A common complaint among educators is that parents are not sufficiently involved in their children’s schooling (Baker et al., 2016; Mapp, 2003; McKenna & Millen, 2013).
Conversely, parents often report feeling unwelcome at their child’s school. In a study by Baker et al. (2016), one parent said, “I honestly did not feel like I was welcomed in this building. They did not want you here.” Another parent said, “If a parent stops by school, they should be invited into the classroom to observe everyday functions of class. Not persecuted by office personnel.”
Some researchers have emphasized the distinction between parent involvement and engagement, with engagement going beyond attending meetings or volunteering. Ferlazzo (2011) views engagement as schools and parents becoming “partners.” Redding et al. (2004) add that engagement is “building a foundation of trust and respect, reaching out to parents beyond the school.”
Family engagement is defined by the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement (NAFSCE) as a “shared responsibility where schools… are committed to reaching out to engage families in meaningful ways and where families are committed to actively support their children’s learning and development” (National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement, 2010).
In 2014, the Dual-Capacity Framework was developed by the U. S. Department of Education. The Framework emphasized that “conventional parent involvement activities like checking homework, and attending open houses and parent-teacher meetings do not necessarily engage families… Moving beyond parent involvement to family engagement means the responsibility is not placed solely on parents. Schools must also actively reach out to children’s primary caregivers… to jointly support children’s learning and development in ways most effective yet comfortable for families… to build effective partnerships in support of student achievement” (Kelty & Wakabayashi, 2020).
Engagement and Student Outcomes
Substantial research has been conducted to examine the relationship between parental engagement in their child’s education and their success in school. Durham et al. (2007) argued that some parents “make a ‘project’ of the child’s preparation for, and performance at, school.” (See the Reading Gap article in October’s Equity Express here.) However, these studies have generally focused on the relationships between individual parents’ actions and students’ educational outcomes.
School-based and community efforts to increase parental engagement, on the other hand, have generally produced only modest impacts on student outcomes, including academic achievement. That is not to say that school-based and community programs are ineffective or unimportant. The challenge is scaling up such efforts to impact larger numbers of students (Jeynes, 2005 & 2015; Henderson et al., 2002; Redding et al., 2004; Lawson & Alameda-Lawson, 2012).
Research demonstrates that trusting relationships play an important role in families’ ability to advocate for their students, as families must feel comfortable interacting with their child’s school (Caspe et al., 2011). Developing trusting relationships requires two-way engagement between the home and school (Henderson & Mapp, 2002).
However, in focus groups conducted by Kelty and Wakabayashi (2020), participants cited fear of judgment as a significant concern among parents. Further, a concern raised by all the focus groups – parents and educators – was the perception that school engagements were “opportunities that were ‘traditional’ opportunities for ‘traditional’ families, not inclusive of diverse family types.”
Factors cited by the researchers that negatively affect family engagement include poverty, language minority status, and family structure (Hindman et al., 2012). Not surprisingly, lack of communication was cited by many parents. Newsletters, texting, emailing, and in-person communication were cited as effective methods for supporting two-way communication. However, parents noted that some schools utilized technology that prevented them from responding or providing feedback.
Other researchers noted that parent engagement declines as the children become older. Yet, in the study by Kelty & Wakabayashi (2020), parents argued that their needs for communication and involvement do not diminish “just because our kids are older.” While typical engagement activities at the secondary level include sports booster clubs, science fairs, and sports events, many parents and educators emphasized the importance of additional supportive opportunities, such as “peer tutoring or workshops for parents to learn about the college application process or how to apply for financial aid.” According to Evan (2011), these themes are also prevalent among “non-dominant languages and cultures, where families often feel unwelcome, powerless, and marginalized within their child’s school.”
Several studies have offered strategies for improving family and community engagement. To learn more about how schools can encourage families to be more engaged, Baker et al. (2016) conducted focus groups across six schools: three elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school. Through extensive data collection, they identified five themes common to both families and staff: providing opportunities for involvement, improving communication, welcoming families into the building, managing time conflicts, and facilitating a smooth transition from involvement to engagement.
Case Studies
Case studies conducted by the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) help to expand our understanding of effective engagement by examining diverse community contexts and effective strategies. The authors do not offer a one-size-fits-all prescription, “because any effort must begin by assessing local conditions, assets, and needs” (Mapp & Kuttner, 2013).
Washington, D.C.
At the time of the study, Stanton Elementary was the lowest-performing elementary school in Washington, DC. One parent described the school this way: “These were elementary school kids, and they were running the school. Parents were disconnected, staff and families were battling one another, and many of the staff seemed not to care… and tensions and feelings of distrust were high between the school and parents” (Mapp & Kuttner, 2013).
According to the principal, during the previous school year, police were called to the school on 24 occasions. During her first year as principal, she tried “all the strategies that dominate the school reform conversation… She also scheduled ‘all of the ‘boilerplate’ family engagement events, such as back-to-school nights, bake sales, parent–teacher conferences, cookouts, and school dances—none of which were well attended by parents.”
Despite these efforts, academic performance did not improve, and the school culture remained extremely problematic. “Over 250 short-term suspensions were recorded within the first 25 weeks of school… and there were frequent incidents of hostility and disrespect between family and community members and staff.”
That spring and summer, the staff received training on two new pilot programs: the Parent–Teacher Home Visit Project and the Academic Parent–Teacher Team model. After their summer training, Stanton teachers began conducting home visits to their students’ families. The staff set a goal of conducting 200 home visits by October 1; they exceeded it, completing 231 visits by the deadline.
Stanton’s parents said that the home visits “changed everything.” One parent stated, “When they first called… I was skeptical. I thought it was a CPS visit. For the teachers to take the initiative and come to my area, where I live, to sit in my living room and ask about me and my child, that really meant something to me. It meant that this person is going to be my partner, and we were going to work together, and she cares for my child.”
During that school year, the Stanton staff conducted 450 home visits and scheduled 30 Academic Parent–Teacher Teams (APTT) meetings for families. The previous year, only 12% of families attended parent–teacher conferences. That year, approximately 55% of the parents attended all three APTT meetings. By the end of the school year, Stanton increased their math scores by more than 18 points and reading scores by more than nine points.
School staff specifically point to the shift from a focus on behavior to a focus on academics as key to building new relationships of trust and respect between home and school. According to the researchers, teachers and families now describe Stanton as a “joyous place” where community members, school staff, and families work together to improve student achievement.
Boston, MA.
In Boston, the task was to build the existing programs into “a system that was cohesive, coordinated, and integrated across the district.”
First, Family and Community Outreach Coordinators (FCOCs) were established in all the Boston Public Schools (BPS). Second, the new leadership changed the role of the Office of Family and Student Engagement (OFSE) staff. No longer would 22 staff try to engage 38,000 families directly. Now, engaging families would be the responsibility of everyone in the district. “The role of the OFSE, then, would be to build the capacity of the district to engage families.”
Next, BPS restructured the Family Resource Centers to launch Parent University as the district’s “primary strategy for engaging parents in their children’s education. “Parent University educates and empowers parents as partners, advocates, leaders, lifelong learners, and their children’s first teachers.” Parent University is now a widely used national model (https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/students-families/parent-university/about).
To build teacher capacity, the district developed the Family Guides to Learning. These guides outline the skills and knowledge that students should acquire at each grade level. They served as a resource for families and a tool to facilitate effective conversations between teachers and parents during parent–teacher conferences.
Next, OFSE developed a 12-hour professional development series and then a 60-hour credit-bearing class on family engagement for teachers. A significant component of the training focused on cultural proficiency and included tools for home visits, parent–teacher conferences, and student-led parent–teacher conferences.
At the same time, the OFSE began working with teachers and principals on their “whole-school improvement plans.” The goal was to ensure that schools had a family engagement strategy aligned with their instructional strategy. The result was a set of criteria and “high-impact strategies” aligned with district curricula.
As was the case with the 22 OFSE staff initially, many assumed that the FCOC’s job was to conduct direct family engagement activities. As a result, OFSE found that the implementation of some of the new initiatives was uneven. To address this issue, the role of the FCOCs shifted from direct coaching to providing “technical assistance.”
Santa Clara, CA.
Santa Clara County, at the southern end of the Bay Area, covers a sprawling area of cities and suburbs. The county is best known as the home of Silicon Valley. However, the tech wealth concentrated in the county was far from evenly distributed among its nearly two million residents. More than 9% of the population lived below the poverty line, and over 50% of residents spoke a language other than English at home (Mapp & Kutter, 2013).
Jolene Smith was working for the Social Service Agency when the County Supervisor asked her to lead a community planning process addressing how the county could best support the education and healthy development of its youngest residents. As a result, Smith led a process that engaged thousands of residents. These conversations led to a call for a “family-centered approach” to child development, focused on supporting parents as children’s “first teachers.”
At the time, there was no money for implementation. However, in 1998, Californians passed Proposition 10, which added a 50-cent tax to each pack of cigarettes sold in the state and funded the establishment of the California Children and Families Commission, known as First 5 California. Because Santa Clara had already developed a plan, it was among the first counties to apply for Prop. 10 funding. The county received $27 million, and First 5 Santa Clara was born.
A centerpiece of First 5 Santa Clara’s work with school districts, Family Support Centers (FRCs) were multi-service centers run by local partners that offered a menu of resources, workshops, and learning opportunities for families. The centers had pre-planned programming, but also adapted to the needs of attending parents.
The FRC community workers, paraprofessionals whose job was to reach out to families in the community, shared information on health, development, and education, and linked them with services at the FRC. Alongside the community workers were “associate community workers,” volunteers from the community.
Locating the FRCs on or near school campuses was an explicit strategy to help parents become familiar with their local schools and foster trust between schools and families. This was also an opportunity for teachers and principals to meet both current and future parents and become familiar with the services the centers offered.
The district then saw a need to support incoming students who had not had prior school experience, either in preschool or through Head Start. This led to the creation of Kinder Academy, a summer bridge program designed to prepare students for kindergarten. Incoming children attended classes with their assigned kindergarten teacher. According to one teacher, the three-week summer classes were more social than the regular classroom and were intended to get kids excited about going to school. They were “all about learning routines, how we look at books, turn the pages, sit in the circle… and (how to) get along with other kids.”
At the same time, parents were taking part in First 5 Santa Clara’s popular parent program, Opening Doors, a “parent empowerment program, where they learn to be strong advocates and partners with their child’s teacher.” The interactive nature of the workshops enabled parents to practice skills such as having one-on-one conversations with a teacher or voicing concerns to district staff. Perhaps more importantly, the course aimed to change how parents viewed themselves, fostering their confidence in their own abilities to support their child’s learning and advocate for them.
The overarching mission of Kinder Academy was relational. The program was designed to facilitate ongoing interactions among the parents, the child, and the future kindergarten teacher. Because of these interactions, according to Smith, “when the teacher goes into their classroom in September, the children know them, they know what to expect…and parents have a relationship with the teacher. The premise of everything we do is based on engagement and relationship, aimed at the healthy development of the child. That’s why the operators of our FRCs are community organizations from the neighborhoods, so the relationship is already there. Parents trust the place; they trust what they learn. We have associate volunteers [from the community] engaged in design and recruitment because neighbors trust neighbors.”
One parent reported that the most significant benefits of involvement were the new connections she has built with her community and the example she sets for her children. “I feel more connected to my community now. I was a stay-at-home mom… I would just stay at home and drop them off. Now I don’t walk straight home. I participate in the FRC, and I have something to look forward to. I see other parents, and they see what I have done; they see that if I could do it, anyone can. My kids, see what I have done, that I have confidence.”
Through its partnership with districts, First 5 Santa Clara helped to empower a population of confident, knowledgeable parents who could support and advocate for their children. The program also fostered a school system that valued parental involvement and built strong relationships with families and the broader community.
Accountability for Low-Performing Schools
Research on family and community involvement and engagement has primarily focused on identifying barriers and exploring potential solutions. The cases described here provide a sense of the diverse models nationwide, and these are far from exhaustive.
For example, these examples do not include efforts by parents and community organizations to hold low-performing schools accountable and drive change.
Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education (2010), presented his vision of family engagement: “I want to have… parents demanding excellence in their schools. I want all parents to be real partners in education with their children’s teachers… When parents demand change and better options for their children, they become the real accountability backstop (Mapp & Kuttner, 2013).
“This type of engagement, which occurs outside of schools and is led by parents and community members, is growing nationwide. These efforts differ from traditional parent involvement and are openly focused on building the power and political skills of low-income families to hold schools accountable for results (Henderson & Mapp, 2002; Lawson & Alameda-Lawson, 2012).
Barriers and Solutions
Across studies, findings often identify common barriers. However, while parents and school staff often agree on the barriers to parent involvement, they frequently offer contrasting solutions. “While parent solutions directly address the identified barriers and support parent engagement, staff frequently offer disconnected solutions that focus more on involvement” (Baker et al., 2016).
Some of the commonly identified barriers to effective communication and parental engagement include:
- Lack of or poor timing of communication
- Language barriers
- Parents’ negative experiences in schools, personally or with older children
- Parents’ level of education may make it difficult for them to help their children academically, or make them feel they cannot help
- Teachers’ and school personnel’s attitudes towards families
- Lack of transportation, work schedule, or the need for childcare
- The age of the students may be a barrier, as older children may have less favorable attitudes toward parental participation in school activities (Hornby & Lafaele, 2011)
Many of these barriers may be particularly acute in low-income, under-resourced, underserved, and minority communities (Dawson-McClure et al., 2017).
To overcome barriers, Baker et al. (2016) suggested five themes common to both families and staff: providing opportunities for involvement, improving communication, welcoming families into the building, making time, and moving from involvement to engagement.
However, case studies have not only highlighted initial barriers to effective parent engagement but also challenges schools and communities face as they work to overcome them. First, hiring additional staff, opening community and school centers, redesigning programs and curriculum, providing weeks of training, and offering summer programs are expensive. The First 5 California programs, for example, were funded by a statewide 50-cent tax on cigarette sales.
In addition, change not only requires leadership and (often) funding, but also significant effort and time from parents, administrators, and, most particularly, teachers. In the Boston example, the engagement strategies were integrated into the BPS curriculum for teachers to implement. The improvements achieved by the Stanton Elementary community included 450 home visits and 30 Academic Parent–Teacher Teams (APTT) meetings in the first year.
Furthermore, the case studies underscore a crucial lesson: “family engagement cannot be seen as the job of a single person or office, but as a shared responsibility.”
[In this edition of the Equity Express, Walter Fields, NCEED Community Engagement and Public Policy Liaison/fSTAR, discusses the Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s ENOUGH Act partnerships to address gaps in existing funding to support children and families.]
Ultimately, from these studies, one overarching conclusion emerged: When programs and initiatives prioritize building respectful, trusting relationships, they are effective at fostering and sustaining connections among families, the community, and schools. When initiatives “take on a partnership orientation—in which student achievement and school improvement are seen as a shared responsibility, relationships of trust and respect are established between home and school, and families and school staff see each other as equal partners—they create the conditions for family engagement to flourish” (Mapp & Kuttner, 2016).
In short, these studies reveal that relationships matter; the way parents and community members are viewed and treated by school staff—as assets rather than liabilities—was a recurring theme.
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