When parents are active participants in their children’s education—whether by attending parent-teacher conferences and other school events or simply talking about school at home—the involvement has long been identified as making a positive difference in students’ academic success.
But language barriers and scheduling woes can get in the way of the ability of parents who don’t speak English as their first language to be actively involved in their children’s education.
Indeed, newly released federal data covering two decades confirm that English-speaking parents and caregivers are more likely to participate in school activities than their Spanish-speaking counterparts. Language barriers and other related hurdles contribute to the gap.
In 1999, about 79 percent of English-speaking parents reported attending a general school meeting, compared with 69 percent of Spanish-speaking parents. By 2019, the gap remained, even though those figures had risen for both groups, to 87 and 75 percent respectively.
During the 2018-19 school year, about 69 percent of Spanish-speaking parents who attempted to participate in activities at their children’s school reported that a language barrier made it difficult to participate.
In addition to the language barrier, Spanish-speaking parents are more likely to face other logistical hurdles that keep them from participating in school activities as much as they want to, said Elisabeth O’Bryon, co-founder and chief impact officer of the nonprofit Family Engagement Lab. Those include scheduling conflicts with work, transportation challenges, and difficulty with finding child care so they can attend meetings with teachers.
Yet when schools address those barriers, they can boost family engagement among multilingual parents, which in turn can lead to improvement in students’ academic achievement, O’Bryon and others have found.
“We need to think about families from that asset-based lens and realize that their potential for contributions is super meaningful and think about how to do that best, given the specific community needs and linguistic needs are huge,” O’Bryon said.
Schools can minimize barriers to parent participation
When working with immigrant families in particular, schools must take the initiative to fully inform them about how things work with U.S. schools, including the basics, such as whom to contact at the school with specific questions and how to view students’ grades, Ana Pasarella, the director of family and community engagement at the Alvin school district in Texas, said in an EdWeek webinar last month.
While the federal data on parental participation focused on school activities held in person on school campuses, O’Bryon noted that schools should think about family engagement beyond those on-campus activities.
“We want families to regularly get information about what their kids are learning and how they can help at home,” she said.
Bethzaida Sotomayor, a teacher in the English-for-speakers-of-other-languages department at the Volusia County schools in Florida, encourages schools to think outside the box when scheduling activities. Offer meals at events held around dinnertime to entice participation among parents who would otherwise need to be at home preparing food, she advised during the EdWeek webinar.
Some teachers in the Denver school district set up meetings with parents at their homes and over Zoom in an effort to become better acquainted with students and their needs and dreams.
Schools can also teach parents how precisely they can help their children with their school work at home. That’s information that Spanish-speaking parents have requested in surveys the Family Engagement Lab has conducted, O’Bryon added.
