive if they want to shape the direction the debate takes. Currently in Australia the Federal government has imposed new reporting to parent requirements on state governments, and I believe it is only a matter of time before the conversation turns to NCLB-type provisions.

While I am not sure that Australian educators will be able to convince communities and political leaders that they can be accountable independently of greater government intervention, I do believe that schools will only have a chance of doing so if they further consider questions like:

• Are we implementing governance structures that genuinely enhance collaborative decision making and accountability to the whole school community?
• How can community organisations and community organisers support us to be accountable to our communities?
• How can we report to parents and school communities on school performance in more effective ways and involve them in creating responses to curriculum issues and academic outcomes?

From my exposure to the U.S system, I have seen promising practices in areas such as parent leadership and data sharing that may begin to assist in answering these questions. The challenge for Australian and U.S educators is to look at the impact of these and consider other approaches that will enable them to more actively respond to accountability concerns.

Once we have done this, then perhaps we can start arguing about whether parents should be held accountable to schools.

¹ For examples of how community organisers, including ACORN, have held school districts accountable see: Brown, C. Gold, E. & Simon, E. (2002) Strong Neighborhoods Strong Schools. Chicago: Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform.
² For a discussion of this distinction between accountability and governance using the context of New York City see: Mediratta, K. & Fruchter, N. (2003). From Governance to Accountability Building Relationships That Make Schools Work. New York: Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. Available at steinhardt.nyu.edu/iesp/publications/pubs/drum_major.pdf

Michael Hayen
Advanced Skills Teacher (Assistant Principal)
Mt Faulkner Primary School
Allunga Road
Chigwell Tasmania
Australia
Email: michael.hayen@education.tas.gov.au

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Are schools doing enough to learn about families?

Debbie Pushor, Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies at the College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, writes:

The most important work we can do as educators is to ask hard questions about what we do and why we do it. It is critical we open our practice to examination and ask what beliefs and assumptions lie beneath those practices. For example, what do we believe about the position of parents in their children's schooling when we schedule 6-minute parent/teacher conferences or when we have parents stand in long lines in a gymnasium waiting to talk to us about their children's performance in school? By making the beliefs and assumptions that motivate our practices with parents visible and conscious, we can begin to critically reflect on the work we do.

I spent a year as a researcher in a midwestern Canadian city exploring one large suburban elementary school's parent involvement beliefs, assumptions, and practices. Through conversations with parents and educators, I came to understand that far too often knowledge and decision making in schools rest with the educators. Parents are involved primarily to carry out tasks the school determines to be necessary. Educators bring their professional knowledge of teaching into a community with the intention of enhancing children's learning and parents' ability to support their children's education. In doing so, educators assume ownership for the school and they establish programs, policies, procedures, and routines for children and parents. Educators hold parent and curriculum sessions to orient parents to their way of thinking, to share their knowledge, and to teach parents how to support their children both at school and at home.

Exploring school practices at my research school unearthed deep questions about invitation and ownership that I ask other educators to consider: What might a school be like if parents had a rightful place and voice on that landscape? How might the landscape of schools change if educators saw parents big, in their integrity and individuality, rather than small, from a detached point of view and through the lens of a system? Who owns the ground called “school”? And, perhaps the most important question, Who decides?

From my perspective, top-down policy or parent involvement matrixes will not change the school landscape. It is people themselves. Possibilities for re-imagining schooling reside within each one of us.

Debbie Pushor, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Curriculum Studies, College of Education
University of Saskatchewan
28 Campus Drive
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada S7N 0X1
Email: debbie.pushor@usask.ca

Janice Kroeger, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education and Teaching, Leadership, and Curriculum Studies at Kent State University, writes:

Schools must take active responsibility to learn more about the range of families they serve within specific communities and use this information to develop family involvement strategies that all find useful and enjoyable. In a recent research project, I found that schools and teachers often approach family involvement as a “one size fits all” model, ignoring the patterns of involvement that emerge between and within diverse populations and subgroups. For example, in one Midwestern school where I conducted an ethnographic study, volunteering in the classroom was possible for parents only in professional families. Although those families supported the full scope of students in the classroom, volunteering as a dimension of family involvement did not reach all parents.

In this same school, PTO events were designed and carried out by only a small faction of the school parent population (middle class and professional and mostly European American). Though PTO parents professed to want to include all parents, their efforts to do so remained at a superficial level (like the provision of transportation and or provision of language support for community events) not a sociocultural level. In other words, events themselves failed to adjust to the culturally rich skill sets and tastes of the entire parent body. When questioned about their lack of attendance at PTO events, minority parents often commented that they lacked the time to attend such events, found them rather unimportant, or committed other resources to their children's schooling. As one African-American mother stated, “It's not what schools do for all families, it's what schools do for all kids.” This mother's spoken desires indicated that she wanted schools to be focusing on teaching children. Her references drew upon curriculum links that were connected with children's ethnic and racial histories as a starting point for meeting the needs of kids and families together.

School leaders, administrators, and parents must take a critical look at the holistic functioning of the school community and learn more about the diversity of families a school serves (which included the middle class, European American). Professional development related to teacher and administrator education should include strategies for learning about the ecology created by communities within the school community; differentiating involvement based on the range of social groups within particular social contexts has a potential to create a healthy home-school-community experience for all.

Janice Kroeger
Assistant Professor Early Childhood Education and Teaching, Leadership, and Curriculum Studies
Kent State University
P.O. Box 5190
Kent, Ohio 44242-0001
Email: jkroege1@kent.edu

Larry and Virginia Decker, coauthors of a new book on school-community partnerships, write:

Our answer to this question is “no.” There is far more educational rhetoric than meaningful action to address the needs of diverse families related to student learning. Educators acknowledge the importance of family involvement in student academic success. However most teachers and administrators have had little preservice training related to family involvement and very few schools have planned in-service training that helps teachers and administrators develop skills and action plans that connect families to student learning.

Schools do know a great deal about those who qualify for Title I, free or reduced lunch, special education, and gifted programs or other economically formula-driven programs. One reason is the large volume of demographic, socioeconomic, and diversity/cultural information and data related to families and students' potential for academic success. The other reason is that students in these types of programs mean an increase in special funding for the school. However, there has not been significant transferability of what schools know about students to adapting instructional approaches or establishing recommended outreach and relationship-building approaches to meet the needs of diverse families and students.

Over the years, we have taught numerous graduate classes for teachers and administrators and conducted a variety of conference and in-service training programs related to family and parent involvement in education. One of the first questions we ask is “What is the percentage of households in the U.S. that are traditional families—working father, homemaker mother, and 2+ children—served by a typical public school in 1955, 1980, and today?” Most of the answers are more like wild guesses and far off the actual statistics. Most of those questioned are surprised to learn that the all time high for the percentage of traditional families in the US was 60% in 1955. By 1980 the percentage had dropped to 11% and since the 1990's the percentage has been 6% or below. The follow-up questions concern what relevance does a learner's family status and economic and cultural profile have on curriculum development, learning plans, and family outreach initiatives. There is frequently a period of silence before the first answers are tentatively given.

The hesitancy to answer is not always due to a lack of knowledge. It may also be due to the current focus on “high stakes” testing and education accountability. This focus has helped to create an educational environment where a “one approach fits all” is being used to meet the challenge of achieving academic success for all students. While many educators agree that multiple approaches are needed to reach this goal, there is a lack of knowledge or consensus about which approaches and outreach efforts are most effective.

So our answer is “no, schools need to do much more.” They need to have a planned, comprehensive initiative to learn more about the families they serve and how to involve them in student learning. Teachers and administrators need to be provided sufficient time and opportunities to gain an accurate understanding of the families and students they serve, to improve skills related to family involvement, and to develop effectively outreach initiatives to involve those families in their children's education.

Dana McDermott, an expert on parent education, writes:

No. Most schools operate from the premise of parent involvement to support schools and adopt a top-down approach tending to disregard the home culture. There seems to be little room to question school goals. Most educators do not understand noninvolvement of parents in homework as possibly a political statement that what a school does is not always in the best interest of the child (de Carvahlo, 2001). Parents may define good involvement as refusing to help a child do hours of homework, which interferes with family life. Teachers interpret this to be a deficiency in parents, as homework is rarely questioned by society.

“Reflective inquiry” on homework by students, parents, and teachers is not typical. What are teacher goals in giving homework? What about learning and relationship “work” at home and in the community? How do parents feel when teachers expect them to do something they are unable or unmotivated to do? Rather than assuming that homework is good, schools can facilitate dialogues on its meaning to a teacher, school, a child, and his/her family.

Schools often are perceived as experts telling families how to help their children succeed. Their sharing of knowledge and expectations with parents often does not anticipate the differences found in parents like socioeconomic status, cultural experience, personal characteristics, home life, or the meaning of school input.

Bringing the family culture into what is learned in school can have positive benefits (McCaleb, 1994). Bowman (1996) in his article Empowering Parents is Mining Diamonds in the Rough notes that “underneath even the most cautious guarded exterior is a person with talents, skills, and dreams looking for a place for the sparkle to emerge and be seen” (p. 27). Few faculty development or teacher-training programs address this process adequately, especially the understanding of context or a discussion about roles (McDermott, 1997).

We know from adult learning principles that if we want learning to go beyond parents receiving information from us, parents need a place to filter information through their values and beliefs. This is difficult within the current construct of parent-school relationships. Often it is wrongly assumed that educators and parents are or are not on the same page. School goals are often so general that parents do not question them or the methods for achieving them until they run into their own child's problems. Many parents and teachers do not have a chance to reflect on how a directive meshes with their own ideas about what they believe children need. They end up consciously or unconsciously resisting what is asked of them. Parents will learn best if they have time to think about a school directive with school representatives, together look at alternatives, make a commitment to the best one, and then personalize it. Many school initiatives are unsuccessful because this process is bypassed.

It is now time for a “new frontier” of parent involvement where we synthesize information on involvement that is culturally aware, review the research on parents and teachers as adult and lifelong learners, explore school reform models like those mentioned above and explores the work on helping parents and teachers with their own growth issues which I hope to highlight in my upcoming book.

Dana McDermott
Resident Faculty
The School for New Learning
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois
snl.depaul.edu

References
Bowman, T. (1996). Empowering parents is mining diamonds in the rough. Family Resource Coalition Report, 15(2), 27–28.

de Carvalho, M. (2001). Rethinking family-school relations: A critique of parental involvement in schooling. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates.

McCaleb, S. P. (1994) Building a community of learners. New York: St. Martin's Press.

McDermott, D. (1997, May). Parent and teacher plan for the child. Young Children, 52(4), 32–36.

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How can we prepare teachers to work with culturally diverse students and their families? What skills should educators develop to do this successfully?

Sherick Hughes, Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of Toledo, writes:

One of the most important skills we need to develop in Pre-K–16 teachers is their ability to build on the knowledge that students bring into classrooms, particularly that knowledge which is shaped by their family, community, and cultural histories. My ethnographic research pertaining to this topic spans over 5 years. By studying multiple generations of Black families in the Northeastern Albemarle region of North Carolina, I search for family knowledge that can transfer into teacher education. I explore historical and contemporary family struggles and hopes regarding school desegregation. My research has uncovered the nuanced ways that families support their children’s education at home and how families teach their children to balance struggle with hope. I refer to such home teaching strategies as “family pedagogy.” What might teachers learn from the Black family pedagogy used by families to survive and “succeed” within and outside of school?

Family pedagogy is shaped by both spiritual faith narratives of hope and stories of struggle. Families maintain faith in a higher power to help them understand and navigate the hidden rules and norms of survival and success driven and accepted by school authorities. Families uphold a spiritual faith that learning to read and write is directly relevant to leading a holistic spiritual life. Families also tell stories of struggle and share hope-filled stories of how even in the face of adversity, members of their family were able to survive and succeed within the educational system that was not initially created to benefit Black families.

Teachers must come to understand the real lived experience of the families and children they teach. In my classes, I try to encourage teachers to think about how to set up plausible situations to give families a legitimate voice in their curriculum and unit planning. If they have not already done so, I encourage teachers to take the spiritual lives of families seriously as a key point of connection. Family voices can advise teachers on how to balance high stakes accountability testing with skills we also know children need to survive and thrive at school.

I now turn to naming and supporting the teaching skills that breed high educational performance by bridging the gaps that separate school and home. I call these types of teaching skills diversity capital. We already talk about the notion of teacher capital, which is the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to be an “effective” teacher. However, all too often this type of effectiveness is measured in a limited way and only highlights the skills teachers possess to help flagship students (students not from traditionally underserved communities) meet or exceed standards on proficiency tests.

Teacher diversity capital is intended to name the type of teaching enhancement that embraces emotion and drives teachers to seek new opportunities and ideas for building positive relationships with students and families from culturally diverse backgrounds. Diversity capital can in turn afford teachers the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed for a sustainable commitment to, validation of, and exchange with culturally diverse students and families. I argue that teachers need support, motivation, and experiences related to cultures other than their own in order to engage in effective cross-cultural teaching. The families of my study note that “good” teachers already implement diversity capital. Thus, the term diversity capital is essentially my attempt to name good praxis.

It is often difficult even for good teachers to go out into the community to do the home visits that can build rapport. I advocate three family-specific alternatives to connect teachers with the primary or secondary caregiver(s) of each student at least once during the school year in order to offer positive information regarding student progress.

1. Call each child’s family with positive information.
2. Email each student’s family during the school year with positive information.
3. Through email attachment, post office mail, or student delivery, send a positive message via audio or audio/visual medium regarding each student.

Finally, I also conduct critical classroom simulation exercises with general and special education preservice teachers to help them connect with the emotional-behavioral lives of their students. First, my preservice teachers do three focused observations of a child with heritage that is perceived as different from their own. I also encourage them to ask the classroom teacher respectful questions about the child’s home life and family life. In class, we work in groups to develop lesson plans that would complement that child’s learning interests without compromising other students’ abilities to reach their highest potential. I then have teachers role-play and critique lessons from the child’s and teachers’ point of view. In all these ways, I work to find and transfer useful information from family pedagogy that can enhance teachers’ development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions to work with culturally diverse students and their families.

Sherick Hughes
Assistant Professor
Department of Foundations of Education, College of Education
University of Toledo
2801 W. Bancroft Street
Toledo, OH 43606
Email: sherick.hughes@utoledo.edu

Bonnie Rockafellow, Education Consultant for the Michigan Department of Education, writes:

One way to prepare teachers to work with culturally diverse students and their families is by developing teachers' communication skills.

To better understand the communication patterns and styles that emerge during parent-teacher conversations, I videotaped seven elementary school parent–teacher conferences in two Midwest school districts. The teachers were all experienced with over 15 years in the teaching profession. Of the seven families represented, six were Caucasian and one was African American. I conducted interviews with both teachers and parents prior to the conference. After the conference, I replayed the video and asked parents and teachers to tell me what they were thinking at particular points.

My analysis of the conference yielded two interesting findings. First, developing shared meaning between teachers and families is a complex process and requires both parties to recognize similarities and differences in perspectives. The more aligned the families and teachers were in their life values and experiences the more likely they were to develop shared meanings. For example, in one conference the mother had known the teacher as a family friend. This mother was able to take the lead in sharing information with the teacher. An example of a lack of shared meanings was evident when a teacher explained how one student was learning to read. The teacher referenced the skill of reading sight words while the mother was certain her child was sounding out words when they read together at home.

Second, in each conference a ritual was played out. Most often the teacher presented the information she had prepared and at the end of the timeframe the teacher would ask if the parents have any questions, and then close the conference. The result of the conference was most often a reporting of the school's information rather than an opportunity for teachers to meaningfully engage with families and listen to their suggestions and comments. Moreover, the conference language is often academic, directed by the teacher, with little opportunity for extensions or explanation from the parents. One teacher explained that her conferences took this structure because it was a type of ritual passed down over time. She said, “Everybody has been through school and expects it to be like it was when they were there.”

Teacher preparation courses need to incorporate more interpersonal communication skill building into curricula so that teachers are better prepared to develop shared meaning with families. Instructors can show videotaped interactions between parents and teachers to preservice teachers and lead discussions about the communication styles of the participants. Watching a videotaped interaction without the audio provides the teacher candidates an opportunity to watch body language and begin to see when participants are engaged or distanced by what is being said. Moreover, analysis of the transcript can help teacher candidates recognize that the message sent is not always the message received.

To break the ritualistic cycle of the parent teacher conference, teacher preparation specialists can also provide teachers with new communication strategies. For example, clarification statements like, “Can you help me understand” or “What would you like me to know or do to address the issue?” provide an opportunity for the teacher to hear the parents' concerns and invite them into a more generative form of communication. Teacher candidates do not need to leave preparation programs with the idea that they must be in charge whenever they interact with parents.

Principals and school administrators can help practicing teachers by providing additional preparation time for conferences. In that time teachers can review student progress and complete family profiles. Family profiles can help teachers become more aware of the limitations of the knowledge they bring to the parent–teacher conference. Teachers write down what is known and what is assumed about students' parents or families, including parents' education level, parents' employment and work hours, siblings, family members in the home, language spoken in the home, and years in attendance at the current school. These profiles can serve as a tool for teachers during the parent–teacher conference. Administrators can also allot more time during conferences so that teachers have time to listen carefully to the information parents bring to the table.

Bonnie Rockafellow
Education Consultant
Michigan Department of Education
P.O. Box 30008
608 W. Allegan St.
Lansing, MI 48909
Email: rockafellowb@michigan.gov

Related Reading
Harvard Family Research Project. (2003). Questions & answers. FINE Forum, 7. Cambridge, MA: Author. Available at www.gse.harvard.edu/hfrp/projects/fine/fineforum/forum7/questions.html.

Eileen Kugler, speaker and trainer on building community support for diverse schools, writes:

It is important for teachers to seriously examine their own attitudes toward people who think and look different than they do. In the classroom, it's comfortable to call on the students whose opinions, speech, and attitude match the teacher's. But it's often the quiet students—feeling uncomfortable with a new culture and a new language—who need personal attention from the teacher to empower them to participate more fully.

Teachers must encourage students to express their own ideas, even if they are challenging to the teacher's own perspective. When I interviewed students from strong diverse schools for my book, Debunking the Middle-Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools Are Good for All Kids, they repeatedly emphasized that they were encouraged by their teachers to speak their minds, listen to others, and think critically in their classrooms.

Teachers need to analyze how they react to parents who don't act “right” in their view, moving beyond the myth that the only parents who care about their children are those who fit the traditional visible mold. While many immigrant parents don't feel comfortable at school, at home they are actively supporting their children's education—making sure homework is done, checking up on their friends, keeping tabs on their time after school, and helping them plan for the future. When you investigate beyond the surface, you find that these parents face similar parenting issues as their American-born peers.

Teachers also need to identify nonthreatening opportunities to welcome parents with diverse backgrounds to the school. At the end of a unit of study, teachers can invite parents into the classroom so the students can share their achievements with them. As opposed to the stereotype of not caring, parents frequently feel left out, just waiting to be asked to be involved.

Teachers must ask themselves tough, challenging questions about their expectations and how they respond based on them. Are classroom discussions dominated by students from mainstream American families who appear more engaged and have views closer to the teacher's? Are white, middle-class students chosen for select programs because their parents know how to advocate for them? Are students of color and those from lower-income backgrounds placed in low reading groups because their parents don't connect well with the teacher? Teachers need to move beyond stereotypes that may be grounded in their own limited frame of reference or myths about “good families.”

Eileen Kugler
President
Kugler Communications
Washington, DC
www.embracediverseschools.com

Andrew Schneider-Muñoz from City Year writes:

Teachers need to learn about the families and communities of the students they teach so that they can do a better job in the classroom.

For a little over a decade, I have conducted an ongoing field project on child-rearing practices in rural communities in Hawaii. Because I am not Hawaiian, I have found it important to show the communities I work with how serious and committed I am to knowing their culture and handling their cultural knowledge respectfully.

I would encourage teachers working with culturally diverse families to use ethnographic methods. Attending community gatherings and traditional events is one way to do this. Teachers might follow the ethnographic strategy of participant observation. In this way they are part of the action, alternating between being in the center of things and observing interactions at the periphery. It's important to notice who talks to whom in the community and who has the leadership for different issues in the family.

For example, in Hawaiian culture, the elders play a very important role in transmitting the cultural rituals of the community. This knowledge has translated into culturally-specific practice in the Hawaiian schools whereby the community selects an elder to come to the school every day, go into the classrooms, and give lessons to the children.

Even if a teacher can't become fully immersed in the community, he or she can listen carefully to the vocabulary of the community and the ways parents talk about schooling and the classroom. There is also an inescapable value to having an “every day” presence in the community, like buying groceries or going to church there. It's important to make a connection with families and communities and that the community views the teacher as a willing participant.

Andrew Schneider-Muñoz
Vice President of Research and Development
City Year
Boston, Massachusetts
www.cityyear.org

Ed Greene from Montclair State University writes:

Teacher preparation programs should institute lifelong learning principles that encourage students to examine their values, attitudes, standards of acceptable behavior, and the ways in which these things influence their beliefs about teaching and learning. Because we live in a dynamic climate of demographic change, there should also be time devoted to examining issues of language, race, class, gender, culture, values, and beliefs. Faculty should be (or become) knowledgeable about these issues and include assignments that help them facilitate dialogue that deconstruct stereotypes and myths about families. Without such opportunities, future classroom practitioners may perpetuate victim blaming and deficit model approaches in their classroom and program practices.

Equally important, we all need to identify and use the strengths of the children and families we serve. Parents and other family members can be resources whose perspectives, perceptions, and concerns may often help reveal strengths that, too often, are overlooked. Students in teacher preparation programs must also learn how to develop and use trust-building strategies, and, if possible, experience approaches respectful cross-cultural dialogue.

What is described here is not a one-semester class or a single lecture on culturally diverse families. The related content and learning processes require time, study, and planning. Ideally, the knowledge, skills, and experiences discussed here should be explicitly woven throughout the teacher preparation institution's program of study and field-based experiences. This is lifelong work that will, hopefully, increase the number of educators who are socially and culturally conscious, competent, and confident, as they serve children and families.

Ed Greene
Associate Professor
Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education
School of Education and Human Services
Montclair State University
Upper Montclair, New Jersey

Carol S. Huntsinger from College of Lake County writes:

In my own research, I examine the parenting beliefs and practices of immigrant Chinese American families, as compared to European American families. In my classes we discuss cultural belief systems and view videotapes that compare different cultures. Often students haven't thought about what their beliefs are. When they talk about these issues they begin to define their own beliefs and practices, and to become aware of the perspectives of other class members. One assignment in my class involves an interview of a parent from another culture regarding child-rearing techniques. The students use an interview questionnaire I've developed and used in my research. I ask the students to conduct the interview, transcribe it, and then answer the questions themselves. It is interesting for them to compare their own beliefs with the beliefs of the parents interviewed. We reflect on and question our own practices and learn to appreciate those of others. This exercise enables us to be more culturally sensitive to parents and families.

Carol S. Huntsinger
Professor of Psychology and Education
College of Lake County
Grayslake, Illinois

Peter Bak-Fun Wong, Principal of the Josiah Quincy Upper School in Boston, Massachusetts, writes:

I look at schools as if they are leather wine skin. If the skin is old, it cracks. It is not that the wine is bad, but rather that the leather skin must be reworked. We created the leather skin. The new leather skin must be more global. Our schools are now diverse and must be flexible to allow for our differences.

In Chinatown, the opportunity for education is crucial. Families give up everything to come over here. There is a lot of stress on these families and social economic pressure to succeed. In the community there is uncertainty and a fear of failure. Looking at the issues facing today's youth and their present realities we must educate and encourage everyone to love and respect other people, their cultures, others' points of views, and themselves.

The four pavilions we follow in our school are critical to the Chinatown community because they are the essence of the combination of the Eastern and Western styles of education. The pavilions are for both students and families. The cultural pavilion concentrates on world cultures, race, and ethnicity, and acknowledges that school and family cannot exist without harmony in society. We have so many things in common. So, we talk about the commonalities first. Then, we talk about our diversity. A lot of people don't appreciate other cultures because they don't know or appreciate their own. We help to involve parents in the process by holding school meetings on Saturdays in different areas in the neighborhoods so that they can actually attend.

Peter Bak-Fun Wong
Principal
Josiah Quincy Upper School
Boston, Massachusetts

Diane Burts from Louisiana State University writes:

The trends initiated by NCATE or NAEYC demonstrate that we want students in preservice programs not only to know about families, but also to interact and work with families from diverse backgrounds. New state guidelines are discussing ways teachers can interface with families and work with less traditional ways of interaction. At LSU we teach classes specifically in family involvement in the graduate and undergraduate level and look at strategies for involving families from diverse backgrounds. Research shows community leaders are becoming more involved and teachers must be aware of how to link with other agencies and what resources are available that sometimes families are less likely to know about. Teachers need to work on more positive and open attitudes. Teachers need to have positive attitudes and beliefs that there are possibilities for collaboration. They must have the willingness to reach out. They must understand the possibilities and issues that exist. Students must learn the environment they teach in, especially if they are separated from it, to understand all the possibilities.

Diane Burts
Professor, School of Human Ecology
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Martha Dever from Utah State University writes:

In recent decades, our national perspective on community and family involvement has evolved. Historically, family involvement was primarily mothers volunteering or accompanying classes on field trips, particularly in the early grades. Parents who did not participate were often considered parents who did not care. Now, we are acknowledging a broad variety of family value systems. For example, in some cultures, parents consider it to be intrusive to come to school and rude to challenge a homework assignment.

Family diversity must be a central component in teacher education programs. Teachers need to understand family structures, embrace diverse family values, demonstrate tolerance, and be prepared to reach families of all types. The objective of teacher educators should be to emphasize the importance of the many ways to include parents in the learning process and promote learning at home.

Martha Dever
Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education
Utah State University
Logan, Utah

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A Public Agenda survey (People's Chief Concerns, 1999) claims that 55% of the public consider lack of parent involvement a “major problem” facing public schools. What is your opinion and how does your work address this issue?

Jorge Izquierdo, Superintendent of District 6 in New York City, writes:

I believe that a large number of parents are disenchanted with schools. I've been finding ways to bring them back and show them there is hope.

First, I invite parents to come into schools with me. My district is the largest in Manhattan. Unfortunately, we are a low-performing district with a number of limited English proficient students. The majority of our families are immigrants from the Dominican Republic. To make them more comfortable with schools, I conduct walk-throughs, where every week about 15 parents walk through a building and learn about instructional practices. We have rich conversations about how schools might be different than those they attended. What people also realize after the visit is that we do a good job with limited resources

Second, as schools, we can do better. We haven't done enough because we don't reach out and make our schools family friendly places. When parents visit schools they often don't feel welcome. Schools must be a lot more welcoming, meet parents where they are, and encourage their participation. For example, as a principal I started Café 163. What began as a one-time breakfast to meet parents turned into a weekly breakfast forum, where parents eventually took over the organization of the entire activity. It's also important when we invite parents to meetings that these are organized, consistent, and have follow through. Otherwise, parents get turned off and don't come back.

Finally, I've involved parents in school restructuring. Student flight is one of the biggest challenges facing our district. Historically, the city schools have not been doing well, and middle- and upper-class parents enroll their children in other schools. It is extremely difficult to change schools when middle- and upper-class parents leave because they don't have faith in our schools. We are now seeing an influx of upper/middle-class families in our district and my goal is to bring them in and have them stay. To do this we are converting two middle schools into smaller academies. Parents have been part of this planning process. Parents must be interested, because if they're not, the children won't succeed.

My goal is to educate parents to the degree that they understand good instruction and become able to support our schools and our children. We have to focus our sights on instruction and we must have the entire community involved in doing it. The parents are key.

Jorge Izquierdo
Superintendent of District 6
New York, New York

Kathy Nakagawa from Arizona State University writes:

Although the lack of parent involvement is often listed as a major problem facing public schools, this (mis)conception places both parents and schools between a rock and a hard place. This view suggests that schools cannot improve without parents, but if schools are doing poorly, then parents (not the schools) are the problem. The reality is that both schools and parents need greater support, not just from each other, but also from the surrounding community. For instance, increasingly, urban schools face the challenge of “city migrant” students—those students whose families move numerous times throughout the year from school to school within the same district or between neighboring districts. The reasons for these moves vary from a need for affordable housing to changes in family structure. This constant movement presents a special challenge to building strong family-school relationships. What should schools do to address this challenge?

In our recent article, The “City Migrant” Dilemma: Building Community at High Mobility Schools, my colleagues and I found that many schools with high levels of mobility also provide outreach through counseling, adult education classes, and additional academic support for children. We found that some schools did a great deal to address the needs of city migrant families—for instance creating special classroom support for the children—whereas others viewed transience as a problem that the schools could not control, and so did little to support these families. We also suggest that schools cannot address this challenge alone; improved community development is needed to provide access to resources, such as better housing and job opportunities, that will allow these city migrant families to become more stable.

Kathryn Nakagawa
Assistant Professor
Psychology in Education
Arizona State University College of Education
Tempe, Arizona
www.ed.asu.edu/coe

Reference
Nakagawa, K., Stafford, M. E., Fisher, T. A., & Matthews, L. (2002). The “city migrant” dilemma: Building community at high-mobility urban schools. Urban Educaiton, 37, 96-125.

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Does the workplace hinder family involvement in children's education?

Claire Smrekar from Vanderbilt University writes:

Our report, March Toward Excellence: School Success and Minority Student Achievement in Department of Defense Schools, underscores the value of a “community-wide, corporate commitment” to children's education. We believe that nonmilitary settings can gain similarly impressive levels of commitment to public education by making more visible the facets of the workplace that limit the ability of employees to participate more fully in school-based activities. Schools tend to structure school-based activities for traditional, stay-at-home mothers. At the same time, a large number of households include parents who are employed in full-time occupations that provide little flexibility and opportunity for parents to leave work during school hours. As schools begin to rethink the purpose and organization of parent involvement activities, employers should reevaluate workplace policies that hinder the kind of parental commitment to educational excellence that organized business groups are demanding in the current debate on the quality of our nation's schools.

Claire Smrekar
Associate Professor
Department of Leadership and Organizations
Peabody College
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee
peabody.vanderbilt.edu

Holly Kreider and Ellen Mayer, researchers on the School Transition Study at Harvard Family Research Project, write:

Our own research suggests that the answer is yes, but also no. We found that low-income mothers who worked full-time tended to be less involved at school than those who worked part-time. However, while work may hinder family involvement in some ways, it may also pose opportunities. Conditions such as positive workplace relationships and climate, and some jobs in the nonprofit and small business sectors, may help provide such opportunities. For example, mothers in our study described communicating with their child's teacher from their workplace—such as by phone or the office fax machine. Several moms brought their children to family friendly workplaces for child care and learning purposes—such as to access computer programs. Others drew upon supervisors and coworkers for educational advice and other supports—such as help in choosing a good school.

Holly Kreider
Project Manager

Ellen Mayer
Research Associate

Harvard Family Research Project
Cambridge, Massachusetts
www.hfrp.org

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Does family involvement in high school matter?

Rae Simpson from the Project on the Parenting of Adolescents writes:

My report, Raising Teens: A Synthesis of Research and a Foundation for Action, is primarily intended for people who work with parents—teachers being an important group. A network of caring adults is crucial for positive teen outcomes and parents and non-parents need to see each other as allies. Teachers therefore need the appropriate skills for collaborating with parents on behalf of teens. Many of the natural structures for parent involvement disappear in high school, so some of the skills teachers need involve setting up frameworks for teachers and parents to be in contact. Teachers also require a knowledge base of both teen and adult development, and they must be aware of issues that both parents and teens may be struggling with developmentally. Finally, so that parents can monitor their teens' school achievement, teachers must be proficient in balancing the increasing privacy teens deserve with the continuing role of explaining clearly to parents about academic strengths and needs.

A. Rae Simpson
Project on the Parenting of Adolescents
Center for Health Communication
Harvard School of Public Health
Boston, Massachusetts
www.hsph.harvard.edu/chc/parenting

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Is teacher preparation key to improving teacher practices with families? What are the alternatives?

The 2004–2005 MetLife survey of the American Teacher found that new teachers consider engaging and working with parents as their greatest challenge and the area they were least prepared to manage during their 1st year.

Julia Johnson Rothenberg and Peter McDermott, professors at the Sage Colleges School of Education, write:

Given the ambivalence of many schools toward parent engagement, it is vital that novice teachers develop the ability to work with families while being mentored during their teacher preparation programs. Our interest in parents' involvement in their children's education began during our study of good teachers in urban schools. We had identified teachers who consistently provided best practices and noticed that working with parents was the area they consistently found disagreeable and in fact, avoided. They told us that as children progressed through the elementary grades, their parents became progressively less involved and more negative. We wondered if parents shared these views.

We formed a parent focus group and found that parents overwhelmingly expressed distrust toward the local elementary school because they felt the faculty has been biased against African American and Latino children and their families. Consequently, the parents said they deliberately decided not to participate in school activities. Parents explained they would only work with teachers who respected and valued their children.

We soon began to implement strategies in our course work to help novice teachers in working with parents. We have found that in order for novice teachers to implement strategies in their classrooms, they must do so before they have their own classes. So we built several parent components into their 125 hours of required practica. Assignments included meeting with the parents of their practica students, routinely beginning conferences with positive news about the children, attending an event within the neighborhoods of their students (something rarely done by local public school teachers), interviewing parents for their views about goals and dreams for their children, finding (or using available) translators, and developing a regular newsletter for parents. Our novice teachers simply accepted these as assignments, and usually enjoyed doing them.

Supervising teachers often found these assignments an annoyance, telling our novice teachers they would be unsuccessful and would only stir up trouble. In fact, parents were very receptive, especially to newsletters and visits to the neighborhood. The novice teachers also found these contacts to be enjoyable and productive for the children. We found that novice teachers became far more appreciative of children's home cultures, which we had also found by having our novice teachers work in the neighborhood projects. Insights included surprising areas of parental support and the astounding thought that the ability to speak two languages was a positive factor for children, rather than always a limitation for new immigrants. As one student said, “Foreign exchange students are praised for attempting English, but Central American or Puerto Rican immigrants are said to have limited language.”

These interactions require hard and constant work. New teachers need to learn a variety of strategies and skills to involve urban parents in their children's education, including the ability to communicate clearly and sensitively with adults of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Methods course work should provide opportunities for prospective teachers to learn how to write effective notes, letters, and newsletters to families. They should learn conversational strategies that focus on children's positive qualities as well as identify ways they might grow and be helped at home. These are all gestures that may help break social and ethnic barriers and foster understanding and respect between family and schools.

Julia Johnson Rothenberg Ph.D.
Professor, School of Education
The Sage Colleges
Troy, NY 12180
Email: rothej@sage.edu

Peter McDermott Ph.D.
Professor, School of Education
The Sage Colleges
Troy, NY 12180
Email: mcderp@sage.edu

Read more about the study in Why Urban Parents Resist Involvement in Their Children's Elementary Education.

Anne T. Henderson from NYU writes:

Whether and how well teachers engage their students' families depends more on the culture of the school where they work than on their training. Is it a fortress school, bent on protecting itself from “outsiders,” or a partnership school, that supports productive relationships with families? Teachers must be able to be leaders. If they enter a poorly performing school, they must know how to work with their colleagues, parents, and community members to improve it.

With this in mind, I recommend three key points for teacher preparation programs:

1. Make sure teachers understand that engaging families is a vital part of their job, and why. The research is clear that students with involved families tend to do better in school, stay in school longer, and go on to post-secondary education. If teachers engage families children will do better, and if they don't (and this is important), children will do worse. It's not a choice.

2. Build strategies for engaging families and working with community groups into every course prospective teachers take. Develop a good methods course, too, and don't make it optional. Give them useful, practical tools to do this job.

3. Establish a relationship with a local school that works well with families and help it do even better. Make sure every prospective teacher spends time there, experiences the benefits, and sees, first hand, how it's done.

Anne T. Henderson
Institute for Education and Social Policy
New York University
1640 Roxanna Road, NW
Washington, DC 20012
steinhardt.nyu.edu/iesp

Dorothy Rich from the Home and School Institute writes:

We need academies to provide in-service and preservice training in school and family/community involvement. It's harder to change schools of education, even though some education leaders are trying. Academies could operate on a team concept and include teachers, school district staff, state education department staff, teacher educators, parent leaders. The goal will be to enable these teams to provide training on site directly in communities across the nation. We have successful models for this kind of initiative. Now, we need the support to make it happen more widely.

Dorothy Rich
Founder/President
Home and School Institute
MegaSkills Education Center
1500 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20005
www.megaskills.org

Sue Ferguson from the National Coalition of Parent Involvement in Education writes:

Very little is done on the preservice or in-service level to provide teachers with greater understanding and skills needed to effectively teach students from cultural backgrounds different from their own, or to recognize cultural and economic factors that may influence family-school dynamics. Existing professional development programs and courses seldom address cultural and class differences in relationship to their impact in the classroom or home-school interactions. If fact, even having teachers confront their own prejudice toward other races, lifestyles, and economic class is almost unheard of. Yet the power of such prejudice “tracks” kids and their families, keeping academic expectations low and families at arms length. Professional development programs need to develop multiple strategies to provide teachers with tools to successfully break through these barriers. Resources such as the Public Education Network and Public Agenda report Quality Now! Results of National Conversations on Education and Race as well as emerging research from the Poverty and Race Research Action Council can provide invaluable knowledge and information. Programs must embed these subjects within the curricula and create ongoing opportunities for discussion. Family/school/community field experiences emphasizing diversity must also be relentlessly pursued.

Sue Ferguson
Chair
National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education
Washington, DC
www.ncpie.org

Nancy Chavkin, Professor at Southwest Texas State University, writes:

We don't prepare people in education for a broad conceptualization of the whole child. We teach them about very specific areas; we teach them to work alone and not as team members. Even if we do prepare them, when they get into the real world, the school's not set up for them to do that. There is a very weak policy about parent involvement in many schools. There's still a lot of rhetoric and parent involvement is not well supported.

Nancy Chavkin
Professor and Co-Director
Center for Children and Families
Southwest Texas State University
San Marcos, Texas
www.health.txstate.edu/sowk

Joyce Epstein, Director of the Center on School, Family & Community Partnerships, writes:

Family-school partnership is really a very immature field of study compared to other aspects of education. People talk about thirty years of research and that's very young in terms of a research enterprise. There must be an investment for research over the next ten years, and how to develop this infrastructure in colleges and universities will be an interesting and challenging task.

Joyce Epstein
Director
Center on School, Family & Community Partnerships
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland
www.csos.jhu.edu/p2000/center.htm

Gord Kerr, Founder of the Ontario School Council Support Centre, writes:

People involved in the Ontario school council system are still learning how to make them work for maximum possible advantage. School council members have not had training in the more advanced responsibility of improving student learning. Without guidance, involved parents will slip back into their “comfort zones” and school councils will continue to struggle to move beyond the more traditional roles of parent groups. The way forward appears to involve a focus on learning for school council participants, principals, and teaching professionals.

Gord Kerr
Founder
Ontario School Council Support Centre
Ontario, Canada
www.schoolcouncils.net

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