As districts struggle to improve student outcomes and well-being, family engagement is a crucial piece of the puzzle. But a new report argues that some schools don’t consider what it means to truly involve caregivers in students’ education.
True family engagement creates a synergy between parents, the community, and schools that can be thought of as an “equitable partnership-driven process,” said Ayesha Hashim, a senior research scientist at the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) and one of the authors of a new report about how family engagement can help schools recover long term from the pandemic.
The NWEA is an educational organization based in Portland, Ore., that creates research-based assessments for K-12 schools and districts. Its report concludes that family engagement is often thought of as parental involvement and interest—but that’s too narrow a definition.
"[The parental involvement] lens assumes parents should just plug into [school activities], it doesn’t actually think about the institutional constraints and barriers that hinder participation,” said Hashim.
Schools encourage parental participation, but parents can play an even larger role in student success, said Karen Mapp, a professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, whose research has focused on creating partnerships between families, community members, and educators.
“We’ve seen engagement is more about, let’s make families happy about our school, happy about our district, so that they support the things that we’re doing,” said Mapp. “But there’s no connection to engaging [parents] with what’s actually happening around student goals.”
Family plays a pivotal role in a student’s education
Past research shows that parental involvement in a student’s education resulted in improved academic achievement, school engagement, and motivation. For example, when students practice skills they learned at school with their parents at home, they showed higher percentages in reading and math proficiency. Additionally, parental involvement also helps students regulate their emotions better, enjoy school, and prevent student delinquency.
Historically, national surveys paint families as uninterested in COVID recovery efforts, according to the report.
For example, the Brookings Institution, Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, and the USC Rossier School of Education conducted a survey in April and May of 2022, asking parents questions about their children’s academic experiences in that school year. Some questions were used to measure parents’ awareness of and interest in tutoring and summer school.
The results showed 23% of parents of school-aged children were interested in their kids attending summer school and 28% were interested in tutoring.
But Hashim argues that questions about parental interest are not the best way to measure family engagement.
“These surveys, because they’re national, they’re asking questions about a lot of different things, so they may not have time to ask families about all their interactions at schools,” she said. “[These questions are] really asking about participation, but the finding is framed as interest.”
Typically, parents are expected to passively participate and plug into school-related activities like parent-teacher conferences or back-to-school nights, the report found.
But that expectation does not consider the different barriers parents may face like language or a tough work schedule, said Hashim: “[Those parents are] not going to be able to plug in when you need them... Then the assumption is to blame them.”
Instead, family engagement should be measured by establishing goals agreed on by the community, parents, and the school. These goals should consider any institutional policies and systemic barriers that might affect parents and students, which can vary by district, said Hashim.
“This is a very locally defined phenomenon. You can’t just read a national survey and understand what family engagement might look like,” she said. “Leaders really need to be asking thoughtful questions of their local communities.”
Recommendations to foster family engagement
In order for schools to increase family engagement, there needs to be more frequent communication with parents on matters that go beyond bad behavior or student achievement.
“If the first phone call home is about bad news, guess what? [There’s] not going to be much of a relationship developed,” said Mapp.
Instead, Mapp suggests schools send a welcome note home to each family and follow up with a phone call, with the main message being: We welcome you and your family.
Additionally, there can be a lack of trust between parents and schools, and it’s important for educators to understand what building trust looks like in their community, she said.
Each school community is different, and the best way to build trust with parents and guardians may vary. For example, in New Mexico, schools that wanted to meet families for home visits as a way to build trust ran into obstacles.
“In Indigenous communities, home visits just aren’t appropriate, and so consequently what [educators] do are community visits,” Mapp said. “They’ll go to a community gathering place—the library or something like that—to do trust-building with families.”
Finally, schools should involve parents more in school-wide decisionmaking, both Hashim and Mapp agreed.
“Parents are actually really hungry for leadership opportunities where they can give input that will meaningfully transform the education of their child,” said Hashim.
For example, if schools are focused on helping students write better essays, teachers can communicate with parents about the components of a good essay. Then, at home, parents can ask their children questions about building an effective argument to further develop those skills outside of the classroom.
“Families aren’t in the dark, and now teachers and schools have allies at home helping them to support the specific goals around teaching and learning that they’re trying to achieve,” said Mapp.
Educators should also be learning more about family engagement in their professional development, Hashim said.
“We need to approach this from the lens of professional development on how to communicate with families,” she said. “This ultimately is going to make the work of teachers easier, because if students and families feel connected to school and are coming to school, then teachers can do their job.”
