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The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.

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Debbie Pushor, Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies at the College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, writes:

The most important work we can do as educators is to ask hard questions about what we do and why we do it. It is critical we open our practice to examination and ask what beliefs and assumptions lie beneath those practices. For example, what do we believe about the position of parents in their children's schooling when we schedule 6-minute parent/teacher conferences or when we have parents stand in long lines in a gymnasium waiting to talk to us about their children's performance in school? By making the beliefs and assumptions that motivate our practices with parents visible and conscious, we can begin to critically reflect on the work we do.

I spent a year as a researcher in a midwestern Canadian city exploring one large suburban elementary school's parent involvement beliefs, assumptions, and practices. Through conversations with parents and educators, I came to understand that far too often knowledge and decision making in schools rest with the educators. Parents are involved primarily to carry out tasks the school determines to be necessary. Educators bring their professional knowledge of teaching into a community with the intention of enhancing children's learning and parents' ability to support their children's education. In doing so, educators assume ownership for the school and they establish programs, policies, procedures, and routines for children and parents. Educators hold parent and curriculum sessions to orient parents to their way of thinking, to share their knowledge, and to teach parents how to support their children both at school and at home.

Exploring school practices at my research school unearthed deep questions about invitation and ownership that I ask other educators to consider: What might a school be like if parents had a rightful place and voice on that landscape? How might the landscape of schools change if educators saw parents big, in their integrity and individuality, rather than small, from a detached point of view and through the lens of a system? Who owns the ground called “school”? And, perhaps the most important question, Who decides?

From my perspective, top-down policy or parent involvement matrixes will not change the school landscape. It is people themselves. Possibilities for re-imagining schooling reside within each one of us.

Debbie Pushor, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Curriculum Studies, College of Education
University of Saskatchewan
28 Campus Drive
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada S7N 0X1
Email: debbie.pushor@usask.ca
www.debbiepushor.com

 


 

Janice Kroeger, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education and Teaching, Leadership, and Curriculum Studies at Kent State University, writes:

Schools must take active responsibility to learn more about the range of families they serve within specific communities and use this information to develop family involvement strategies that all find useful and enjoyable. In a recent research project, I found that schools and teachers often approach family involvement as a “one size fits all” model, ignoring the patterns of involvement that emerge between and within diverse populations and subgroups. For example, in one Midwestern school where I conducted an ethnographic study, volunteering in the classroom was possible for parents only in professional families. Although those families supported the full scope of students in the classroom, volunteering as a dimension of family involvement did not reach all parents.

In this same school, PTO events were designed and carried out by only a small faction of the school parent population (middle class and professional and mostly European American). Though PTO parents professed to want to include all parents, their efforts to do so remained at a superficial level (like the provision of transportation and or provision of language support for community events) not a sociocultural level. In other words, events themselves failed to adjust to the culturally rich skill sets and tastes of the entire parent body. When questioned about their lack of attendance at PTO events, minority parents often commented that they lacked the time to attend such events, found them rather unimportant, or committed other resources to their children's schooling. As one African-American mother stated, “It's not what schools do for all families, it's what schools do for all kids.” This mother's spoken desires indicated that she wanted schools to be focusing on teaching children. Her references drew upon curriculum links that were connected with children's ethnic and racial histories as a starting point for meeting the needs of kids and families together.

School leaders, administrators, and parents must take a critical look at the holistic functioning of the school community and learn more about the diversity of families a school serves (which included the middle class, European American). Professional development related to teacher and administrator education should include strategies for learning about the ecology created by communities within the school community; differentiating involvement based on the range of social groups within particular social contexts has a potential to create a healthy home-school-community experience for all.

Janice Kroeger
Assistant Professor Early Childhood Education and Teaching, Leadership, and Curriculum Studies
Kent State University
P.O. Box 5190
Kent, Ohio 44242-0001
Email: jkroege1@kent.edu

 


 

Larry and Virginia Decker, coauthors of a new book on school-community partnerships, write:

Our answer to this question is “no.” There is far more educational rhetoric than meaningful action to address the needs of diverse families related to student learning. Educators acknowledge the importance of family involvement in student academic success. However most teachers and administrators have had little preservice training related to family involvement and very few schools have planned in-service training that helps teachers and administrators develop skills and action plans that connect families to student learning.

Schools do know a great deal about those who qualify for Title I, free or reduced lunch, special education, and gifted programs or other economically formula-driven programs. One reason is the large volume of demographic, socioeconomic, and diversity/cultural information and data related to families and students' potential for academic success. The other reason is that students in these types of programs mean an increase in special funding for the school. However, there has not been significant transferability of what schools know about students to adapting instructional approaches or establishing recommended outreach and relationship-building approaches to meet the needs of diverse families and students.

Over the years, we have taught numerous graduate classes for teachers and administrators and conducted a variety of conference and in-service training programs related to family and parent involvement in education. One of the first questions we ask is “What is the percentage of households in the U.S. that are traditional families—working father, homemaker mother, and 2+ children—served by a typical public school in 1955, 1980, and today?” Most of the answers are more like wild guesses and far off the actual statistics. Most of those questioned are surprised to learn that the all time high for the percentage of traditional families in the US was 60% in 1955. By 1980 the percentage had dropped to 11% and since the 1990's the percentage has been 6% or below. The follow-up questions concern what relevance does a learner's family status and economic and cultural profile have on curriculum development, learning plans, and family outreach initiatives. There is frequently a period of silence before the first answers are tentatively given.

The hesitancy to answer is not always due to a lack of knowledge. It may also be due to the current focus on “high stakes” testing and education accountability. This focus has helped to create an educational environment where a “one approach fits all” is being used to meet the challenge of achieving academic success for all students. While many educators agree that multiple approaches are needed to reach this goal, there is a lack of knowledge or consensus about which approaches and outreach efforts are most effective.

So our answer is “no, schools need to do much more.” They need to have a planned, comprehensive initiative to learn more about the families they serve and how to involve them in student learning. Teachers and administrators need to be provided sufficient time and opportunities to gain an accurate understanding of the families and students they serve, to improve skills related to family involvement, and to develop effectively outreach initiatives to involve those families in their children's education.

Larry E. Decker
Eminent Scholar in Community Education
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida

www.fau.edu
Virginia A. Decker
Managing Editor
Community Collaborators
Boca Raton, Florida

 


 

Dana McDermott, an expert on parent education, writes:

No. Most schools operate from the premise of parent involvement to support schools and adopt a top-down approach tending to disregard the home culture. There seems to be little room to question school goals. Most educators do not understand noninvolvement of parents in homework as possibly a political statement that what a school does is not always in the best interest of the child (de Carvahlo, 2001). Parents may define good involvement as refusing to help a child do hours of homework, which interferes with family life. Teachers interpret this to be a deficiency in parents, as homework is rarely questioned by society.

“Reflective inquiry” on homework by students, parents, and teachers is not typical. What are teacher goals in giving homework? What about learning and relationship “work” at home and in the community? How do parents feel when teachers expect them to do something they are unable or unmotivated to do? Rather than assuming that homework is good, schools can facilitate dialogues on its meaning to a teacher, school, a child, and his/her family.

Schools often are perceived as experts telling families how to help their children succeed. Their sharing of knowledge and expectations with parents often does not anticipate the differences found in parents like socioeconomic status, cultural experience, personal characteristics, home life, or the meaning of school input.

Bringing the family culture into what is learned in school can have positive benefits (McCaleb, 1994). Bowman (1996) in his article Empowering Parents is Mining Diamonds in the Rough notes that “underneath even the most cautious guarded exterior is a person with talents, skills, and dreams looking for a place for the sparkle to emerge and be seen” (p. 27). Few faculty development or teacher-training programs address this process adequately, especially the understanding of context or a discussion about roles (McDermott, 1997).

We know from adult learning principles that if we want learning to go beyond parents receiving information from us, parents need a place to filter information through their values and beliefs. This is difficult within the current construct of parent-school relationships. Often it is wrongly assumed that educators and parents are or are not on the same page. School goals are often so general that parents do not question them or the methods for achieving them until they run into their own child's problems. Many parents and teachers do not have a chance to reflect on how a directive meshes with their own ideas about what they believe children need. They end up consciously or unconsciously resisting what is asked of them. Parents will learn best if they have time to think about a school directive with school representatives, together look at alternatives, make a commitment to the best one, and then personalize it. Many school initiatives are unsuccessful because this process is bypassed.

It is now time for a “new frontier” of parent involvement where we synthesize information on involvement that is culturally aware, review the research on parents and teachers as adult and lifelong learners, explore school reform models like those mentioned above and explores the work on helping parents and teachers with their own growth issues which I hope to highlight in my upcoming book.

Dana McDermott
Resident Faculty
The School for New Learning
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois

snl.depaul.edu

References
Bowman, T. (1996). Empowering parents is mining diamonds in the rough. Family Resource Coalition Report, 15(2), 27–28.

de Carvalho, M. (2001). Rethinking family-school relations: A critique of parental involvement in schooling. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates.

McCaleb, S. P. (1994) Building a community of learners. New York: St. Martin's Press.

McDermott, D. (1997, May). Parent and teacher plan for the child. Young Children, 52(4), 32–36.

© 2016 Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College
Published by Harvard Family Research Project