Do schools take parent involvement seriously?

No
Jackie Allen
It's more than fundraising and field trips

For many schools, parent involvement is defined as attending a once-a-year meeting, being a fundraiser, being an active booster, chaperoning field trips or serving on committees that meet occasionally. Many schools never acknowledge that parents have substantive knowledge to offer.

The fact is we parents possess many talents, and schools would certainly be more interesting and diverse places if they could learn to creatively use parents' knowledge, interests and experiences to enhance the educational experience for all children. In fact, numerous studies show that family involvement positively affects student achievement. The national PTA and other organizations endorse strong parent involvement programs, while most federally funded educational measures mandate parent involvement.

Many teachers and administrators maintain that parents don't want to be involved. This may be true of some parents, but it's often because they have been alienated from the educational setting. Some of this stems from their own negative school experiences or from the way they feel they are treated. Unwelcoming atmospheres, rude school staff, lack of access to classrooms and teachers, meetings that are scheduled during normal working hours and lack of meaningful communication from schools contribute to this feeling. Meetings scheduled at 3 or 4 p.m. send the message to working parents that the teachers' time is more valuable than the parents' time. Too many employed parents don't have the luxury of being able to leave work that early. Schools need to recognize that the rest of the world operates on a different schedule. If schools are sincerely interested in increasing their parental involvement, they must try reaching out, try new ways of involving people when the ways they have traditionally used are ineffective.

Another obstacle is the fact that teachers and administrators often are not trained in dealing with parents and seeking meaningful parent involvement. Even if they would like to have parents involved in their classrooms and schools, they seem not to know what to do with them once they are there. Parents make teachers nervous, or so it sometimes seems. Maybe some professional development could address this, as could a change in attitude.

Teachers and parents must learn to talk with each other. Parents want to be involved and can be one of the schools' most valuable resources.

Teachers should consider parents allies in enhancing achievement for every student in the school. While many schools have learned what wonderful resources involved parents are, unfortunately, too many schools and their staffs still give only lip service to the concept.

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Yes
Kelly Allin Butler:
Schools are making progress

Research suggests that we're making progress in involving parents in public schools. The work of Anne Henderson and others show that when parents are involved, children do better in school and the schools get better, too. Don Davies, founder of the Institute for Responsive Education, once described the essential elements of parent involvement in what he called the "10th school," meaning that they were present in one of every 10 schools.

As Davies pointed out, schools (although not enough of them) are reflecting not just the presence of parents but a change in the culture and a heightened expectation about the role parents can and should play.

There are other advances as well, such as the legal framework supporting, although not always guaranteeing, the parents' role. The reawakening of "civic engagement" has put whole communities on alert that those who are most directly affected by the public schools--parents and their children--should be on the front lines of creating stronger schools for all children, not just the ones we know.

Parents also are pushing for a change. No longer willing to sit on the sidelines, parents want to be a part of the decisions that affect learning. Parents of all income and educational levels are stepping up to make their voices heard. What this suggests is that historical mechanisms and expectations for involvement by the system have not been enough.

Traditional parent involvement probably has not improved much, except that schools are creating more convenient times for parents to attend parent/teacher conferences. More of the same is not necessarily better anyway. But real, effective parent involvement is refreshingly apparent in schools led by administrators who embrace the presence and participation of parents. They have a clear sense of why they are involving parents. For them, it is not an add-on or a program that pays lip service to district policy; it is a part of the culture of the school. You can feel it the minute you walk through the door and you can see it in the achievement levels of the students.

Increasing parent involvement is not about losing control by administrators or teachers. It's about recognizing and supporting an essential component of the student achievement equation.

The first step toward better parent involvement is believing that it really matters to student achievement. Furthermore, to evaluate parent involvement based on too-limited a role is to miss the advances we have made in widening the scope of what it means. On both counts, significant progress is being made. After all, even the 10th school had to start somewhere.

American Federation of Teachers, AFL•CIO - 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW - Washington, DC 20001