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EFFECTIVE SCHOOLS RESEARCH Research indicates that a child’s success in school is significantly influenced by having: A HIGH DEGREE OF PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT Parental involvement is the most significant factor contributing to a child’s success in school. Parents and family members are a child’s first teachers. Their active participation in school activities improves student achievement, increases school attendance, and decreases student dropout, delinquency, and pregnancy rates. The kinds of involvement that parents want most with schools is how to work with their own child at home in ways that help the student succeed and that keep the parents as partners in their children’s education across the grades. Typically, efforts on the part of schools to involve parents start to drop dramatically as early as grades 2 or 3. Research shows that parents at all grade levels want to stay informed and involved. Teachers sometimes resist getting involved with parents because they think it involves too much time and energy. Some parents also resist involvement because of work demands (particularly for single parents), time constraints, or their own negative experiences with schooling. But the research indicates that it is teacher practices, not the education, marital status, or work place demands of parents, which makes the difference in whether parents are productive partners with schools in their children’s education. School/home relationships often improve when the school administrator takes the lead in planning and implementing parent involvement strategies and activities. The research also suggests that the strongest parent/school partnerships usually occur in schools where there is a part-time teacher and assistant to work with teachers and develop materials. No one practice (meetings, workshops, public relations efforts) can cover the full range of ways parents and teachers need to work together for their children’s education. For various reasons, some parents can’t get to meetings and workshops. They feel guilty about not attending and their children feel bad because their parents didn’t participate. To reduce the guilt and distress, schools need a wide variety of ways of sharing the information they normally distribute at workshops and parent meetings. The research indicates that while single parents and working parents are less likely to interact with the school as volunteers they are as likely, or more likely, to spend time with their children at home assisting them with school activities. Schools need to design and test more effective ways to provide information to parents. They need to know not only whether messages are going home but who understands them and who does not, and who they are reaching and who they are not reaching and why. The communications from school to home need to be sent in simple, readable, jargon-free English or in the language spoken by the family. Research does not support the assumption that poor families don’t have the same goals as middle class families. Parents in all economic classes want their children to succeed, they want to help them, and they need the school’s and the teacher’s help to know what to do with their children at each grade level. All parents from all economic classes can assist teachers if they are given useful, clear information about what they can do, especially at home. Sources: Brand,
1989.
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