International Perspectives on Contexts, Communities and Evaluated Innovative Practices

Family-School-Community Partnerships

Rollande Deslandes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415852272
• eBook ISBN: 9781134019847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Research and practice in the vast field of school-family-community relations have evolved dramatically over the last thirty years. Schools throughout the world face enormous challenges due to demographic changes and societal problems, making partnerships among schools, families and community groups a necessity. Specific issues such as poverty, school dropout, violence and suicide, the wider diversity of students and parents, the higher accountability demanded of school systems, the implementation of school reforms and a multitude of government strategies and policies all contribute to a rapidly changing educational world. But as this book shows, even though research is often being undertaken independently in different countries, strong similarities are apparent across countries and cultures. School-family-community collaboration is no longer a single country issue.

The book brings together contributions from culturally and linguistically diverse countries facing these common situations and challenges. It details practices that have proved effective alongside relevant case examples, and covers a wide variety of topics, including:

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• challenges arising from the application of parent-school legislation at national level

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• the work of schools with migrant groups, low-income parents and parents with behaviour problems.

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• evaluation of various family-school-community partnerships programs

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• the way ahead for Family-School-Community Relations

With contributions from distinguished researchers from throughout the world (including the United States, Canada, the UK, Europe, China and Australia). It is a perfect companion to International Perspectives on Student Outcomes and Homework, also edited by Rollande Deslandes, and published simultaneously by Routledge.

1
Four key policy questions about parent engagement recommendations from the evidence

Kenneth Leithwood

This chapter summarises recent evidence in response to four key questions concerning parent engagement in their children’s schooling. Fifty-seven original empirical studies published since 1996 in reputable refereed journals,¹ along with six recent, particularly well-done reviews of literature, form the database used to answer these questions² and to craft a series of best-evidence recommendations for parents, school staff and educational policy-makers. The questions are about:

• the abilities, dispositions and behaviours needed of parents, teachers, principals, and school staff to foster parent engagement;
• factors contributing to poor communication and tense relationships between parents and teachers or principals;
• features of the context (e.g. school environment, socio-economic status, urban– rural characteristics, school–community relations, etc.) enhancing different types of parent engagement;
• sources and types of assistance in the development of resources and training programmes to foster parent engagement.

Abilities, dispositions and behaviours needed to foster parent engagement

Parents have an enormous impact on the education of their children at home whether they think they do or not, whereas they may or may not choose to become engaged in their children’s school. Home is explored in other chapters. The focus in this chapter is restricted to the direct engagement of parents in schools—reasons influencing parents’ engagement in schools, as well as how teachers, principals and other staff foster such engagement.

Reasons for parent engagement

Parents’ personal construction of the parental role. Parents are much more likely to become involved in their children’s education when they believe that such involvement is a key part of what it means to be a responsible parent. Evidence indicates that parents become engaged to the extent that they believe such engagement is part of their parental duties (Deslandes and Bertrand 2005), when they have a strong desire to be involved in promoting the success of their children (e.g. Mapp 2002) and when they believe, more generally, that all parents should be engaged in their children’s schools (Sheldon 2002). Parental engagement is associated with parents’ motivation to be active in their child’s life both inside and outside of school.

Parents’ personal sense of efficacy for helping children succeed in school. When parents feel that they have the opportunities, skills and knowledge required to help their children, they are more likely to become engaged. Parents’ life circumstances shape their views on whether they believe they have or can make opportunities to become involved with the school (e.g. Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler 1995). Long working hours and inflexible work schedules result in less time and energy for parents to be engaged with school, for example.

Parent efficacy is also a significant factor in parent decisions to become engaged. They are likely to become more engaged with school when they believe they can exercise control over their children’s education and, in some cases, when they believe there is a problem to be solved with their own children (e.g. Coots 1998) or the school as a whole, such as a negative school climate. Parents’ socio-economic status (SES) is related to parental sense of efficacy. Abrams and Gibbs (2002) reported that the sense of entitlement some high SES parents exhibited depressed the participation of lower SES parents.

Parents’ beliefs about the extent to which school personnel want them to be involved in their children’s education at home and in the school. When parents think that their involvement is needed, desired and expected by teachers, they are more inclined to become involved in their children’s education, in some fashion. These beliefs may be quite different for different groups of parents. For example, Birch and Ferrin (2002) found much more uncertainty on the part of Mexican American than Anglo-American parents in the same rural community. Engagement is also encouraged when parents receive support and encouragement to become engaged from other parents and staff during attendance at school events (Mapp 2002). Parents value detailed information from school staffs on how the school functions (Christenson et al. 1997) and what they can do to become more involved (Halsey 2005). Exchanges of information with other parents, more generally, can prompt parent engagement (DeMoss and Vaughn 1999). Meeting with school personnel and the active seeking of information from parents by teachers (Coots 1998) is reported to result in parents believing that teachers want their opinion and view them as partners in their children’s education (Flaugher 2006). Satisfaction with their children’s high school programme, Castro et al. (2004) found, encouraged greater parent engagement.

Parents’ beliefs about the desire of their children for them to be involved in their education at home and in the school. Engagement is encouraged when parents believe their own children want them in school (Baker 1997a). As children move through different stages of schooling, increasing numbers of them exercise their need to become independent from their parents by discouraging their parents’ involvement in school and, in many cases, involvement in school work at home, also. Evidence seems to suggest that parents should resist this preference of their older children, however (Jeynes 2007).

How teachers foster parent engagement

Teacher behaviours. Three distinct types of behaviours appear in the research—classroom-related, communication-related and interpersonal-related. Classroom-related behaviours include developing special projects to involve parents in the school and classroom (Baker 1997b), ensuring that parents’ involvement in class is in direct support of instruction (Baker 1997b; Belenardo 2001) and matching the skills of parents with the tasks they are asked to carry out in the class (Edwards and Warin 1999; Trumbull et al. 2003).

Communication-related behaviours include: altering schedules to accommodate the schedules of parents (Trumbull et al. 2003), modifying the format of parent conferences to make them less intimidating and more meaningful for parents (Baker 1997b), and providing a private environment in which to have parent–teacher conferences (Chrispeels 1996). Communication-related teacher behaviours fostering parent engagement also include soliciting parent views on key matters concerning their children’s education (Chrispeels 1996), and engaging in joint problem solving with parents (Baker 1997b). Parent involvement is reported to be discouraged by only sporadic attendance by teachers at school meetings involving parents (Pena 2000).

Effective communication with parents about student work and progress is reported to encourage parent engagement (Belenardo 2001), as has establishing a regular schedule of communications with parents (Chrispeels 1996), and ensuring forms of communication that are culturally appropriate and take account of parents’ educational expectations for their children (Dyson 2001).

Finally, teacher behaviours that are primarily interpersonal in nature include: fostering positive interpersonal relationships with parents (Baker 1997b), behaving towards parents in a respectful manner and putting them at ease (Baker 1997b) and making individual contact with parents rather than simply having an ‘open door’ policy for such contact (Halsey 2005). Parent engagement is also encouraged when teachers demonstrate positive attitudes towards parent engagement (Grolnick et al. 1997).

Teacher skills, attitudes and beliefs influencing parent engagement. Teacher skills contributing to positive parent engagement include being able to communicate effectively with parents, in particular, linguistic and culturally diverse parents (Dyson 2001). Teachers skilled in building mutual understandings with parents about school expectations also contribute to parent engagement (Lawson 2003).

Teacher attitudes fostering parent engagement include trust in parents and students (Hoy and Tschannen-Moran 1998), positive dispositions towards parent involvement in school (Osborne and deOnis 1997) and realistic expectations about the nature and extent of parent involvement given the demands they face in other parts of their lives.

Teacher beliefs associated with increased parent engagement, especially the engagement of mothers of girls in the one study reporting on this matter, is the value of parent contributions to the school (Grolnick et al. 1997). Parent engagement is suppressed by teachers believing that English as a Second Language (ESL) parents are not interested in their children’s schooling (Huss-Keeler 1997) and that parents do not have the expertise to contribute to their children’s education (Linek et al. 1997).

How principals foster parent engagement

Only a handful of studies provide information about principals’ skills, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours likely to foster parent engagement. It helps if principals are skilful in making parents feel welcome in the school (Baker 1997a), and have technical expertise, attend to detail, make good decisions and are clear, logical thinkers (Belenardo 2001). About principals’ beliefs, Norris (1999) reported that principals and parents held differing estimates of the extent of parent involvement in their schools with parent estimates being higher than the estimates of principals; Osborne and deOnis (1997) found higher levels of importance attached to parent engagement among elementary and middle school principals as compared with secondary school principals.

How other staff foster parent engagement

The term ‘other staff’ is used here as a category label sometimes for teachers and administrators treated as an undifferentiated group and sometimes in reference to the school psychologist. Most of the evidence from these studies is particularly relevant to the engagement of minority and/or ESL parents.

Evidence concerning the staff, as a whole, supported the need to appreciate the challenges facing ESL parents and to act from the belief that they are just as interested in their children’s welfare and education as any other group of parents (Lee 2005). Additional evidence (Lopez et al. 2001) recommends using the tacit knowledge of former migrant school staff in working with parents, home visits, and other forms of communication with families. This evidence also recommended helping to connect parents to the social services they may need, providing a welcoming environment for parents in the school and providing them with educational services. Staff should work with other agencies to help these parents find the resources that they need.

Factors contributing to poor communication and tense relations between parents and schools

Three sets of factors contribute to poor parent–school communications, tense relations between parents and school personnel and frustrations for parents arising from the school: dispositions towards parent engagement on the part of parents and school personnel; the nature of school–parent communications; and both linguistic and cultural differences between parents and staff.

Dispositions towards parent engagement. Parents report frustration when schools appear not to welcome their contact in an effort to raise issues or concerns. For some parents schools feel like ‘closed systems’ and always seem to support teachers over students when there are conflicts of any sort. Further tensions are created when parents and staff hold quite different underlying assumptions about patterns of family–school interactions (e.g. families expected to respond to the school’s suggestions for involvement versus families initiating contact to communicate their own expectations of the school). These differences lead to parental frustration with, and distrust of, staff. Older students’ negative disposition towards their parents’ engagement in school was reported to be a source of tension for parents by Baker (1997a).

Parents’ own disposition towards their engagement in school has also been identified (e.g. Lawson 2003). This disposition sometimes consists of insecurity on the part of parents about how and who to contact in the school when they are not as familiar with the school as they might be if they were members of a parent–teacher group, for example. Many parents are reported to feel a diffuse sense of powerlessness in their interaction with school personnel. When parents had a negative experience with the school, they sometimes concluded that not being involved might be in the best interests of their child.

Nature of communication between schools and parents. School–parent communications can be a significant source of tensions and frustrations for both parents and school staffs. These tensions and frustrations could be traced to the frequency, timing and effectiveness of communication initiatives. Baker (1997a, 1997b) found that parents complained of too little time for teacher–parent conferences. Parents also complained about interactions between parents and school staffs which were infrequent and unhelpfully brief, from the parents’ point of view. Evening meetings are sometimes difficult for parents to attend and school staff may mistakenly assume that lack of attendance means parents are not interested in their children’s school work. Bakers’ studies also found that parents were frustrated by lack of timely parent notification of children’s problems by their schools.

Even when communication is frequent and timely, it is sometimes not especially effective (e.g. Bernhard and Freire 1999). Results of such communication are jeopardised when schools use students to carry home information and that information does not reach parents. Frustrations also arise for parents when they are unable to understand feedback from teachers. Parents complain about communications from school not really inviting their engagement. Parent–staff meeting agendas are usually set by the school not collaboratively by the school, and parents. Many parents expect specific invitations from the school to become involved rather than general announcements about opportunities for involvement. Frustration for some parents also arise when they view commu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures and tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Four key policy questions about parent engagement recommendations from the evidence
• 2 Family–school partnership in theory and practice of the Czech schools: conflict between ideal and reality
• 3 Home–school collaboration in two Chinese societies: Hong Kong and Macao
• 4 ‘Class acts’: home–school involvement and working-class parents in the UK
• 5 Creating effective family–school partnerships in highly diverse contexts: building partnership models and constructing parent typologies
• 6 The challenge of co-education in a disadvantaged context
• 7 Indigenous family and community involvement in Australian curriculum development
• 8 Observatory on family–school–community partnership in Spain: a longitudinal programme to promote quality in education and social development
• 9 Using evaluation to prove and improve the quality of partnership programmes in schools
• 10 School–community collaborations and measures supporting academic achievement in two underprivileged Montreal neighbourhoods: an evaluation of processes and effects
• 11 Family–school–community partnerships: What has been done? What have we learned?
• 12 More than services: community organising and community schools
• 13 Evaluation of comprehensive prevention–intervention partnership programmes for school children
• 14 Capturing complexity: evaluation of the Yale Child Study Center School Development Program
• Conclusion