Under Title I, schools serving the children of low-income families are required to spend 1% of those funds engaging parents in their childrens’ education. But there is little oversight on how schools spend that money–and little sense if the efforts are raising achievement, according to Dale Russakoff of the Foundation for Child Development.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Russakoff quotes an expert who notes schools “have so much they consider more important that they’ve gotten good at knowing how to minimally meet the requirements.” The usual parental involvement strategies, including parent nights and notes home in backpacks might work in middle class schools, but are not effective with low-income parents or parents who don’t speak English, he notes.
“It’s a dilemma we all face in the area of parental involvement,” Rosie Kelly, a U.S. Department of Education official involved in monitoring state Title I programs, observes. “Our monitoring is for compliance. You’re talking about a quality issue.” Research efforts have likewise yielded little of value, Russakoff notes, frequently failing to take families social class into account. This is not to suggest, however, that there are not promising strategies to explore.
Joyce Epstein, a sociologist who directs the Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University, has helped low-income schools raise student achievement by involving both parents and local institutions in learning. “You don’t have to give parents a college education,” Epstein said. “You just have to give them a strategy for having an interesting conversation with their third-grader about a book they’re reading even if the parents haven’t read the book.”
New York City schools hold workshops early in the morning and on weekends, when parents who work multiple jobs are free. “There are many such strategies that the government could subject to rigorous examination and guide districts on how to implement those that bring results,” Russakoff writes. “Rather than chanting the familiar mantra that parental involvement helps students, it is time to tackle the reasons the current approach isn’t working for everyone and seize this opportunity to lower the tall barriers to achievement facing low-income children,” he concludes.
Amen! Another very good resource in this area is Larry Ferlazzo’s book and accompanying website on parent engagement: http://engagingparentsinschool.edublogs.org/.
Larry also writes a good deal about teacher home visits, which have been very effective. It’s hard work, but it seems to work.
Comment by Claus — December 23, 2009 @ 1:56 pm
Agree with Claus above: home visits are powerful.
However, a similar strategy is frequent phone calls home, proactive calls. We do that. The average parent gets at least one call per week. A home visit is probably 30 minutes to an hour, plus an hour commute or more. Phone calls tend to be 5 to 10 minutes each.
We also do a parent survey each year, and compare the scoring on 4 different metrics to each previous year. Example: To what extent are you satisfied with communication from our school, on a 1 to 10 scale? To what extent are you satisfied with our school overall? Etc.
Then the principal personally meets with any parent scoring the school below a 7 out of 10 (the median is 9, so it’s not a billion calls).
Comment by GGW — December 24, 2009 @ 5:38 pm