Family - School Partnerships

How much influence should parents have over what happens in their children’s schools?

You already know this question has sparked some lively discussion across our state and in the national news.

And it doesn’t have a simple answer.

At one extreme: an old-school approach. Parents are “informed” more often than “engaged” as collaborators. Parents are invited to support the school in certain limited ways: as a room parent, a chaperone, a fundraiser.

I don’t like this approach because I know parents have more to offer and that schools are stronger when parents play a larger role. Research tells us that schools with strong family engagement are 10 times more likely to improve student learning outcomes, and that it matters as much as rigorous curriculum and high-quality school leadership.

At the other extreme, however, is an approach that feels equally untenable to me: parents who feel like they can—and must—weigh in on nearly every facet of their school’s operation. This approach is cumbersome, advantages those parents with the time and skills to advocate, telegraphs mistrust of school staff, and often has unintended negative consequences for the students we’re trying to educate.

For example, a new state law in Tennessee requires educators to catalog every book in every school. Some teachers who have built up sizable classroom libraries are opting to dismantle them because the cataloguing directive seems too daunting; it’s Tennessee’s students—only one-third of whom are reading at a “proficient” level—who will suffer.

So how do we strike the right balance? To help guide my own thinking, I’ve been spending some time with the PTA’s National Standards for Family-School Partnerships. There are several national organizations that have produced guidance about family engagement, but I am partial to the PTA’s work because it is a nonpartisan group with well-established governance regulations and financial transparency.

Just this year the PTA updated its Standards for Family-School Partnerships. The PTA’s iterative process involved more than 600 local and state PTA leaders, members, researchers and administrators.

​Each of the six standards has related goals and performance indicators. You can find the full text on the PTA website, but in brief here are the standards:

1. Welcome all families — The school treats families as valued partners in their child’s education and facilitates a sense of belonging in the school community.

2. Communicate effectively — The school supports staff to engage in proactive, timely, and two-way communication so that all families can easily understand and contribute to their child’s educational experience.

3. Support student success — The school builds the capacity of families and educators to continuously collaborate to support students’ academic, social, and emotional learning.

4. Speak up for every child — The school affirms family and student expertise and advocacy so that all students are treated fairly and have access to relationships and opportunities that will support their success.

5. Share power — The school partners with families in decisions that affect children and families and together - as a team - inform, influence, and create policies, practices, and programs.

6. Collaborate with community — The school collaborates with community organizations and members to connect students, families, and staff to expanded learning opportunities, community services, and civic participation.

If you dig into what changed when the PTA updated its standards this year, you’ll find the following revisions, which feel very significant to me:

1. A shift from “opportunities to volunteer” to “opportunities to contribute”—signaling that parents have more to offer than simply filling volunteer slots. (But keep doing that, too!)
2. Where the standards previously acknowledged “economic barriers to participation,” they now speak to other linguistic and cultural barriers.
3. The standards now talk about co-developing communication expectations and protocols with families and staff.
4. Adding clear statements about eliminating bias in family engagement approaches and encouraging leadership among historically marginalized groups.
5. A shift from “informing” families about students’ academic progress to partnering with families to ensure two-way communication about students’ strengths and needs and to set goals.
6. Engaging families in decision making in ways that go beyond surveys. Tracking data and filling gaps for representative input and power in decisions so that diverse perspectives are considered.
7. Describing in more detail how school-community partnerships could be conceived and managed to benefit students and staff, including mapping community assets and needs, and aligning community partners to school improvement planning.

In short, what I see (that I like) in these standards is a shift towards inclusiveness, collaboration and sharing power.

​But what does “sharing power” between schools and families entail?

I think it means drawing upon the strengths of the various players. Parents know their students in a way that teachers can’t. They know what may be particularly motivating or challenging for their kids, and this knowledge is gold in the hands of an interested teacher. Educators know the research-based approaches that will help all kinds of students move from Point A to Point B. They also have additional context: they’ve worked with dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of students who may have benefitted from similar instructional strategies. 

Educators also commit to serve the greater good—that means doing what’s right for all kids, not just what I think is right for my kid. Think about that: the significant work it takes and the incredible promise of every child feeing safe, valued, appropriately supported and intellectually challenged.  No parent should ever have the right, in the name of “sharing power” or “parental control,” to take that away from another parent’s child.

Creating effective family-school partnerships is complex and increasingly contentious work. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. The answer is not to double down on the old-school model that shuts families out or boxes them in. Instead, maybe we can create spaces where we can talk about this partnership model. Maybe in your parent group or school staff meeting—or better yet, all together—you can explore questions like these:

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• How can we learn about and meet families’ communication preferences?
• How can parents improve the ways they communicate with school staff?
• What would it look like if teachers, families and students worked together to set social, emotional and academic goals?
• What are some new and potentially promising ways that school staff could get to know students and families and their strengths?
• What work do we need to do (all around) to recognize and eliminate biases?
• How could we give families and students a voice in decisions that affect children? What kinds of decisions? What does “a voice” mean to us?

I’d love to hear how you would answer these questions. Please reach out. I’m interested as a parent, a former PTA leader, and as a School Board member—because of course I believe that what the PTA has outlined for family-school partnerships is relevant for family-school district partnerships, too.