Dr. Joyce L. Epstein, Director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships and National Network of Partnership Schools, and Research Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, spoke in Connecticut in September 2006 at "Welcoming, Honoring and Connecting for Learning: A Forum on Building Bridges between Schools and Families for Student Success."
This transcript is from an edited version of Epstein's talk, which was titled "From Then to Now: Developing Effective Programs of Family and Community Involvement."
This excerpt has been corrected by the speaker for readers' understanding.
Many of you who are in this room have been partners with me and my Center at Johns Hopkins University for just about ten years. The state was a charter member of the National Network of Partnership Schools and has been growing knowledge and skills with schools and districts in the state all that time. It's been a wonderful relationship and a very important one because we, as researchers, learn with you — the educators, families, and state leaders — as you conduct your work. And so, things that I'm going to talk about today reflect many of the things we've learned with our excellent partners in Connecticut.
I want you to know that everything that we have done in the area of family and community involvement has changed since I started working on this in—well, I'll say it—1981. Everything has changed, and we must begin to think, talk, and work in new ways or we will forever be stuck in the past.
The definition of our work has changed. It used to be that we called this topic "parent involvement." Now, we still use those words; it's so easy to say, --it just rolls off the tongue. But we mean school, family, and community partnerships.
Why is this important? In the old days — which for some of us were yesterday — we put the burden of the work of family involvement only on parents' shoulders. If they were involved, they were good parents and if they were not involved — well, that was not the school's fault.
When we use the new terminology we are saying the school has a role to play, families have a role to play, and the community has a role to play in helping children succeed at high levels. And I'm very pleased that the Connecticut State Department' has placed the new language of "school-family-community partnerships" front and center in its work to help districts and schools organize their partnership programs. The leaders here certainly have gotten the message and have moved from then to now the way they view work on partnerships.
We know that everyone wants to have excellent schools, but in order to think about this, we also must talk about having strong families and healthy communities. I call this picture "overlapping spheres of influence." Where do children learn and grow? They learn and grow at home, school, and in the community. We can't do anything about that; it is a social fact. But some educators still push those spheres of influence apart and say, "You do your job, I'll do my job. Families, send your children to school ready to learn and we'll do our job to teach your children." That is the old way of thinking and talking. We have learned that by activating the overlapping spheres of influence, we really can help more children do better in school. The data show that children do better when their parents, community, and schools are working together. So the real question is, "What does this mean for what schools and districts need to do?"
The responsibilities for this work have changed. In the old days, it was up to the parents to get involved or not. Involvement activities were organized, often, by one or a few parents. A parent leader at a school might put together an activity or two. Actions were very accidental. Today, we know that family and community involvement must be understood as part of school organization and school improvement. We know that this work should not be off to the side. As we think about improving instruction, the curriculum, assessments, and other aspects of school reform, we must think of school, family, community partnerships as part of the story so that involvement contributes to the results that schools are trying to reach with all students. Front and center.
In our work across the country over the past 10 years with our national network (which now includes more than a thousand schools, 125 school districts, and 18 state departments of education — all of whom, like Connecticut, are trying to understand what research says about good programs of partnerships), we've learned how important teamwork is at all stages of the game.
At the school level, we have learned with data that we collect from all sites every year in a longitudinal, multi cohort, multi level data set, that an Action Team for Partnerships is needed in every elementary, middle, and high school. Teachers, parents, and administrators must work together on good partnerships. Now, I want to show you what this looks like so that the concept is not an abstraction to those of you who would like to move from then to now in your work on partnerships. Here is how we view this. Your schools, and many schools across the country, now have a school council or a school improvement team. This is, typically, an advisory group that oversees the school improvement plan, test scores, and goals for students—an overarching advisory group. We have learned that the council or school improvement team needs an "action arm," — an Action Team for Partnerships that is focused only on developing the school's partnership program. The Action Team for Partnerships reports to the school council or the school improvement team, and will plan and implement activities to address, four school improvement goals for student success. For example, if your school has set specific goals to improve students' reading skills, math skills, attendance, behavior, and/or students' health, and also wants to establish a climate of good partnerships, the Action Team structure will help your school create the kind of planful program of family and community involvement that will improve from year to year.
In schools without a structured plan, it is not clear whether and how things improve from year to year. And because educators and families are human, the activities are not always perfect the first time they are implemented. Right now, because most involvement programs tend to be accidental, there is no way to know if and how the quality of involvement activities improves. We must have a structure in place to help us monitor progress.
Program design for partnerships has changed. In the old days, it was really incidental, off to the side. I say that family involvement was a matter of luck. If a child was in a classroom that had a really knowledgeable teacher, a parent would say "I am so lucky this year. Johnny has a teacher who keeps me so well informed. I know how to help. Last year that just didn't happen." And that parent may never be able to say that sentence again because involvement may not be systematic for every teacher in the school. Involvement may not be systematic in the principal's mind. With an organized team and written plan to help every teacher in the school move from then to now every school can design a program with practices of family and community involvement.
These days we know that a framework of Six Types of Involvement that I developed over the years, and a goal-oriented approach focused on involving families and the community to help improve reading, math, attendance, and other school, district, or state goals as part of the school improvement process, is a better way to organize a partnership program and improve from year to year.
The framework of six types of involvement grew from studies that I and my colleagues have done for many years. We call it a "framework" rather than a "model" because you know that sometimes a model is viewed as being fixed in nature. By contrast, the framework of six types of involvement opens avenues for schools and districts to develop programs that are right for their own populations of students and families. Every community is a little different and groups of parents have different backgrounds, abilities, and ways of working and communicating.
The first rule of good program development is that educators in schools and districts must know their families. You don't want to do things in your communities, in your schools, in your districts that aren't going to work. Knowing what your families can and cannot do is really very important. For example, if 90% of the moms in your community work full- or part-time during the school day, that has implications for how your school will conduct parent workshops to help parents understand child development, which is what Type 1-Parenting in the framework is about. Type 1 also emphasizes how your school is going to understand its families. In this slide, you will see that each of the six types of involvement has two-way interactions. The framework is not about the school telling parents what to do. You can see that Type 1-Parenting is about educators and families talking with each other, so that families understand child and adolescent development as youngsters move from preschool to elementary, middle, and high school. Type 1 also is about the need for schools to understand the backgrounds, goals and expectations of families.
Type 2 is about communicating. It is about conducting parent-teacher conferences and designing them well. It is about having open house nights and designing them well. It is about student- led parent-teacher student conferences. Student-led parent-teacher student conferences are another example of a Type 2 communicating activity within a well-planned partnership program.
Type 3-Volunteering has to do with the way Action Teams for Partnerships organize volunteers to help your school or the students, whether the volunteers are in the school or outside of the school. We stretch this definition to include audiences as volunteers. If you invite parents to come to hear a band concert, attend sports activities, award assemblies, drama productions, or other events, they're coming to volunteer to support the school and children's activities. In that way, parents and others may be giving your school 5, 10, or more hours of volunteer time. In a partnership program, schools can recognize audience members as volunteers.
Type 4 has to do with learning at home, which is, mainly, about homework—one of the most volatile topics in the world. It is important for a partnership program to guide parents to know how to help their own child with schoolwork at home. In the National Network of Partnership Schools, we have a process called TIPS Interactive Homework, which helps teachers design activities that enable children to show and share their work without requiring parents to think they're supposed to teach all the subjects you teach in school. That would be an impossible task for just about all parents. In TIPS, teachers design homework that guides the children do the work and demonstrate skills, discuss ideas, survey parents, get reactions, read their work aloud, and enable parents to engage in what I would call "conversations" about school life and learning. With TIPS, this is done without putting parents in an impossible position of teaching school subjects.
Type 5 is about decision-making. It includes the PTA, PTO, the school improvement team, and the Action Team for Partnerships that we have been discussing to bring parents' voices to bear on school decisions and work to improve school programs, including partnerships.
Finally, Type 6 concerns collaborating with the community. Those of you who are here from community agencies know that there are effective ways to work directly with school teams to enrich school programs and to help schools increase and improve their partnership programs. I recall, for example, that one school in Baltimore had AT&T or a similar phone company as a community partner one year. . They put a phone company representative on the Action Team for Partnerships, and later, the phone company put telephones in every classroom. That is an example of selecting strategic team members—to bring together many folks who will work well together to help children do better in school.
I also recall a school in Connecticut whose Action Team for Partnerships had a member from the local police force. Safety issues in that school could be addressed more fully by that team. By looking at teamwork and planning in a strategic way, schools can have more comprehensive and effective programs. The interesting thing is that there are hundreds of practices for the Six Types of Involvement. So there's not just one way to do this work., It is up to each school's team to develop a program and select involvement activities that will work.
The good news is that hundreds of suggestions have been produced by the sites in our network and that are shared in an annual book of Promising Partnership Practices. Over 500 activities that are working in schools in Connecticut and across the country are in these books and on our website, at www.partnershipschools.org in the section Success Stories. Your school may not be able to use someone else's practice in exactly the same way, but it sure is a good idea to start from something that others know is working. For example, you may see 15 different ways that of organizing open house nights in innovative and interesting designs, or 13 different ways of running parent-teacher conferences. In the 2006 book of Promising Partnership Practices, Connecticut is represented with ideas from the state department, a school in Windsor, and a school in Groton.
The implementation of programs has changed to focus on meeting the challenges to reach all families in a good program of partnerships. The Six Types of Involvement are a fine place to start moving from then to now, but the types are not the end of the story. We must meet challenges to reach all families, or else some families will be excluded. In the old days, people talked about "the barriers to parent involvement." We don't use the term "barriers" anymore. When people said "barriers" they were talking about parents' diversity --such as parents who did not speaking English at home, or moms who were employed and who were not available during the school day. We know that mobile and migratory families, homeless families, families in the military who often are on the move, set challenges for schools to create new ways to involve families. When these factors were considered "barriers," schools were following a "deficit model." Educators complained about the parents who couldn't and wouldn't become involved with the schools and with their children's education. But the many schools and districts in NNPS have been working for up to ten years to reach and involve these very parents. The collections of Promising Partnership Practices include hundreds of ideas of how to think about these realities. The various conditions and constraints of family life are not barriers. They are challenges (which the educators in this room know is a euphemism for barrier) but the challenges that families pose open up some opportunities for new designs to solve these issues. We know that there are solutions that can be shared by networking in this state and across the country to help all schools improve their programs. Further, the improvements and activities that your schools implement can help the next locations to their programs. That's why networking about partnerships is so important.
Now, in NNPS, we follow a "strengths model." We acknowledge that all parents care about their children. We have found that is true. We have an international network of scholars from 40 nations who work on these same topics, and we haven't found a nation yet where parents don't care about their children and their children's success. But, how do we help all parents' strengths emerge? How do schools help parents do the things they say they would like to do to support their children's learning, if only they had a little better information? From our first study in 1981 we found, as others have found, that parents are ready to be partners. We also learned is that some schools and some districts are not so ready to allow true partnerships to grow in a productive way because they're still stuck in the past.
In the old days, implementation of family and community involvement was, mainly a topic for preschools or the early grades. One of my inspirations for getting started in this work was the Head Start program. In Baltimore, for example, there was a Head Start center that we visited, teeming with parents, parents were everywhere—it was in the law. Parents were part of the Head Start legislation. Across the street from the Head Start center there was an elementary school that we visited --not a parent in sight. What was going on there? Where were the parents? We were told "It's better not to get them very involved -- better to keep them out."
I was visiting a school — I think it was in New England. The school had two fences around it — an outer fence and an inner fence. Parents were not permitted past the outer fence. Now that's metaphorical. A new principal went into that school and removed both fences—that's metaphorical too.
We are learning that school, family, and community partnerships is a topic that is important at all grade levels. Recently, research at the high school level included two studies by my students in dissertations following 17,000 middle school students into high school through grade 12. Even from grade 11 to 12, there were positive effects of parental involvement for the students on credits earned, attendance, coming prepared for school, and other outcomes that measure success in high school.
We have many studies now that have measured the effects of family and community involvement on student attendance. Improving attendance is one issue that arises in many middle and high schools. This is also a family issue. Parents must get their children up and out; the children, of course, have to get up and out to school on time, too.
In the old days, family involvement was conducted by separate groups of parents in isolated activities. When I first started to do field work in Baltimore, we would see that on Monday, the Title I parents had a meeting. Then on Tuesday, the special education parents had a meeting. On Wednesday, the PTA or PTO had a meeting, but if you had been to a meeting on Monday or Tuesday, you didn't have to go to the meeting on Wednesday. It was as if parents wore different hats that announced their group identity. It was really a little silly and separated groups rather than bring them together.
In 1988 or thereabouts, the Title I legislation changed to focus on whole school change and improvement—and that was a very good thing. We know now that all groups in a school and across a district need to view themselves as a community -- to build a sense of community. The work on partnerships can include the PTA or PTO, parents of students receiving special education services, parents, in schools that receive Title I funds, the after-school program, business partners and other groups. These are no longer "siloed" activities. Rather, bringing the groups together creates a school community. We must begin to think of all the groups within a school in this way.
In the old days, work on involvement was mainly mothers' work. Some of you are sitting there thinking, that this is still mainly mothers' work. You are correct that mothers are most often involved today. However, we know that the sites that are working to improve their programs from year to year are reaching out to mothers and fathers, grandparents, foster parents, guardians, business partners, volunteers, and others in the community. Once schools set in motion the Six Types of Involvement, their teams begin to think in larger terms of who are possible leaders, who can help, who's available to conduct planned activities, who wants to grow their own leadership skills, how can different activities bring people together? It's really quite an exciting agenda to see that it is possible to change old kinds of narrow designs of involvement into more equitable and well planned partnership programs.
In the old days, decisions about programs of school, family, and community partnerships were made school-by-school. Now, we know—this is one of the things that I've learned most, personally, in the last five years—that this is topic that requires multi-level leadership. We've learned most about how important district-level leadership is, with an assigned coordinator or facilitator for family involvement to help schools understand teamwork, write plans, and evaluate their work. We have learned how important it t is for district leaders to work with all schools on partnership program development in systematic and effective ways. We call this a "nested design." Schools are nested in districts, and districts are nested in states. Leaders at all levels contribute to the solutions that are needed to move programs of family and community involvement from then to now.
There are even more important changes from then to now. The whole point of working to improve partnerships would be lost if we stopped right here. We have changed from then to now to focus clearly on reaching results for students.
Everyone wants students to succeed in school — that's why we have schools. Schools do not exist just to be welcoming places for parents and community partners. Schools exist to help children do better as students, to feel successful in school, have good attitudes about school, graduate on time, see themselves as students, move on to college and work, and take productive roles in young adulthood. We have to keep our sights on the real purpose for improving partnership programs.
In the old days, programs were content to measure parent outcomes. They measured how many parents came to a meeting, or how many volunteers assisted a school. These intermediate outcomes still -are important, but they're not the reason for doing this work. The reason is to help students do their best in school, to link the practices that an Action Team for Partnerships conducts each year to the results that the teachers are working very hard to reach with students—to improve reading skills, to improve math skills, to get parents involved in productive ways. When the focus is on results, then everybody's time is better spent and everybody's efforts are better respected. We do not want to play a game called "get involved to get involved." These days, with NCLB hanging on everyone's shoulders, we do not have time to just play games. Work on school, family, and community partnerships has to be a productive story.
The link to getting these pieces together is an annual One-Year Action Plan for partnerships linked to specific school improvement goals. We do not have time today to get into the details of action plans, but I wanted to show you an example from one elementary school that was trying to reach reading goals to help children do better in school. The Action Team for Partnerships activated the Six Types of Involvement by selecting and designing—my favorite word, designing—activities that would help parents and the community see that the school was all about reading. The team wanted to send a message that all partners can work with youngsters to make the school a reading place. You can see that, for Type 1-Parenting, the school decided to conduct workshops for the young children's parents on how to read aloud with kindergarteners and first graders. For Type 2-Communicating, the school conducted parent-teacher student conferences where the youngster is present. Instead of trying to cover everything in the world in that 15 minute conference, the school planned to have the student, teacher, and parent talk about reading —the child's reading skills, things to work on in the next report card period, and how all partners could help the youngster keep moving forward to improve reading skills.
You can see that this elementary school planned to have reading buddies, a very common and exciting Type 3 activity when volunteers come in and read with children who needed some extra help with reading, and guest readers at a Family Reading Night, also a very common and popular activity in schools that are working on becoming a reading place. For Type 4, the teachers planned to assign weekly interactive homework that guided students to talk about what they were reading or writing with a family partner at home. Parents love to hear what a child has written even if it's an odd sentence or short poem. The notion of creating that interactions without expecting parents of any grade level to teach their children phonemic awareness, comprehension, and other reading skills makes for more of a pleasant and successful homework environment.
In this school, for Type 5-Decision Making, the PTA supported reading nights and helped parents to swap children's books. In this way, the PTA was not just conducting meetings, but was conducting activities to support the school's reading goals and the plan for partnerships. In this school, Type 6 was activated by working with community partners who donated books that children could take home and/or use in school. Some parents don't have funds to buy reading books and so the notion of bringing community partners into the reading agenda is one of the ways to enrich a partnership program.
The way we share results has changed. In the old days, results of partnership programs or the success stories of specific activities were shared locally, if at all. In a school district, one school did not know what the school down the street was doing. We know that we must move forward so that success stories are shared in your districts, across the state of Connecticut, and, because of NNPS, throughout the nation to enliven and enrich this agenda.
From then to now, we have increased an emphasis on equity. In the old days, equity in partnerships was very unbalanced. Knowing that some families are involved whereas others are not involved is not enough. The blame game is not enough. Saying that teachers, principals, and parents can do more to reach all parents is true, but it is not helpful to point fingers, when all partners can do more and do better. So our question becomes: How can schools create programs so that involvement emphasizes equity and the need to reach all families? How long will it take to meet that goal for good partnerships? Will schools achieve equity in involvement the first year they try? Maybe not, but there are schools that established a team, wrote a plan, implemented better activities, reached more families, and increased students' attendance and other successes, even in the first year of their work on organizing their program of partnerships.
The No Child Left Behind guidelines specify — many times — that schools and school districts must communicate with all families in languages they understand in order to help children achieve at higher levels. That is very different from the language in the first ESEA legislation that said that a school or district receiving Title I funds should have an advisory group of parents. The old legislation outlined the old way of thinking. The new way requires schools to reach all parents and involve them in ways that make a difference for students. That is a huge difference from then to now. In its own way, the legislation builds on research that shows how to build a better mouse trap —so to speak — to improve programs of school, family, and community partnerships.
Even our research methods have changed from then to now. In the old days it was enough to measure anything about how are parents involved. We've learned that the general measures of family involvement are not enough. New studies explore how to organize partnership programs effectively, how to measure what really is happening, how different types of involvement are implemented, their effects on students and families, and whether and how well schools are reaching all families, even where there are many family language groups.
Our most recent data from 2005 show that, over and above what school's Action Teams for Partnerships did on their own to organize their work on partnerships schools that were in districts with leaders who facilitated good partnership practices had higher quality partnership programs, reached out to meet more challenges, and involved more families than did schools that did not have direct and active assistance from district leaders..
So you can see that everything has changed in work on partnerships since we started to conduct research and development on the topic. Which change from then to now do you think has been most important or is most important in your school or district for strengthening your programs of family and community involvement? Is it the change in definition? Is it the improvements in implementation? Is it the emphasis on equity? Is the focus on results? What change that we talked about today is most important to you? And, why do you think so? What questions do you have?
To conclude, we have learned that any school, any district, and any state can move from then to now and develop stronger and more effective partnership programs and practices. We invite your schools to join the National Network of Partnership Schools at Johns Hopkins University. Of course we can't make you do that; but it is an opportunity to obtain on-going assistance in developing a research-based, goal oriented, evaluated program of family and community involvement that can be sustained and improved from year to year. We invite you to work with NNPS because we learn from you, too.
You should know that Section 1118 in NCLB is, actually, an attainable section of the law. Your schools and districts, just like the state of Connecticut, can meet the requirements for family involvement that are outlined in Section 1118. The topics we discussed today will enable you to meet the requirements. And, of course, the networking opportunities also will help improve your programs and practices.
Like a school's reading program, work on a good partnership program doesn't go away. No school would start the school year without clear plans for its reading, English, and math programs. As we move from then to now, we can foresee a time when no school will start a school year without a well-planned, goal-oriented program of school, family, and community partnerships in place. Are you ready to take this path to partnerships?