Group items tagged

This guide provides ideas and suggestions taken from research on family and community involvement in schools and can help school staff and others design a long-term approach to garnering the positive involvement of all concerned. These ideas represent the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. There are as many solutions for creating a comprehensive plan to involve parents, families, and the community in the education of children, as there are schools. Each school has its own demographic mix, community context, and history. Following are ideas that can be modified and expanded upon to suit the needs of the school.

Parent involvement is consistently cited as an important correlate of effective schools. For nearly a quarter of a century, research on parental and family involvement has documented that parents can do much to reinforce positive attitudes toward school, to prepare their children for school, and to support their children's efforts once they are in school.

Latinos1 have been continually overrepresented in low-skill and service sector U.S. jobs. One of the factors accounting for this is the educational experience of the Latino community, which has been characterized by low high school graduation rates, low college completion rates and substandard schooling conditions.2 As schools and policymakers seek to improve the educational conditions of Latinos, parental influence in the form of school involvement is assumed to play some role in shaping students' educational experiences.

Parent involvement in schools has an impact.

NEA policy brief examining research showing need for community involvement in education

Family and community involvements foster partnerships among schools, family and community groups, and individuals.

"If we want faculty to be involved in communities but reward them for other activities, we are our own worst enemies" [7]."

Child Trends improves the lives and prospects of children and youth by conducting high-quality research and sharing the resulting knowledge with practitioners and policymakers.

"Public health researchers have advocated CBPR as a means to bring evidence-based public health policies and programs to communities and to enable researchers to conduct community-informed research. Despite these goals, no studies have evaluated whether linkages among agencies involved in the CBPR process have changed as a result of interventions. In our study, we measured network linkages across 14 topics to determine whether linkages among and between CBOs and universities have changed as a result of project activities."

An even less-involved and more robust tool for creating infographics!

Parents play an important part in literacy. We need to engage our parents to increase our children's literacy performance.

When schools, families, and community groups work together to support learning, children tend to do better in school, stay in school longer, and like school more." That's the conclusion of A New Wave of Evidence, a report from SEDL.