September/October 1997

Family Involvement in Schools:
It Makes a Big Difference, but Remains Rare

By Leon Lynn

Sharon Williams considers herself a very lucky parent.

Her three children attend Boston's Patrick O'Hearn Elementary School, where parent involvement is a high priority. The principal and staff devote time and energy to encouraging parents to play an active role in the school, everywhere from the classroom to the school management council.

"Parents have a real voice here," says Williams, a single parent. "If you have a concern, they will listen. If there's something the parents really feel we want to change, we can usually work with the staff and get it changed."

But satisfied as she is, Williams does have a problem. Next year her oldest daughter will have to leave the O'Hearn to begin middle school.

"I'm looking at the middle schools now, and I don't see one out there with that same commitment to the parents," Williams says. "I need a school for my daughter that has that. I've had that at O'Hearn, and I guess you could say they spoiled me."

Williams' predicament illustrates the good and bad news of parent involvement in America's schools.

First the good news: Now more than ever, educators and policymakers understand the importance of parent involvement. Teachers, school board members, principals, and superintendents are trying to build strong, reciprocal relationships between schools and the families they serve. Some schools have truly invited parents to be their educational partners, welcoming their contributions, giving them a real say in how the school runs, and providing them with information and training to make the most of that opportunity.

A National Effort

This jibes with a new national emphasis on parent involvement. In 1994, Congress began requiring all schools that receive federal Title I money to develop a plan "that outlines how parents, the entire school staff and students will share the responsibility for improved student achievement, and the means by which the school and parents will build and develop a partnership to help children achieve the state's high standards." That same year Congress amended Goals 2000, the national education goals, to demand that "every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional and academic growth of children."

What's more, a growing body of research shows that schools with strong family- involvement programs enjoy improved student performance and attendance, and fewer discipline problems. Even in schools where large shares of the students are poor--the type of school where parent involvement is generally lower--research finds that well-conceived, well-executed parent-involvement programs have positively influenced most families' attitudes toward their schools.

Now the bad news. Schools like the O'Hearn--where parents are true partners in their children's schooling--remain rare. As Sharon Williams is discovering, the level of parent involvement nurtured at the O'Hearn can be hard to find elsewhere. A national study of eighth-graders in 1990 found that half their parents hadn't attended a single school meeting during that academic year. And another study released that year by Joyce Epstein, director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University, found that most parents never participate directly in activities at their children's schools.

Despite all the recent rhetoric and studies supporting increased parent involvement, many schools are still dominated by cultures that give parents only marginal roles to play, such as baking cookies for fundraisers or signing report cards. Parents are discouraged--sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally--from playing any greater role in learning activities or governance issues. Teachers and administrators often believe that most parents can't or won't play a more active role in school life, an assumption rarely challenged by training and certification programs for educators. Whatever parent-involvement mechanisms do exist at these schools, such as PTAs, often lack real influence over school policy, and may not be readily accessible to less-advantaged families.

Even in schools that are making good-faith efforts to build partnerships with parents, many educators report that contact with parents remains frustratingly sparse, and that their efforts have borne little fruit. This is especially true in schools serving lower-income communities.

Still, many educators and policymakers remain optimistic. Meaningful parent involvement may be rare, they say, but where it does exist it benefits teachers, families, and students alike. And thanks to initiatives by school districts, government agencies, and other groups, notably educator networks, more schools are learning about the importance of parent involvement and are learning better ways to nurture it.

A Two-Way Street

Before the 1960s, relationships between parents and schools were "uni- directional," says Elena Lopez, associate director of the Harvard Family Research Project. Most families were expected to deliver their children to the schoolhouse door and then go home while educators did their jobs. When parents were asked to get involved, the focus was usually very narrow. For example, they might be invited to work in the school office or to raise money through bake sales, Lopez says.

By the mid-1960s, however, challenges to these habits and traditions were growing, due in part to James Coleman's influential study, Equality of Educational Opportunity. Coleman concluded that a student's home environment had more impact on test scores than any other factor, even school curriculum or student body characteristics. As a result, policymakers and advocates began to think of parent involvement as more of a two-way street. Not only should parents help the school, they realized, but the school should help make children's home environments more supportive and more conducive to learning.

Since the 1960s, the concept of family involvement--what it means for parents and other family members to be "involved" in their schools, and for schools to be involved in the home lives of their students--has continued to evolve. Many educators today embrace a "partnership" model of involvement, centered on the belief that in order to serve and support families, schools must work hard to create and sustain communication with parents, must listen carefully to what parents have to say, and must be willing to welcome parents into the school, not just as cookie-bakers but as valued, empowered partners in the educational process. This model is perhaps best described by Joyce Epstein (see "Six Types of School-Family-Community Involvement").

From Parents to Partners

Researcher Karen Mapp believes that the Patrick O'Hearn School has been successful, in part, because a wide variety of involvement options are offered to parents. Mapp is conducting research at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on successful parent- involvement programs in schools serving disadvantaged families (see "Making the Connection Between Families and Schools").

"Sometimes all it takes is that first indication that the school wants you to be involved," she says. "It can start with something as simple as planting tulips in front of the building, or reading a story to children. That kind of thing gets parents acclimated. The school is saying, `OK, let's ease into this relationship,' and then through exposure to other parents involved in other things, some parents will get more involved in governance or volunteering."

Parents have a lot to offer schools too. They can motivate their children to work harder. They can become educational resources. For example, an immigrant parent could visit their child's class and describe life in their native country, therefore helping a teacher provide a living social studies lesson. And parents can recruit other parents.

Sharon Williams was really nervous when her oldest child enrolled in the O'Hearn school. "I didn't know anything about the Boston Public Schools," she says. "When I was a kid I went to a school where I sat in the classroom and kept my mouth shut and hoped they didn't hit me with that ruler. You did as you were told, you had no say." Williams feared that the O'Hearn would be that way too. "When I first went there I felt like I was back in first grade again," she says. "I thought the school had all the power."

That began to change soon after she arrived. One of her daughter's teachers suggested that she visit the parent center at the school. "I went in and started talking to some of the other parents, and I realized that they had a say in the school," she says. Soon she attended her first parents' meeting, and shortly after that "I got a call from another parent, a neighbor who lived down the street, and she told me about some of the other things happening at the school, and asked me if I wanted to get involved. I was very impressed by that. I was brand new and they were already inviting me in."

By the following year, Williams herself was visiting the homes of new O'Hearn families, inviting them to get involved with the school. "I got a few parents to come," she says. "I was repeating the cycle. It has to be a constant effort, bringing in the new families, if the program is going to remain stable.

"We try to tell the new parents that there are a lot of different ways they can get involved in the school," Williams says. "Sometimes you find a parent who says they don't have time, or they can't make it to the school, and we tell them there are still things they can do. They can make phone calls. We can send home a package of fabric and thread, and they can sew costumes for a school show. Whatever little part they can play, we want them to play it. And once you get them doing one thing, then they find there's something else they can do, something they feel comfortable moving into."

Resources Are Available

As interest in parent involvement continues to grow among educators, a number of different mechanisms have developed to help spread the word and support schools' efforts. Funding from a variety of sources--such as federal Title I money and grants from states, foundations, and research groups--supports efforts to build partnerships between schools and the families they serve.

A number of networks and educator-driven initiatives also support parent- involvement efforts. One example is the National Network of Partnership-2000 Schools at Johns Hopkins, which Joyce Epstein directs. The network, which now includes more than 600 schools, helps members learn about various types of family involvement and helps schools apply them to their particular situations. It conducts training sessions for teachers and other educators, and offers information and support to schools via telephone, newsletters, e- mail and a World Wide Web site.

Researchers with the network are also studying the progress of member schools, so that the members will be better able to evaluate their progress and share their findings. "That's one way our center can be of assistance, cataloguing this information and sharing it," Epstein says.

The network calls on schools to engage in a lot of hard work building relations with families and the community. But the results can be impressive: In Baltimore, for example, a recent analysis of 39 lower-income schools working with the National Network of Partnership-2000 Schools suggests that schools with stronger ties to their families and community boosted their attendance rates and student achievement in reading and writing.

"This doesn't mean they turned from poor schools to excellent schools overnight," Epstein says, but it does suggest that stronger partnerships contribute to student success in schools. And, she adds, the research findings help disprove the "erroneous notion that poor schools can't or don't build these kinds of partnerships or make this kind of progress."

Educators and policymakers hope that these efforts will help more schools find ways to build stronger parent involvement. That's something Sharon Williams, the parent from Patrick O'Hearn Elementary School, hopes will happen sooner rather than later. She still needs to find a new school for her daughter that puts as much empahsis on parent involvement as the O'Hearn does. And she knows that other parents would reap the benefits of such partnerships as well.

"I need a school where that's already in place, and I can find my spot in it," she says. "I was lucky to get into O'Hearn, where the process was already in motion. To start from scratch, that takes a lot of energy, and a lot of parents don't have that much energy left after taking care of their families."

Leon Lynn is an education writer living in Milwaukee, WI.