Over the past few decades educational research has found that parental involvement is related to student achievement, overall school performance, student behavior, graduation rates and enrollment in higher education. Community involvement is important because it opens the door to a wide variety of services for children as well as a large supply of volunteers. Schools implementing CSR, should be aware of the requirement as specified in the NCLB legislation: A school’s CSR program must provide for meaningful parent and community involvement in planning, implementing and evaluating reform activities.
To assist schools as they attempt to incorporate parents and the community into their reform efforts, the National Parent Teacher Association (NPTA) developed the following six standards for parental involvement in schools:
- Communication: Communication between home and school is regular, two-way, and meaningful.
- Parenting: Parenting skills are promoted and supported.
- Student Learning: Parents play an integral role in assisting student learning.
- Volunteering: Parents are welcome in the school, and their support and assistance are sought.
- School Decision Making and Advocacy: Parents are full partners in the decisions that affect children and families.
- Collaborating with Community: Community resources are used to strengthen schools, families, and student learning.
These standards are based on the work of Dr. Joyce Epstein at the Johns Hopkins University. More information on these standards is avilable at
http://www.pta.org/parentinvolvement/standards/index.asp.
Question from the Field: "How can a school achieve high levels of parental and community involvement?"
The following Keys to Success were compiled and written by the National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education (NCPIE). They are based on information from actual school programs.
- Remember, there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer to partnerships. Identify, with families, the strengths, interests and needs of fami- lies, students, and school staff and work from there.
- Set clear and measurable goals based on family and community input.
- Develop a variety of outreach mechanisms to inform families, businesses, and the community about family involvement policies and programs. These can include newsletters, flyers, personal contacts, slide shows, videotapes, local newspapers and cable TV, web sites, and public forums.
- Provide a varied menu of opportunities for participation geared to the diverse needs of families, including working families. Schedule programs and activities flexibly. Recognize that effective family involvement takes many forms that may not necessarily require parents' presence at a workshop, meeting, or school.
- Ensure that families and students have complete information about the standards students are expected to meet, examples of student work that meets these standards, and understanding of how students will be assessed. For example, hold curriculum nights to feature the standards and exhibit student work. Provide workshops about the state's testing program, with a chance for parents to take the test.
- Ensure that families and students have access to information about nutrition and health care, after-school programs, and community service agencies.
- Recognize how a community's historic, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural resources can generate interest in family-community participation.
- Hire and train a family coordinator to act as a liaison between families and schools and to coordinate family activities. This coordinator should be bilingual as needed and sensitive to the needs of families and the community, including the non-English speaking community.
- Use creative forms of communication between educators and
families that are personal, goal-oriented, and make optimal use of new communication technologies. One idea might be telephones in every classroom with voice-mail capacity.
- Find positive messages to send to all families about their child at least once a month.
- In addition to parent-teacher conferences, offer regular opportunities for families to discuss their children's progress, raise concerns, and work as partners with school staff to solve problems that arise. To promote student success, create a support team for each student and include a family member.
- Make sure that family members acting as volunteers in the school have opportunities to help teachers in meaningful ways such as assisting with instructional tasks and administrative functions. In addition to being tutors and classroom aides, family members might speak to students about their careers, explain customs from their cultural traditions, or demonstrate a special skill.
- Provide professional development opportunities for educators and families to enable them to work together effectively as partners in the educational process.
- Involve families in evaluating the effectiveness of family
involvement programs and activities on a regular basis and use this information to improve them.
The above points were retrieved on August 29, 2003, from
http://www.ncpie.org/DevelopingPartnerships/KeysToSuccess.html.
NCPIE is dedicated to developing relationships between schools and families. For more information, including guidelines on creating a school policy for parental involvement, visit the NCPIE web site at http://www.ncpie.org.
Resources
The following are helpful highlights of the tools available:
- In Beyond Input: Achieving Authentic Participation in School Reform (2003), the Harvard Family Research Project uses standards-based reform as the context to discuss what both schools and parents can do to foster authentic participation in school reform efforts.
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/hfrp/eval/issue22/theory.html
To learn more about the benefits of community involvement, you may also wish to visit
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