How Family and Community Engagement Supports Students, Parents, and Educators
Educators and families around the country are enjoying their last days of summer vacation. Trips to beaches, lakeside cabins, and amusement parks represent a subset of destinations that will be squeezed into these last few days before kids make their way back to the classroom. As Remind prepares for the new school year, I took some time during my family vacation to read up on a recent review of education research that highlights the impact family engagement has on learning outcomes for students of all backgrounds. The study was shared with me by one of my colleagues at Remind, and was conducted by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation (NMEF). It’s definitely worth reading through the full study, but in the event you can’t get through it cover to cover before school starts, I’ve outlined a few of the top takeaways from NMEF’s review and have shared some thoughts on how school leaders might further assess the study’s findings during the coming school year.
Nellie Mae initiated the study in light of the fact that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) “calls for increased stakeholder engagement as states, districts, and schools implement provisions targeted to support the law.” Specifically, ESSA “requires schools identified for comprehensive support and improvement (CSI) or targeted support and improvement (TSI) to develop and implement their school-level improvement plans in partnership with stakeholders, including family and community members”. [Note: ESSA defines CSI schools as the lowest performing 5 percent of schools and high schools with graduation rates below 67 percent, and defines TSI schools as those in which a subgroup of students is consistently underperforming.]
Beyond helping CSI and TSI schools, Nellie Mae’s focus in conducting this research review stems from the realization that “without research-based strategies, states, schools, and districts have been slow to make family engagement a priority.” NMEF partnered with the American Institutes for Research who ultimately helped the foundation whittle down their review to 35 research papers, peer-reviewed articles, and reports that directly attempted to measure the impact that family and community engagement has on educational outcomes.
Through their meta-analysis, Nellie Mae “found several family and community engagement programs and practices that have been shown to have a positive impact on student outcomes and school improvement.” Three strategies that bubbled to the top of the several highlighted in the literature review include: 1) engaging social networks of parents, 2) empowering parents with leadership roles in school environments, and 3) providing families opportunities to engage with their children’s education at home. Below I’ve highlighted a couple of the studies that support each of these approaches, as well as additional thoughts that add dimension to how educators might more extensively implement these strategies. [Note: The NMEF meta-study highlights several other approaches that may also deliver student learning benefits through increased family-community engagement efforts, and I encourage readers to learn more about these additional strategies surfaced by NMEF to see which might apply to their district or school beyond the three highlighted here.]
Social networks. Nellie Mae defines the goal of parent social network programs “to make schoolwide changes through the collective action of parent communities.” One study cited by Nellie Mae focused on supporting elementary age children through a collective parent engagement (CPE) program that compared a CPE study group to a comparison control group (both groups consisted of 16 parents, and 14 of the parents in the CPE group were African American). Results of the study indicated that “how empowered parents felt corresponded to higher standardized reading scores” and that a “parent’s participation in the CPE program corresponded to higher mathematics and language scores for the child.” Another program — Families and Schools Together (FAST) — created social networks by bringing families together within the school setting, and then measuring the impact on educational outcomes between parents who participated in the FAST program versus those who didn’t. A review of a FAST program administered in Milwaukee in 2006 found that “two years after the completion of the FAST program, teachers rated students of this program as having significantly higher social and academic skills and lower aggressive behaviors than students in a comparison group.”
In all of the social network research studies reviewed by Nellie Mae, the common theme revolved around the physical dimension of the programs studied. A heavy emphasis on the creation of social networking opportunities was placed on bringing parents to the school so that they could interact with other parents, educators, and/or their children. None of the studies in the NMEF review mentioned the potential use of digital tools like Remind’s mobile communication service built for the school environment or even the use of more general social networking services like text messaging or Facebook. For those who participated in the CPE and FAST programs cited above, one could imagine perhaps even deeper engagement if the studies had included a formal digital communication layer that enabled ongoing social interaction amongst participants. Perhaps even more important, enabling digital communication tools to be utilized as part of these education-based social networks may broaden the reach of programs like FAST by including those parents who can’t physically attend sessions at schools given work or other obligations.
Parent leadership. Getting parents more involved in what happens at school has shown positive results on school success and student achievement. The Nellie Mae report highlights two studies that demonstrate how parent leadership roles in school-level decision-making can pay off. First, a partnership between the Kentucky Parent Teacher Association and the Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership “aimed to help parents understand new education reforms, create parent leaders, and train parents on how to become involved in efforts to improve their children’s schools.” The evaluation of this study highlighted heightened family engagement and an increase “…in families serving as active decision makers with school staff in support of school improvement.” The second study highlighted by the NMEF study “found positive associations between schools with higher student achievement and diffused leadership structures.” This study looked at 2,570 teacher survey responses from almost 100 high achieving schools and found that “…leadership influence in the high-achieving schools was extended to more stakeholders, including parents, to a greater degree than lower achieving schools.”
Despite positive indications from these studies, the notion of parent leadership roles in schools is tricky to say the least and many educators struggle with how to appropriately cast parent involvement in their schools. On one hand educators love the idea of getting as much support as they can get, whether that’s more helping hands in the classroom, or more true parent leadership representation to complement that of the faculty and staff. If done right, having parents more involved in schools potentially diffuses what may otherwise evolve as an awkward, arm’s length relationship between parents and educators. Further, getting parents involved demonstrates for children important role modeling and clear-cut signs that parents care deeply about what happens when they are at school, which has the added benefit of deepening the student-parent connection at home. However, maintaining discrete space between educators and parents is oftentimes seen as a more prudent approach by administrators and teachers. In some instances, parents granted leadership roles or even simple access to the school or classroom can push too far in the spirit of “just trying to help”. In less desirable scenarios moms and dads may cast aside their need to be objective parent leaders by pushing a personal agenda too hard from the inside. So long as expectations are clearly defined around the purpose and scope of parent leadership, and that the clear decision making for what happens in schools and classrooms clearly remains with the educators, the benefits to students from parent leadership contributions can be significant.
Family engagement at home — Sometimes the things that work well in life are perhaps a bit too obvious. The idea of engaging families around a student’s education in the home setting sits high on that list. Increasingly though, the definition of home has become fractured in the U.S. The mid-1950’s image of the family of four sitting around the dinner table, jovially talking about the kids’ school day has been replaced by a visual of kids at home with one parent, with their grandparents, or worse, home alone (with or without siblings) trying to muster the energy and focus to study when they are simultaneously attempting to figure out what’s for dinner. Schools can play a major role in helping families work around these new definitions of “home” by keeping parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and all caregivers connected with what’s happening at school so that all of these caregivers can be there both physically and digitally to help students stay on the right path.
Many districts and schools today have professionals dedicated to this important area of family engagement, where the primary goal is to ensure kids make it to school every day and that important information makes it to their caregivers so that these people can support student progress towards the learning outcomes that matter most e.g. completing homework, maintaining good grades, and ultimately graduating from high school with a clear path towards what’s next. One of the most useful tools to help family engagement staff at schools maintain these important connections with both students and caregivers is the use of mobile communications. Simple group messages or individual deliveries of information can be sent anytime during the school day or evening to keep the beat of family engagement thumping. Mobile communication enables critical interactions between caregiver and student that support learning outcomes whether they come in the context of a physically intact home environment where the caregiver and student can engage one-on-one as well, or in a family setting that must be virtually constructed because the student and caregiver live apart.
In the Nellie Mae report, several studies are highlighted that feature the importance of family engagement at home. In one study, African American high school students from urban schools were assessed based on the communication behaviors of their parents. In the study, “…parent engagement at home was defined as parent communication with students about school (e.g., talking about school experiences, knowing how well the student is doing in school).” The study found that more engaged parents had students who exhibited better educational outcomes in terms of academic achievement and attendance. A second study highlighted by Nellie Mae tracked students from middle school through high school in a large Maryland county. In this study, almost 1,500 students from 23 public middle schools were tracked in three waves of data collection, and their academic performance was connected to measures of parent involvement in the form of “…scaffolding in dependence (e.g., parents providing opportunities for children to complete schoolwork and solve problems on their own) and providing structure (e.g., designated homework time).” Results of the study revealed strong associations between these parental engagement tactics and improved GPAs from seventh to eleventh graders.
Clearly, parents being involved in their kids education matters, but for some parents being physically present every evening may not be possible. Enabling schools to reach all caregivers with updates about what’s happening at school for each student — what classes are they taking, which ones are they doing well in, and which ones are they struggling with — is a great start. With this basic information, caregivers can go further. They can engage with students around what makes Algebra hard, but English Literature a joy. They can ask about how basketball practice, band rehearsal, or robotics club is going. Enabling parents to engage deeper builds the scaffolding that comes from recurring expressions of interest and support that may very well make a bigger difference than simply copy editing that English Lit essay, (though editing that English essay is pretty helpful too!).
For both school educators and parents/caregivers thinking about family and community engagement this coming school year, the comprehensive work completed by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation should prove insightful. As specific approaches to family and community engagement come into view this Fall for school communities, it’s important to highlight and qualify a few final points suggested by the NMEF study:
Pursue multiple strategies. While the NMEF study suggests that “employing multiple strategies in a program will likely increase the odds of getting families to engage and of positively affecting school and student outcomes”, for many school communities the right approach may very well be to focus on a single approach this Fall and work to optimize that effort. Given limited time and resources across all stakeholders, developing a well executed family engagement program in the coming school year may yield better results than trying to rollout several efforts in parallel.
Be sensitive to student population. The NMEF folks rightly highlight that school communities should attempt to identify family and community engagement strategies that have been successful in other school settings that mirror their own school community demographic make-up and that “Different strategies may work better for certain populations.” School leaders would be smart to map their strategies to their school community profiles, yet if they are unable to find a family engagement approach that applies exactly to their community they might do well to select the strategy they believe can most positively impact family engagement in their school community.
Use technology to increase communication. Multiple studies referenced in the NMEF cite the positive impact technology has on family engagement. A study conducted in a Title I school in Georgia “…revealed the primary obstacles to family engagement at the school to be communication…” and a separate study of parents of students in fourth through sixth grades “…demonstrated that parents had a positive perception of technology to improve family engagement at the school.” Regardless of the family engagement strategy employed by educators, digital communication technologies can no doubt augment the effectiveness of the school’s chosen strategy. In today’s busy, crazy world where parents live on mobile devices as a means to stay connected with their kids, school educators can tap into this communication channel to reach parents when they need to be reached. This enables schools to truly connect with parents/caregivers in the spirit of family and community engagement communication geared to helping every student succeed.
