The David A. Ellis School in Boston is testing a hypothesis advanced by some experts on student achievement: A “parent friendly” school setting is as important to learning as the classroom environment itself.
Since 1988, the inner-city elementary school has included a parent center, with an overstuffed couch and a coffee machine, so that parents have a place in the school to call their own. A support group for adults earning their high-school-equivalency diplomas, classes in English as a second language, and parenting workshops draw families into the school on a regular basis.
Breakfasts organized by grade level are held in the parent center to enable mothers and fathers to discuss curriculum and other classroom concerns with teachers and administrators. Parents at the school have established a clothing exchange and a school store. And a specially trained cadre of parents visits other families in their homes to involve them in their children’s education.
The efforts are part of a research project, coordinated by the Institute for Responsive Education, that seeks to make families equal partners in their children’s schooling.
“We want to demonstrate that family involvement is crucial to the success of children,” says Owen Heleen, manager of the ire project, known as Schools Reaching Out. “The goal is to make a connection [between families and schools], to have face-to-face contact.”
Although the ire project is more ambitious and comprehensive than most, it represents a growing attempt by educators to reach out to the parents of school-age youngsters.
After more than a decade of reform that has virtually ignored the role of parents in schools, educators and policymakers are beginning to realize that families are crucial for children’s success.
Their growing interest in school-home collaboration is driven, in part, by research that has found a positive relationship between parent participation in education and improved student achievement. (See Education Week, April 4, 1990.)
“A school will never be truly excellent unless it involves parents,’' argues Anne T. Henderson, an associate with the National Committee for Citizens in Education. “Educators can do it all by themselves to the extent that they meet minimum requirements, but they’re never going to get beyond that unless they get the community involved.”
Today, all schools provide for some level of parent participation, ranging from sending home student report cards to asking parents to attend graduation ceremonies.
But experts say that, in most schools, parent participation remains limited in scope. Generally, it is confined to fund raising and other volunteer activities, participation in parent-teacher conferences, and attendance at school plays or sporting events.
“In most schools, parents are not seen as essential partners at all,” says Vahac Mardirosian, president of the Parent Institute, a community-education agency in San Diego. “Schools just don’t see it as their role to court parents or to cultivate a friendship in any way for any real benefit.”
In a few places, however, educators who are alarmed at what they see as a growing gap between home and school have begun to reach out to families through more assertive measures. These include sponsoring parenting workshops, creating parent centers, visiting students’ homes, developing contracts that detail the obligations of parents and teachers, and enhancing communication between home and school.
In the most extreme instances, states and localities have threatened to impose fines or jail sentences on parents who fail to take responsibility for their children’s behavior problems. (See related story, page 30.)
“Schools must do more to position families to help their children in school,” states a recent report by the Council of Chief State School Officers.
“Though some may feel this adds to an already overburdened set of responsibilities for schools,” the report adds, “the situation is such that the potential for the school to address basic family needs must be used.”
Sending a Message: ‘Parents Matter Here’
Joyce L. Epstein, director of the Effective Middle Schools Program at Johns Hopkins University, has identified five types of parent involvement in education. These include:
- The basic obligations of parents, such as providing for their children’s health and safety and creating a home environment that supports learning;
- The basic obligations of schools, such as communicating with parents about school programs and their children’s progress;
- Parent involvement at the school site, through attendance at student performances and sporting events, or through work as volunteers;
- Parent involvement in learning activities at home, such as monitoring or assisting their children with homework; and
- Parent involvement in school governance and advocacy, by serving on advisory councils that make important decisions about school programs and policies, or by participating in external watchdog groups.
At all grade levels, Ms. Epstein maintains, parents need clear information about course requirements and objectives, standards for promotion and graduation, grading practices and test results, and school budget and policy decisions.
But schools vary in how they choose to communicate such information to families and whether they attempt to create more meaningful forms of collaboration.
‘Dignifying’ the Parents’ Role
At the most basic level, some schools are trying to clarify the obligations that parents and teachers have toward children through the creation of written “contracts” or agreements.
School-parent contracts are an important aspect of the Quality Education Project, or qep, launched in 1982 by Nancy Honig, the wife of California’s superintendent of public instruction.
The program, currently used in schools throughout that state and Mississippi, is designed to improve the coordination between home and school by training school officials, teachers, and parents to work together to improve student learning.
The performance contracts provide a visible symbol of that teamwork, Ms. Honig notes.
As part of their “pledge,” parents sign a document promising that they will: provide a quiet place for their children to study, encourage them to complete their homework, get them to bed by 9 P.M., send them to school on time, spend at least 15 minutes a day reading with or to them, and attend back-to-school nights, parent-teacher conferences, open houses, and other school events.
In exchange, principals and teachers sign contracts in which they promise to provide a safe place for children to learn, teach all the concepts necessary for academic achievement, strive to be aware of children’s individual needs, and communicate with parents about their children’s progress.
Contracts are also an important component of the “Accelerated Schools” program begun several years ago by Henry M. Levin, a professor of education and economics at Stanford University.
As part of the program, which aims to bring the achievement of disadvantaged youngsters up to grade level by the end of 6th grade, all parents or guardians are expected to sign a written agreement that clarifies the obligations of the school and the family to promote learning. Parental obligations include ensuring that children go to bed at a reasonable hour and attend school regularly and punctually. School obligations include keeping parents informed about students’ performance.
“The purpose,” says Mr. Levin, “is to emphasize the importance of the parental role through the dignity of a written agreement that is affirmed by all parties.”
Enhanced Communication
In addition to clarifying such basic obligations, educators are attempting to strengthen the regular communication between home and school.
Experts assert that the lack of information flowing between home and school may lie at the root of the dissonance between teachers and parents.
Doris Wilson, a parent at the David Ellis school, says that before the school’s parent-involvement program began, it was difficult to approach teachers to discuss her child’s schoolwork.
“It seemed like a lot of the teachers were on an ego trip,” the Boston parent recalls. “Unless you had a teaching license, they’d look down on you.”
Typically, teachers have communicated with parents in writing, by sending messages home through the mail or with the student themselves. Often, these communications are ignored or are unintelligible to poorly educated or non-English-speaking parents.
Parent-teacher conferences allow for more interaction, but are infrequent and difficult to schedule. As a result, many parents see educators only when their children are having disciplinary or academic problems.
Mr. Mardirosian of the Parent Institute notes that such limited interactions tend to remind low-income and minority parents of their own negative experiences in school.
“We have to actually teach poor parents what middle-class parents already know from their own experience--that school can be a positive, supportive place,” he suggests.
To address such concerns, some schools and districts are trying to find ways to keep parents and teachers in touch on a regular basis.
The q.e.p. program, for example, provides students with a special folder in which they can carry home schoolwork and notes from the teacher at the end of each week.
And in Connecticut, 10 schools have been using the telephone as a constant link between schools and families. As part of a pilot program offered by the Southern New England Telecommunications Corporation, several classrooms in each school have been equipped with a phone-message service that can send recorded voice messages of any length simultaneously to the parents of all students, or to any parent individually.
Parents can also leave phone messages to which the teacher responds.
Madeline A. Mongillo, a kindergarten teacher at Bradley Elementary School in Derby, Conn., uses the system to send messages to parents about each day’s activities and assignments.
The system, she says, “replaces the old paper messages that would more often end up lost in the black hole of the student’s book bag.”
At the Park Elementary School in Dolton, Ill., two teachers have gone one step further, by creating a means for parents to view their children at work.
A special-education teacher, Diana L. Brown, and a speech pathologist, Mary Jo Roche, won a state mini-grant last year that enabled them to rent a video camera and film their students in the classroom.
The videotapes, sent home regularly, help parents develop a clearer understanding of their children’s classroom activities and behaviors.
Although the program’s goal was parent education, Ms. Brown observes, parent involvement in the school increased “tremendously” during the project. “After seeing the tapes, the parents were much less threatened by the school setting,” she says.
Desiree Sanchez, a New York City teacher who has been involved in the Institute for Responsive Education project, says she has found that the more contact she has with parents, the easier her job becomes.
“If I have quick access to a parent,” she explains, “I have quick access to the solution to a problem.”
In other places, educators are trying to increase families’ participation at the site by making schools appear less intimidating and more open to parents.
Last year, for example, state education officials in Florida instituted a “Red Carpet Schools” program to encourage educators to make parents feel welcome. Under the program, special certificates--as well as a genuine red carpet--are awarded to schools that are deemed “parent friendly” by committees of outside observers.
To qualify for the awards, schools are encouraged to make their physical facilities available to families, to set up a “warm and friendly’’ reception area, to provide opportunities for parent education and family involvement, to establish a parent-community advisory group, and to communicate with parents in a variety of ways.
More than 200 of the state’s 2,100 schools have now earned the distinction, according to a state spokesman.
A Room of Their Own
But the ire suggests that if schools really want to make parents feel welcome, they should set up a room for parents to call their own.
At the David Ellis School, for example, the parent center is a comfortable room with places for parents to sit and a play area filled with toys for the preschool chilho accompany them on their visits.
A telephone is provided for parents who do not have phones at home and for teachers to call their students’ families.
In addition to the adult-education classes and workshops held weekly at the center, parents are drawn in by various social events, such as a multicultural potluck dinner and a fathers-only breakfast.
The room is staffed by Annie White, the mother of 10 children, who is paid by the ire as a parent coordinator to bridge the gap between families and the school.
Her first order of business as coordinator, she notes, was to help a homeless family find an apartment. Since then, her role has often included helping to meet the basic needs of families through referrals to other social-service agencies.
“People see me as sort of a mother figure,” she says. “I know what they’ve been through--I’ve had problems with the school myself. But if I can help the parents, both the parents and the students benefit.”
Vivian Johnson, the ire’s project coordinator, estimates that about 30 percent of the school’s parents use the center.
“Before we came in, there was a sign on the outside of the school saying, ‘Parents: Wait outside for your children,”’ she re6calls. “The fact that this center exists sends a message to parents.”
An Education for Parents
Schools like David Ellis are also offering workshops and classes for parents, in an effort to bring them into the school building.
As part of the qep effort in Mississippi, seven school districts have developed monthly seminars for parents on topics of the parents’ choosing. The seminars, which are held in the evenings and on weekends to meet working parents’ schedules, cover such subjects as parenting skills, drug and alcohol abuse, and basic school procedures.
The goal of the seminars is to assist parents who often feel “powerless” when it comes to helping their children learn, says Ivy H. Lovelady, coordinator of the statewide pilot program. “Schools need to ‘empower’ parents,” she says, “to teach them how to discipline their children, or to turn off the TV to help them study.”
Other efforts focus on teaching parents and children together. For example, the Family Math Program, which is used by schools nationwide, teaches parents and their children problem-solving skills based on the use of hands-on materials.
In San Diego, community agencies have also joined with schools to take on the task of parent education. Mr. Mardirosian of the Parent Institute there has operated six-week courses for parents in about 25 schools over the past two years. The courses are developed by parents and taught at the schools by local college professors.
In other instances, educators have helped launch parent-education classes that take place outside the school. (See story, page 26.)
In Indianapolis, the district has an agreement with 15 local businesses to provide parent-education seminars at their workplaces during lunch hours. And this spring, the United Federation of Teachers and two other New York City unions announced an agreement to provide parent seminars in several languages at work sites throughout the city.
Such classes often target the parents of children in specific age groups and provide them with the skills they need to work with their youngsters on schoolwork at home or to become better parents in general.
David L. Williams Jr., director of the school-improvement resources group of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, warns that schools should not intrude on the “right and ability of parents to rear children.”
But he argues that without training on how to support their children’s learning, parents will never become the resources that schools so desperately need.
The ‘Accountability Factor’
Once parents are drawn into a school by classes geared to their needs, educators hope they will become more involved in schooling on a regular basis, with benefits to themselves and their youngsters.
For example, research has found that parents’ visits to observe their children in class can engender trust and shared expectations between parents and teachers.
“If parents are in the school building at all times,” says Ms. Henderson of the National Committee for Citizens in Education, “and are listened to by school officials, the kids say, ‘Gee, our parents matter here,’ and the school’s whole climate will change.”
In addition, she observes, the parents’ presence introduces an “accountability factor” into the teacher-student relationship."If parents are around, teachers will treat kids better and give them more attention,” she says. “And children who get caring, loving attention do better in school.”
Not Always Welcome
But parents’ visits to schools on occasions other than pre-scheduled appointments often result in conflict. And teachers frequently are unwilling to comply with the full open-door policy sought by parents.
Mary Filardo, a mother of three schoolchildren in Washington, cites one example of the often halfhearted welcome offered to parents. For years, she says, her daughter’s elementary school had a policy inviting parents to visit the school at any time. But no visitors were allowed on the second floor of the building, where all of the classrooms were located.
“There has always been the question of who controls the child’s life in school,” acknowledges Sandra Feldman, president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City. “Teachers are always concerned that parents will interfere.”
In other cases, educators say they have tried to involve parents, but to no avail.
Tom Hollister, executive director of Associated Pomona Teachers in Pomona, Calif., says, “I think teachers are convinced that parents just don’t have the time to get involved.”
“Teachers try to lay out a plan for parents,” he asserts, “they try to meet with them to get them more involved, but then no one shows up.”
A Newsweek poll released this spring, for example, found that more than half of all parents surveyed had not attended a single back-to-school night since the school year began, while 54 percent had not gone to a single parent organization meeting. Parents most often blamed their low participation on lack of time and conflicting work schedules.
‘From the School to the Home’
In response to such findings, some experts contend that schools should devote more effort to helping parents reinforce their children’s learning at home, and less time to in-school activities.
“To involve more parents more often and more productively” argues Ms. Epstein, “requires changing the major location of parent involvement from the school to the home, changing the major emphasis from general policies to specific skills, and changing the major target from the general population of students or school staff to the individual child at home.”
She is one of several experts nationwide who have developed models to help parents work with their children at home on school-related skills. Her program, “Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork,” offers training for teachers to involve elementary- and middle-school parents in their children’s homework assignments.
The program targets mathematics and science instruction in the elementary grades and social-studies instruction at the middle-school level. The goal is to help6teachers guide parents through structured homework assignments that must be completed by the parent and child together.
Dorothy Rich, founder of the Home and School Institute Inc., has also been pressing for increased parent involvement at home for more than 20 years.
Drawing on ideas in her book Megaskills: How Families Can Help Children Succeed in School and Beyond, Ms. Rich has created the Megaskills Education Center, which offers parent-training workshops across the country.
The program teaches parents to provide their children with the motivation, basic skills, and attitudes needed to succeed in school, rather than reinforcing specific in-school lessons. Students whose parents have participated in the program have shown improvement in reading, reasoning, and visual-aural skills, according to Ms. Rich.
Some programs are even sending teachers directly into students’ homes to work with families. In El Paso, Tex., for example, “Project Care” provides substitutes for teachers who would like to visit parents at home during the school day.
Gloria Barragan, the project’s director, says teachers were impressed by how eager even the most hard-to-reach parents were to work with their children, once they were shown how they could provide educational activities at home.
Parents as Decisionmakers
Others argue that, especially for poor and minority parents who have been disenfranchised by the educational system, attempts to foster stronger school-home ties must include giving parents a greater say in school decisionmaking.
That concept is a basic premise of the school-improvement model developed by the psychiatrist James P. Comer at Yale University’s Child Study Center.
Dr. Comer contends that involving parents on governance councils that have direct input into school operations can help lessen parents’ distrust of educators.
The model, which is being replicated across the country through a $15-million Rockefeller Foundation grant, focuses on children’s academic, social, and emotional development through the use of teams composed of teachers, parents, and child-development specialists.
As part of the “Accelerated Schools” model developed by Mr. Levin at Stanford University, parents and teachers also collaborate in making important school decisions.
“Unless we can create schools in which ... there are decisions that parents can make that have meaning for their children,” Mr. Levin maintains, “parental involvement must necessarily be limited.”
Involving parents in decisionmaking, however, has often proven problematic because of the potential for turf conflicts between educators and parents.
Ms. Honig of California says she designed the qep program to avoid the school-governance issue for just that reason. “School boards would be too threatened” by a governance role for parents, she asserts.
‘Words Are Meaningless’ Without Support
Experts generally agree that the most effective parent-involvement programs employ a combination of approaches. Individual strategies, they say, are less important than that the efforts be comprehensive and sustained.
In contrast, existing programs still tend to be fragmented and limited in scope--in part, because of inadequate funding.
“Even when assistance is made available, there are often strings attached,” notes Ms. Barragan of Project Care.
Many programs are struggling to survive on private funds, unable to convince cost-conscious school boards or state legislatures of the importance of their work.
The phone-message service created in Connecticut, for example, was scheduled to end this June, after the pilot project was completed. So far, district officials have not made a commitment to continue it.
The videotape project in Illinois ended earlier this year because the school lacked the money to buy a video camera after the initial mini-grant ran out.
And Boston’s David Ellis school is in danger of losing its parent center because of overcrowding. District officials consider the room an empty classroom that should hold another group of kindergartners.
In addition, experts note that training for teachers and parents to improve home-school collaboration is sorely lacking.
“Teachers are never taught to work with adults,” says Jean Krasnow, a senior researcher with the ire “There’s never any discussion of the tension that exists there.”
Those tracking such initiatives also say that a dearth of visible role models and weak state and district leadership have thwarted parent-involvement efforts.
Seven ‘Essential Elements’
Mr. Williams of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory has identified seven “essential elements” that he says can help parent-involvement programs succeed. These include:
- Written policies at the district and school levels that establish the legitimacy of parent-involvement activities.
- Three types of support from school administrators: funding designated in the main budget; materials, equipment, and meeting space; and designation of people to carry out program efforts.
- Training for school staff members and parents to help them develop partnership skills.
- Joint planning, goal-setting, and assessment by teachers, parents, and administrators.
- Frequent, two-way communication between home and school. Parents should feel comfortable coming to school, and staff members should welcome their involvement.
- Connections with other programs, information systems, and resources that serve families, such as social-service agencies.
- Regular evaluations and revisions, where necessary.
“Words about the importance of parent involvement are meaningless without financial and technical support,” says Ms. Epstein of Johns Hopkins University.
“State education agencies have offered mainly symbolic, verbal support for the importance of parent involvement,” she maintains, “but little financial support for staff and programs needed to improve parent understanding, teacher practices, and family and school connections.’'
‘A Long Way To Go’
A 50-state survey released this spring--"Assessing State Parental Involvement Legislation and Regulations: Is the Cup Half Empty or Half Full?"--supports Ms. Epstein’s criticisms.
Of the 47 states responding to the survey, 20 had enacted some type of legislation to promote school-home collaboration. But most of those simply encouraged districts to reach out to parents as part of a broader school initiative, such as Head Start, Chapter 1, or the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.
Only four states had mandated that districts involve parents in the education of their children, and in each case there were limits on the type of participation required.
For example, two of the states, Missouri and Oregon, required districts to work with parents before their children reached school age, but not after.
The other two states, South Carolina and Massachusetts, focused only on involving parents on advisory councils that monitor school improvement.
“It can be seen that, while making inroads, parent involvement as an integral element in the educational process still has a long way to go,” the report concluded.
Another report, released last July, found that state education agencies “offer only lip service to advancing improved home-school connections.”
The report analyzed the number of staff members in each state responsible for coordinating school-home programs. It found that state education agencies had allocated only one full-time employee for every 500,000 public-school students nationwide.
“Even those states that might claim to provide leadership in parent-involvement practices,” it concluded, “are providing insufficient monetary and human resources to ensure healthy and continued collaboration on the district and local level between the school and home.”
State and District Action
A few states and districts are trying to promote more aggressive efforts.
Dade County, Fla., and San Diego adopted far-reaching parent-involvement policies this year. Neither district mandates such programs, but both offer financial incentives and technical assistance to help schools develop parent-participation programs.
The Dade County policy, adopted in April, was forged by a task force of school officials, teachers, parents, and community members, who often clashed over components of the plan.
The policy they finally agreed on offers parents a “bill of rights,’' according to Betsy Kaplan, the school-board member who initiated the concept. Parents are guaranteed an equal role on school-governance committees at every school, and they have a say in the selection of principals and teachers.
The district has established an office of parent involvement, with a full-time coordinator. In addition to general parent-education workshops, training is offered to school staff members and parents to help them learn to collaborate.
The district is also lobbying local businesses to offer employees leave time to become involved in their children’s schools. And district officials are pushing for local teacher-education programs to include training on the role of parents in education.
Ms. Kaplan emphasizes that the Dade County plan will attempt to include “all kinds of parents,” not just a limited few.
“There are parents out there who aren’t doing the best job, and there are teachers and principals who aren’t doing the best job. But if we keep parents out of the education process, none of them will be able to do the best job for their children,” she argues.
The San Diego policy also offers parents a role in school decisionmaking. In addition, the new office of parent involvement has developed a series of guidebooks and other literature to promote school-home collaboration.
The policy, which will take three years to carry out, establishes an action plan for schools that includes strategies to improve communication, involve parents at the school site, and make better use of community resources.
Janet Chrispeels, coordinator of the district policy, notes that the San Diego program was developed as part of a broader reform plan.
“People are running to parent involvement as a Band-Aid to fix things, but frankly it won’t work unless it is part of an overall school-improvement plan,” she contends.
Although San Diego officials developed their plan locally, its success is related to a state policy promoting parent involvement that was adopted last year.
California was the first state to adopt a comprehensive policy calling for increased parent involvement in education.
Since then, officials in several other states have indicated interest in the concept. For example:
In Minnesota, legislators passed a bill last October that calls for the creation of a comprehensive parent-involvement plan. A state conference--including a wide range of parent advocates, educators, community leaders, social-service workers, and state officials--was held in April to begin drafting a model policy.
A key component of the plan will be financial incentives to promote innovative school-home partnerships, according to state Representative Ken G. Nelson, a sponsor of the bill.
- Joseph Shilling, state superintendent of education in Maryland, in May included increased parent involvement as one of 10 goals for the school system. Plans for a statewide policy have not yet been released, but the superintendent is calling for nontraditional, collaborative relationships between homes, schools, and communities.
- Mississippi lawmakers this spring approved a reform package, called Better Education for Success Tomorrow, or best, that includes both carrots and sticks to promote increased parental involvement in education. The package, as yet unfunded, includes a plan to help lower the dropout rate by coordinating community services for parents through the workplace, churches, schools, and other institutions.
In addition, the law requires parents to attend disciplinary conferences for their children or face a misdemeanor charge or a fine of up to $2,000.
‘Waiting for the Revolution’
But Don Davies, executive director of the Institute for Responsive Education, says he has grown impatient waiting for “the revolution” to come from state and district initiatives.
In an effort to promote successful programs, and help schools share ideas on how to involve parents, the ire has established a League of Schools Reaching Out in 19 urban districts across the country.
The 37 league schools were chosen for having taken “the first step toward forging new partnerships to support students both in and out of the classroom,” Mr. Davies says.
Through the network, the schools will share ideas for promoting parent involvement with each other and with other interested groups.
Mr. Davies says he also plans to develop a model for collaboration based on findings from the ire’s efforts at the David Ellis school and a sister laboratory school in New York City.
In an upcoming report on his work with the Ellis school, Mr. Davies concludes that “the educational revolution is likely to occur in small stages, gradually and painfully, with many starts and stops.”
“It is better to begin with some ideas that work and that can be achieved by ordinary people with reasonable effort,” he argues.
Although the research project at the David Ellis school is over and the ire officials do not expect to continue working as closely with parents and teachers there, the school-home partnership is expected to continue.
“Some people say that, when we leave, the teachers will all go back into their classrooms and shut the door, and the parents will go back home,” says Ms. Krasnow of the ire “But I think the teachers here are ready to go on to another level. They started the change, and I think it won’t be stopped.”
