THE NATIONAL POLICY FORUM FOR FAMILY, SCHOOL, & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

As the Poway example demonstrates, personalized, student-centered learning begins at an early age and sets the foundation for a lifelong quest to develop one’s knowledge, skills, and talents. The second element of reframing family engagement emerges from this developmental perspective: Family engagement is continuous from birth through young adulthood. Although it is often associated with practices in early childhood and the elementary grades, family engagement continues to be important in middle school, high school, and college. When schools and communities support sustained family engagement—including transitions from preschool to school and from one grade level to the next—students benefit. Students with engaged parents throughout childhood and adolescence are more likely to graduate from high school.[12] Even if youth do well academically and behaviorally, those with poor relationships with parents are more likely than those with strong relationships to drop out of high school. This suggests that positive and supportive parenting is important for the educational attainment of all youth.

A dominant assumption behind much of educational policy and practice is that school is the only place where and when children learn. This assumption is wrong: Learning happens in the home as well as in early childhood centers, afterschool and summer programs, community schools, museums, libraries, parks and recreation offerings, faith-based institutions, and other community settings, and increasingly, through various new technologies. As such, the third element of reframing recognizes that family engagement reaches across and reinforces student learning in multiple settings. Families, for example, play a pivotal role in helping children and youth access afterschool and community resources for enrichment or assistance in addressing learning challenges. Among low-income families, parents often seek to overcome negative neighborhood conditions that threaten their children’s lives through “community bridging strategies” that link students to mainstream institutions (e.g. libraries, museums) and expand their web of peers and supportive adults.[13]

In the coming years, families are likely to experience greatly amplified opportunities for engagement outside the classroom. Leading educational experts predict that “the most vibrant innovations in education are likely to take place outside traditional institutions.”[14] Such innovations will come from new media, games and play, afterschool programs, and community-based learning programs. These sources of learning for students also become sources of family guidance and participation.

The reframing of family engagement—as a shared responsibility, continuous from birth to young adulthood, taking place wherever and whenever children learn—suggests that new investments in the FSCE field should focus on a systemic and sustainable approach. A handful of districts are already beginning to adopt this approach by building family engagement into the district’s instructional goals and creating the administrative structures to provide standards of practice; aligned professional development; outreach and community partnership; and assessment for learning, improvement, and accountability[15] (see Textbox 2, below).

The policy landscape

Since the 1960s, the commitment to family engagement in learning has been manifested in several pieces of legislation and several federal programs. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) requires districts to spend 1% of their Title I funds on family involvement activities and includes mandates and opportunities for family involvement at the local level. Under ESEA, underperforming schools are required to include family involvement provisions in their school improvement plans. Several early childhood programs, including Head Start, Early Head Start, and the Even Start family literacy program, include mandates for family involvement, as does the 21st Century Community Learning Centers afterschool program. Family involvement is also part of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and federal special education initiatives.[16]

With family involvement funding streams and programs spread across federal departments, it has been difficult to develop systemic, integrated, and sustainable efforts. Scattered activities and events fail to make the connection between family engagement and student outcomes, and give the impression that family engagement is an “add-on” rather than integrated into academic goals. In addition, family involvement often consists of short-term activities rather than a sustained pathway running from early childhood programs through high school. While it is critical that family engagement remain a cornerstone of federal law, ESEA and related programs and legislation should focus on providing incentives, guidance, and capacity to scale up research-based and innovative practices at the local level.

Next steps for federal, state, and local policy

Systemic family engagement is possible: it is being adopted in Boston, Oakland, Federal Way, Wichita, and other school districts around the country.[17] To bring these emerging efforts to scale, policy levers can build awareness and interest and engage stakeholders to take steps toward systemic family engagement. These levers include leadership, capacity building, training and professional development, innovation, and learning and accountability. Empirical research on policy implementation, however, suggests that federal mandates alone will not ensure policy success where it matters most: in schools, districts, and communities.[18] It is the people on the ground who ultimately implement policy. Systemic family engagement will depend on the extent to which those charged with carrying out this work see merit in proposed or enacted policies and programs—and if they are willing to change their beliefs, skills, and behaviors. These changes, which are necessary in order to catapult FSCE to a new era of education reform, will require substantial support at each level of the policy process, from federal to state and local levels.[19]

Leadership. Using its leadership role, the federal government can put the spotlight on the importance of family engagement as a core element of a new generation of learning, and adopt a clear definition and common framework for family engagement. The U. S. Department of Education can develop a long-term strategy for FSCE, beginning with tighter coordination and alignment of programs within the Department and across other federal agencies. The systemic change that is being seeded in this document will develop deep roots through capacity building, incentives, and funding for innovation, and mechanisms for learning and accountability. This can be facilitated at the federal level by the U.S. Department of Education’s leadership in providing incentives for state and local education agencies to meaningfully engage families, and in capacity building to scale up and replicate effective research-based practices. Similarly, at the state and district levels, leadership and capacity must be in place to develop and implement proven family engagement practices that raise student achievement.

Capacity building. Capacity building is crucial because individuals often lack the knowledge and skills to implement effective family engagement, and thus intended policy outcomes are not met. There is a need for well-designed and high quality training and technical assistance in the development, implementation, and evaluation of FSCE initiatives. State and local education agencies are more likely to benefit from such assistance when it is sustained over time until results are achieved.

Intermediary organizations—such as associations of education professionals and volunteer non-profit organizations—play an important role in translating policy into practical tools and tailoring technical assistance to meet the different needs of districts and schools. These intermediaries help districts and schools plan outcome-oriented family engagement strategies. Through documentation and evaluation, they compile best practices that can be shared broadly for adaptation and replication. Intermediary organizations also convene a wide range of practitioners, researchers, and policymakers, and help build networks. Information sharing among these entities builds their respective capacities to strengthen family engagement practice and better serve families.

Training and professional development. Much more can be done to strengthen the foundation of those entering the teaching profession. Teachers know that family involvement matters and believe that it is one of the top strategies to reform schools. However, they do not receive adequate training and professional development to support efforts to engage families. Higher education policies can take into account the immediate and long-term needs of building an educational workforce where working with families is a core professional competency of teachers and school administrators. Teacher preparation programs that offer training in family partnerships usually deliver it related to early childhood education and special education. However, FSCE is important across all educational levels. It benefits parents and teachers as well as schools. Where teachers are able to communicate with parents and develop trusting relationships, they are more likely to remain teaching in their schools.[20]

Innovation. Federal leadership is demonstrated in promoting state and local innovation. Social innovation refers to “a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions.”[21] Although family involvement in education is not an original idea, a systemic and integrated approach to family engagement represents an innovative strategy in education reform. This thinking embodies a dramatic shift in framing family engagement and reorganizing its practice. It taps into an overlooked strategy that can leverage improvements in student learning, as the Chicago school reform study has fully demonstrated.

Unlike other fields in which innovation might be a technology or product, innovations in education tend to take the form of creative uses and sharing of resources and opportunities to create new practices (see Textbox 3, below). Productive innovations can be co-developed by researchers, practitioners, and social entrepreneurs who can bring them to scale.[22] In this model of research and development, or R&D, innovators develop prototypes, and then test and refine them as part of a continuous improvement process. In addition, there is a federal role in helping to create communities of practice, sharing the lessons from ongoing innovations to support state and local efforts to create systemic approaches to FSCE. Communities of practice—groups of people that come together to share expertise on a common endeavor—can generate new models of FSCE, spread promising practices, and develop stakeholders’ professional skills for high quality family engagement.[23] Federal departments can encourage the formation of communities of practice, especially across agency programs that seek to strengthen family engagement, and help organize and support them as part of capacity-building activities. Lastly, there is a federal role in facilitating the use of information about effective initiatives through mechanisms such as the What Works Clearinghouse, technical assistance providers, webinars, grantee meetings, and so forth.

Learning and accountability. Since ESEA was enacted in 1965, requirements have been in place for state and local education agencies to implement and report on federally mandated family involvement activities.[24] Federal monitoring of these requirements over the years has represented an important first step in ensuring that family involvement provisions are enacted; however, we now have an opportunity to move beyond compliance monitoring to a more comprehensive accountability system to assess the implementation and impact of these provisions. Creating a three-tier accountability system whereby the federal government, along with states, districts and schools, all apply meaningful measures of implementation and impact can ensure that family engagement provisions are not only enacted, but are actually meeting their goals.

The first tier could include a common set of standards and leading indicators for family engagement identified by the federal government that would provide guidance on research-based family engagement strategies. Second, state and local educational agencies would work with families, schools, and communities to develop or expand indicators against which they can benchmark their progress and identify areas where additional support and training are needed. An additional tier of accountability would reside at the school and community level where staff performance assessments would include family engagement indicators. With input from families, these indicators will measure how families’ capacities for supporting their children’s learning are being increased and how their involvement in school improvement dialogue is actively supported.[25] As evidenced below in Textbox 4, teachers and parents in the Creighton School District use student data to become mutually accountable for children’s learning progress in order to leverage the capacity of both families and educators to raise student achievement.

DATA DRIVEN EDUCATION REFORM

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has made data a vital component of education reform with the commitment to help states refine and expand what they have in place.[26] To be useful, data systems need to be “learner-centered” rather than “institution-centered,” according to Education Sector.[27] Data systems should move away from compliance with federal reporting and expand to provide actionable information that enables teachers, students, and families to set goals, track progress, and take specific actions to promote learning and achievement. Furthermore, a data system that begins in early childhood creates a pathway focusing on the trajectory toward college and career readiness.

A data pathway provides families with facts and figures about children’s development and learning from early childhood through young adulthood so that they are on the right track to graduation and college and career preparation. The data can be used for short-term, (e.g. helping a child increase vocabulary) and long-term (e.g. monitoring a child’s progress across grade levels to be on track for high school graduation within four years) goals. This pathway consists of concise and simple data that families can easily access and understand as they relate to school expectations, academic standards, and continuous improvement. Additionally, the information has to be actionable: families turn to data to guide their child’s learning goals and to avail themselves of school and community resources that can enrich student knowledge or address learning challenges (see Textbox 4 on next page).

Creating a data pathway demonstrates in concrete and practicable ways the key elements of a reinvented framework of family engagement:

• Family engagement is a shared responsibility: Through data sharing, school districts and schools are responsible for communicating student performance with families. Beyond providing access to data, schools also provide training and assistance to ensure that families grasp the meaning of the data so that they can partner with teachers to take action and support a student’s learning goals.
• Family engagement is continuous across a child’s life: As student data become available across grade levels, families are equipped with the information to support academic progress throughout a child’s school years. The data enable them to focus on the trajectory of high school graduation and college and career readiness.
• Family engagement cuts across and reinforces learning in the multiple settings where children learn: Equipped with data about a student’s learning goals, families are able to direct students to learning resources such as afterschool and homework-help programs. School districts that are sharing data with families are also providing them with tips and tools, often through web-based formats, so that parents can help their children at home.

Data sharing with families can transform the way family engagement is organized, helping to keep the focus on those activities that align with student academic progress and achievement. Rather than being a checklist of activities, family engagement is systemic and linked to specific educational goals. Rather than being an “add-on” to what teachers already do, family engagement is integrated into teaching and learning by providing teachers with a partner who supports and monitors student learning. Rather than being activity driven and dependent on time-limited funding, family engagement is more likely to be sustained when it is outcome-oriented and tied to the instructional goals for a student, with specific benchmarks across the school year. The power of data as a tool for student learning and meeting school goals is illustrated in Textbox 5 (next page) about the Washoe County School District.

TRANSFORMING LOW-PERFORMING SCHOOLS

The need for systemic family engagement is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the efforts to turn around the nation’s lowest-performing schools. Both Congress and the Administration have trained their collective eyes on the bottom 5 percent of America’s public schools and have dedicated funding streams and programmatic initiatives to facilitate turnaround efforts.[28] Yet these efforts have revealed some hard truths: we still do not fully understand what causes these schools to slide into such a deep decline or why their low performance remains so entrenched, despite decades of various reform efforts.[29] Furthermore, evidence is scant for turnaround success at scale,[30] suggesting that there is a great need for new and innovative solutions.

What is clear is that there is no one way to address the problems of low-performing schools, no “magic bullet” approach that will work across all grades and all settings. There is, however, emerging evidence of some of the critical elements that must be in place if turnaround efforts are to work, one of which is strong, strategic FSCE.[31] Furthermore, it is important to recognize that many low-performing schools exist in extremely disadvantaged communities in which parents themselves have likely had negative schooling experiences. This makes it even more imperative that schools and districts strengthen their capacity to meaningfully reach out to and engage families, understand the barriers to involvement, and partner with families and other community members to enlist their help in revitalizing struggling schools. Sustainable change in low-performing schools is most likely to occur when it is facilitated and supported by the families and communities who have the biggest stake in the outcomes of such efforts.

Engaging Families and Communities in Turnaround Efforts

Most of the existing turnaround efforts focus on some combination of instructional/curriculum reforms, changes in staffing, intensive professional development, and reorganizations of the structure of the school. Efforts to engage families complement these elements of turnaround movements, helping to strengthen instructional improvements and staff development by increasing families’ knowledge of academic goals and demonstrating how they can partner with school staff to reinforce learning in the home and in the larger community. One study of successful turnaround efforts among eight failing Chicago schools reported that parent engagement was not only a core element in helping to dramatically improve student achievement, but: “The results clearly reveal that the existing staff and parents…form a large and untapped reservoir of energy, ideas, and commitment that is ready to transform the quality of their schools, and do it quickly.”[32] Yet engaging families and communities doesn’t always come naturally to school personnel, who often lack training and preparation for family partnerships, or who might be wary of reaching out to parents if most of their school–family interactions are problem-focused, thus creating tension between families and school staff. This points to the need for more innovative approaches to bringing families and schools together to identify common goals and learn how to collaborate to improve student learning.

Informed advocacy can be a very effective mechanism for change by empowering parents to demand excellence in local public schools; however, families need to know how to identify high-quality schooling so they can understand which areas need improvement, the types of reforms that best meet the needs of the students, and how to assess the impact of enacted reform measures. Families’ abilities to understand and use data on school performance can help focus their advocacy efforts, and for those parents who might not be aware of the school’s conditions or the need for change, community organizations and advocates can act as intermediaries to both inform and empower parents to demand excellence from their children’s schools.

Effective FSCE in low-performing schools often must begin with intensive efforts to rebuild trust and promises of accountability (factors that other communities can sometimes take for granted) given longstanding dynamics of miscommunication and distrust between these schools and their surrounding communities. Community and faith-based groups serve as a bridge between schools and families, and are often able to act as intermediaries with families who feel alienated from the school or who are simply unaware of improvement efforts and how they can contribute to the process by becoming more actively involved in school reforms. These organizations help to facilitate improvements in school–community relationships and foster a sense of trust and collaboration among families and school staff, providing the necessary foundation on which to build meaningful home–school partnerships.

Identifying Critical Junctures in Achievement Drop-offs

While low-performing schools span all grade levels, the high school “dropout factories”—where only a small minority of students graduate on time—have received the most attention. A number of studies have found that effective family engagement is a crucial factor in keeping students engaged in their education as they progress through the middle and high school years.[33]

One of the key issues in addressing the problems of low-performing schools is identifying the critical juncture points at which achievement tends to decline, and targeting intensive efforts at those periods. For instance, research has shown that the ninth grade is the most critical year for putting students on the path towards on-time graduation and post-high school success.[34] Targeting efforts toward this time period—including the transition into ninth grade—helps to catch attendance, behavioral, and academic problems before they become entrenched and threaten students’ ability to successfully navigate the requirements and rigors of high school.[35] This need to focus on the ninth grade year has further implications for the value of strengthening FSCE efforts, because family engagement tends to drop off as children become adolescents. At this juncture, parents often simultaneously feel less competent about their ability to help with their teen’s academic work and more distanced from—and intimidated by—large, complex high school environments.[36] Efforts to provide parents with clear, actionable information about their students’ academic performance, such as the work done by New Visions for Public Schools in New York (see Textbox 6, below), can help break down these barriers and foster productive school–home communication.

Enhancing Turnaround Efforts through Data Sharing

Advances in student and school performance data systems and efforts to make such data available and accessible to families are of particular importance in efforts to turn around low-performing schools. Experience has shown that the families of students in high-poverty schools are more likely to need assistance in understanding how to interpret performance data, and in particular, how to act on such information in ways that benefit not only their own child’s achievement, but the performance of the school overall.

The use of data to address the problems of low-performing schools should also move beyond basic report cards that simply chronicle the deficits of the school system. Focusing on negative school performance data can exacerbate the tension and anger that often exist in communities with low-performing schools and work against schools’ and families’ ability and inclination to come together to understand where difficulties lie and how to work together to identify concrete steps to take to improve students’—and thus the schools’—performance. Data sharing in the spirit of building strategic partnerships between families, schools, and communities holds enormous potential in addressing the persistent poor achievement evidenced in low-performing schools.

Engaging families in systemic, integrated, and sustainable ways in turnaround efforts draws on a number of reform areas that impact student achievement: strengthening parents’ ability to support their students’ learning at home, at the school, and in the community; providing opportunities for strategic and collaborative uses of data; and embedding family engagement into professional development and instructional goals so that low-performing schools don’t have to “go it alone,” but rather gain an invested and effective partners in improving student learning—families.

This paper was designed as a companion piece to the National Policy Forum on Family, School, and Community Engagement, held on November 9, 2010 in Washington, D.C. The paper laid the foundation for a conversation about the role of FSCE in education reform by offering a framework based upon four decades of research and emerging innovations in the family engagement field.

At the forum, over two dozen experts engaged in dynamic, interactive discussions about the role of FSCE in education reform, providing insights based on their own work and identifying new directions for family engagement in the coming years. Everyone present—from the panelists to the participants to special guest speakers from the U.S. Department of Education (USDE)—agreed that FSCE is a key component of successful education reform that needs to be implemented in a systemic, integrated, and sustainable way. The forum emphasized the fact that the essential elements of successful school reform—which include a focus on teaching and learning, a rigorous curriculum, teacher and principal effectiveness, a positive school climate, and family and community engagement—operate as parts of an interconnected system. This system of mutual dependencies requires sustained commitment to each element; for example, schools can’t work well if their relationships with families and communities don’t work well. This makes it critically important that we invest in efforts to better engage families and communities in order to maximize their value in school reform efforts.

Several cross-cutting themes emerged on how this work could be accomplished, which focused on policy levers for change and the use of data to create meaningful partnerships between schools, families and communities:

• At the federal level, attention to family engagement must move from a checklist orientation to a full engagement plan with outcome tracking to assess whether these efforts are impacting student outcomes. The USDE’s proposed increase in Title I set-aside dollars for family engagement needs to be accompanied by clear expectations of what should be done with these dollars as well as accountability measures to show the benefits of how the funds are used. Policymakers must identify meaningful indicators of FSCE that are correlated with student outcomes, and create accountability models that assess how well schools and communities are engaged with one another.
• Better coordination of family engagement efforts at the federal level will model the type of collaboration and integration that needs to happen on the ground. The impending reauthorizations of Head Start, IDEA, and ESEA all provide opportunities to build in methods of integration so that regulations and laws don’t impede efforts to coordinate and blend programs and funds.
• Given the shifting nature of federal funding streams, it’s unlikely that schools and districts will have guaranteed adequate dollars to dedicate to family engagement, thus making it imperative that stakeholders focus on innovations that can help change the system from within. Schools and districts need to rethink the way schools are organized as a system—the role of the teacher, the management of time and space, the relationship with families and communities—so as to reap the value of FSCE. This could entail hard decisions about what to let go and what to focus on with respect to FSCE.
• Sharing student learning and performance data with families changes the conversation between families and schools. Data provide the content that engages families to understand where students are, where they need to go and the options for getting to their goals. When data use involves parents in this way, it becomes meaningful: it gives parents a voice in the educational process and empowers them to partner with educators to promote their child’s academic growth.
• Families and communities can be a force for turning around low-performing schools. Family engagement entails thoughtful effort on the part of districts and schools, so that evidence-based frameworks and practices are adopted, external resources such as community and intermediary organizations are used, and student data become a tool for honest and transparent conversations between families and schools. Underlying these strategies must be a continuous effort at relationship building so that trust binds families, schools and communities to change the trajectory of underserved students.

In her closing remarks at the forum, Carmel Martin, the Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development at USDE, discussed the proposed increase in set-aside dollars for family engagement, noted that the Department plans to embed family engagement throughout its grant proposals, and asserted that family engagement in student learning is an outcome in and of itself, in addition to serving as a “critical, non-negotiable component in terms of a comprehensive strategy to improve our schools.” Education reform initiatives will focus on a comprehensive early childhood-to-college family engagement agenda that can support innovative practices, scale up what works, and empower families to play a greater role in their children’s learning. The insights and recommendations generated from the policy forum will continue to inform and refine the development of these initiatives at the federal level.