We know that parental involvement in elementary schools pays off in improved achievement of students and quality of their schools. But whether school-parent partnerships are initiated by administrators at the district level or by parents, agree that it takes commitment from district leaders as well as creative thinking and hands-on staff management to make partnerships work well. And according to a report by the Safe and Responsive Schools Project, increased parent involvement can lead to home environments that are more conducive to learning and improve communication and consistency between home and the school. Schools can promote parent involvement in learning in part through teaching better child-rearing skills and stressing learning at home. And parental notification systems, such as STN Alert Now, can help keep parents in the loop on emergency and important school matters.
Although data directly linking parental engagement with positive results is limited, administrators, teachers and parents cite anecdotal evidence—and some numbers about test scores and attendance from individual schools—to affirm the effectiveness of engagement programs. Meanwhile, researchers are studying the keys to successful programs and bringing the results to the attention of educators.
“The nation’s schools must improve education for all children, but schools cannot do this alone,” says Joyce L. Epstein, director of the Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University. “More will be accomplished if schools, families and communities work together to promote successful students.”
The center conducts research into the types of parental involvement that work effectively in its National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS), which includes more than 900 schools in 91 districts. Researchers have found that successful programs can boost students’ reading skills and test scores, improve school attendance, and engage parents of different cultures who might be unfamiliar with and intimidated by how U.S. schools function. But Epstein acknowledges “the numbers are tricky” when measuring the specific impact of parental involvement. “In most school reform efforts, if scores go up, every component of the school’s program gets credit. If they go down, the kids usually get the blame,” she says.
While administrators generally welcome parental engagement, it can make them uneasy when groups representing special interests extend their involvement to aggressive advocacy with senior administrators and school boards. With access to modern tools and techniques from cell phones to social networking, parents can become engaged at the click of a button and sometimes drown out other voices with differing viewpoints on issues from grading and testing policies to budgets and birth control.
Open, Written Policies
Some parental involvement programs have written policies that spell out the details. For example, the Naperville (Ill.) Community Unit School District 203, whose 21 schools are members of the NNPS, has a school board policy that states what parental and community involvement means. It includes requiring each school to “develop an open and inclusive process to select parents” and other community members for school and district committees and school improvement teams.
As the district’s director of community relations, Nina Menis provides day-to-day support to a volunteer, districtwide School Family Community Partnership Core Team. This district team works with individual school Action Teams to plan activities like “International Night” at Meadow Glens Elementary School, a multicultural event that introduces parents and children to the different student cultures. “It’s important to have a point person so things don’t get lost in the shuffle,” says Menis. “I believe having supportive parent and community partners has an impact on our test scores, which keep improving,” she adds. Menis provides continuity that helps when parent leaders change as their children move on, says parent Peggy Kulling, a co-chair of the Core Team.
The NNPS also includes schools like Jane H. Bryan Elementary in the Hampton (Va.) Schools. After below-average test scores over several years kept the school from attaining adequate yearly progress goals, administrators set a goal in 2007-2008 to have 70 percent of students in grades 3-5 pass the language arts section.
