Family Valued

by David McKay Wilson

Two weeks into the fall term, Stamford schools superintendent Joshua Starr, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D.’01, welcomes 90 parents and community members to the year’s first monthly community forum. As a crew of teenage babysitters care for the children of single parents in one classroom, Starr discusses his vision of math instruction for elementary and middle school students, declaring that the district staff will do its utmost to make sure every Stamford child masters algebra.

Starr acknowledges that his diverse urban district in Connecticut’s affluent Fairfield County lags behind others on statewide math exams. But he assures the audience that Stamford has changed its curriculum this year to give students a better chance at meeting the benchmarks. To help assuage parent fears, they are invited to sit in on a short lesson, with Latino parents aided by a translator equipped with a wireless communication device.

“When folks don’t know about the changes, oftentimes they think the worst,” says Starr, who became Stamford’s schools chief in 2005. “We felt that strategically we had to educate parents as to exactly what we were doing in math and science.” For Starr, the September forum was part of his drive to engage parents from the entire community — from the anxious upper-middle class parent concerned that her high-achieving son is not getting the enrichment he deserves to the struggling low-income single mother worried that her child might drop out or the Latino father who doesn’t speak English and is mystified by the American school bureaucracy.

This fall, Stamford established the Office of Family Engagement, which has a team of bilingual parent facilitators in each of Stamford’s 20 schools serving as a contact point for immigrant families who may not feel welcome there. These facilitators provide Spanish-speaking allies for immigrant families and can serve as translators in school meetings — be it in the principal’s office or before the committee deciding on their child’s specialeducation placement.

“We want to make our schools more welcoming,” says Beryl Williams, the district’s school/family resource officer Stamford educators, like those in school districts around the country, are devising innovative strategies to form partnerships with parents that will encourage learning, close the achievement gap, and broaden support for education in their communities. They do so at a time when federal officials are reviewing the parental involvement mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act as Congress considers reauthorizing the landmark legislation. These mandates give parents the option to transfer their children within the district if their school has failed to meet state benchmarks or is found to be “persistently dangerous,” a term defined by each state that has come under heavy criticism from school administrators. In addition, parents are required to have access to test scores in their schools and in the overall district, giving parents opportunities for advocacy. For Title 1 schools, which receive funding for lowincome students, the requirements are greater, with the district required to set aside at least 1 percent of their Title 1 funding for parent involvement initiatives.

As a result, family engagement initiatives are cropping up across the country. Boston teachers are making home visits to immigrant parents to engage them on their own turf. In the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, educators established the Parent Academy with courses for adults on discipline, nutrition, and child development. Educators in Omaha, Neb., have installed a web-based system that allows parents access to teacher grade books so they can track their child’s progress from home. Pittsburgh officials, meanwhile, are working on a district-wide initiative to improve the annual parent-teacher conference. Helping develop Pittsburgh’s family involvement strategy is Heather Weiss, Ed.M.’71, Ed.D.’79, founding director of Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP). Based at the Ed School, the project serves as a clearinghouse for studies and initiatives on family engagement.

“The research has been stacking up for 40 years, showing that getting under-involved parents involved is one of the most powerful mechanisms to improve learning and development in the country,” says Weiss. “It shows that you get a good return on investment, whether it’s in early childhood, elementary, middle, or high school.”

“The research has been stacking up for 40 years, showing that getting under-involved parents involved is one of the most powerful mechanisms to improve learning and development in the country.” – Heather Weiss, Ed.M.’71, Ed.D.’79This involvement goes far beyond the fundraising auction sponsored by the PTA or showing up to volunteer in your child’s classroom. Engagement can occur at home as well, where parents read to their infants and make sure that homework gets done. And it continues into the community, with parents serving a crucial role in generating support for school budgets and bond referenda. It’s not just parents either — grandparents and aunts and uncles play important roles, especially for children raised by single parents.

There is a growing understanding that family engagement is important. School reform researchers, aided by data from statewide tests required by NCLB, have found that family involvement promotes school success for children of every age, according to a series of HFRP reports published in 2006 and 2007. Involvement in a child’s education starts during infancy as parents work with their children to develop language and get them ready for kindergarten. Elementary school children thrive with parents who understand the importance of schooling, continue reading to them, expose them to the world, and work with them on homework. Parental involvement typically falls off in middle and high school, though studies show that continued engagement is important to keep the child focused so that he or she can succeed in high school, be prepared for college, and subsequently enter the workforce.

“There are real challenges to keep parents involved past elementary school,” says Holly Kreider, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’97, a HFRP researcher from 1992 to 2007. “Parents really have to start early and stay the course.”

Staying the course means continuing involvement through the high school years as parents play a crucial role in helping their child through the process that will bring them to college. In fact, the college selection process for today’s high-achieving student has created a new phenomenon — the parent who goes on college tours without the student, who is away during the summer at sports camp, doing an internship, or on an overseas mission trip.

“This was mind-boggling the first time it happened,” says Norrine Bailey Spencer, Virginia Polytechnic Institute’s associate provost and director of undergraduate admissions. “Clearly, the parent and the student divvied up the work to be done during the summer. The student was away doing something equally important, so the parents made the college tour alone.”

How families become involved, and the influence that involvement has with their children, can vary widely. Ed School Lecturer Karen Mapp, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’99, says educators must be careful not to have a narrow view of family engagement. Mapp, coauthor of the 2007 book Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family-School Partnerships, says parents can have a positive influence in many ways.

“If your definition of involvement is that they come to school or volunteer in the office, it will be very difficult for many parents to be engaged,” she says. “We studied the families of migrant students. They took their children with them on weekends to pick fruit and told them that if they didn’t succeed in school, they’d be doing this all their lives. We have to be careful with the assumptions we make.”

Mapp’s book is a how-to guide both for educators designing programs to involve families and for parents, whom the authors urge to be “pushy” for their children. That advocacy, she warns, must be done in a positive manner, with a respect for the professionals at the school.

For teachers, the involved parent can be a blessing and a curse. Teachers welcome engaged parents — to a point. Marc Pekowsky, a veteran middle school teacher in Yonkers, N.Y., says parents can play an important role in middle school, helping to reinforce the classroom learning by making sure that homework is a priority at home. But he says parental involvement can also cross the line when they do not back teachers who have disciplined their children.

“We often get parents coming in, taking the side of the child who has misbehaved,” says Pekowsky. “They sit there and demand we tell them what we did to provoke the child.”

The conflict between parents and teachers can be real, with disputes at times tinged with racial and cultural biases, says Nancy Hill, a visiting associate professor at the Ed School this year. Her research found that teachers had a tendency to attribute low levels of pro-social behavior in African American boys to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder at much higher rates than similar behaviors exhibited by white boys in grades kindergarten through four. Other studies have found that when African American boys were seen goofing off in class, their behavior was labeled as disrespectful and in need of punishment while a white child behaving similarly was seen as bored and in need of an intellectual challenge.

“That happens enough that African American parents may be on the defensive for the right reasons,” Hill says.

“If your definition of involvement is that they come to school or volunteer in the office, it will be very difficult for many parents to be engaged.” – Lecturer Karen Mapp Some Latino parents, meanwhile, may seem uninterested in their child’s education because they have emigrated here from countries where adults leave the teaching to the educators and would never think of questioning a teacher’s actions.

“Teachers may view that as disengagement rather than professional respect,” Hill says.

Empowering the parents of students in low-performing schools was one aim of NCLB. That empowerment came in part through the release of test scores on statewide tests that would show whether one’s school was failing or making the grade.

If a school failed to meet certain benchmarks, then parents won the right to transfer their child to high-performing schools within their district. That provision, however, has not resulted in many transfers because some districts had several failing schools, and transfers aren’t allowed across district lines.

Students in failing schools were also eligible for supplemental services, provided by private tutoring companies or nonprofit agencies. But that process has proved troublesome as well with parents experiencing difficulties discerning which programs best suited their child, says Anne Henderson, a New York– based senior consultant at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform and coauther, with Mapp, of Beyond the Bake Sale.

“The parents don’t have the information they need to make these choices, and many districts have taken a hands-off approach to the private providers,” says Henderson. “It has been confusing to parents.”

While urban educators often need to devise strategies to engage the under-involved parents of low-income students, suburban educators often have to address the needs of middle and upper class parents in their communities. David Fleishman, Ed.M.’93, superintendent of schools in Chappaqua, N.Y., an elite district in New York City’s northern suburbs, says it is a much different environment from the Washington Irving High School in lower Manhattan where he began his teaching career in the late 1980s.

Chappaqua parents are highly involved and highly educated, he says. They are also very vocal. He has had parents question the district’s curriculum choices after they had done research on the Internet and found what they thought was a better way. At a recent PTA meeting, Fleishman was confronted by a mother concerned that while some teachers at the school had websites that let parents know their child’s homework assignment each day, her child’s teacher did not have one. Then there was the e-mail campaign, organized by an irate parent concerned about a change in the schedule at Horace Greeley High, which generated 100 e-mails to his inbox that needed response. “This forces us to communicate really quickly,” he says.

“We were going from 45 minutes a class to 60 or 80 minutes to move to richer and deeper learning. But we had tons of e-mails, based on some misinformation, and we had to get [the situation] corrected fast.”

With the research showing that family engagement is good for children, parents too must figure out how they manage the relationship between themselves and their children, and with their children’s teachers.

That hit home for Holly Kreider, the former researcher at HFRP, whose daughter, Sarena, entered first grade this fall at Mariano Castro School in Mountain View, Calif. Her daughter attends a dual immersion class, with teachers speaking in both English and Spanish. At back-to-school night, the Spanish teacher announced that she does not speak English in front of the children, which encourages students to only speak Spanish to their teacher.

This put Kreider in a bind. She is a single working parent of two children. Her only opportunity for face-to-face contact with her daughter’s teacher is at drop-off time with the children around. But Kreider does not speak Spanish.

So they now communicate by e-mail and plan to meet at an upcoming open house, where childcare is provided. Kreider still bristles at the situation, which has made her more sensitive to the issues confronting non-English-speaking parents every day.

“My first-grader will never see me speak to her teacher, and as a parent involvement researcher, I don’t like that much,” she says. “I think the cost of this policy on children whose parents are monolingual English speakers is large. It promotes inequities across parents and children. And it’s a cost that I suspect many non-English-speaking parents bear.”

It is those very non-English-speaking parents that Joshua Starr wants to engage in Fairfield County as well. Thirty-four percent of his students come from families that do not speak English at home. He sees it as a key piece of his campaign to get every Stamford student prepared for college. Among the initiatives is a leadership academy for ninth- and tenth-graders, which involves parents through dinner meetings and events that celebrate student academic success.

“We bring the parents together through their kids,” says Starr. “We need parents involved in this work, and we need to be organized to make it happen.”

— David McKay Wilson is a former newspaper reporter whose work appears in The New York Times and other alumni magazines. This is his first piece for Ed.

— Illustrations by Tom Blaff

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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