Parental Involvement in Schools

While the idea of increasing parent involvement most often receives universal approval, defining what parent involvement really means is far more difficult. Most parents when asked if they are involved in supporting their kid's education, growth, and development would answer in the affirmative and may even take offense at anyone assuming otherwise.

In 1999, Public Agenda, a non-profit organization dedicated to unbiased public opinion research, conducted a study and produced a report, "Playing Their Parts: Parents and Teachers Talk About Parental Involvement in Public Schools." The results were fascinating, finding a lot of murky areas of communication on the topic of parent involvement. What they did find was a common concern for the welfare and future of our nation's children and the "feeling" that there is something different that parents and schools need to be paying attention to.

According to the study, the term parental involvement means many things to many people. For some, it means getting more parents involved in school governance, volunteering in the classroom or fund raising to benefit the school. But for many others, the focus is on what is happening at home.

While the research showed that volunteering at school is helpful and important, there was overwhelming agreement that it is not what parents do at school but what they do at home that makes the difference. Both teachers and parents agreed that teaching kids respect, effort, and self-control is essential to support academic learning. These core values, echoed by all, are what make the difference in kid's success in school and in life. The study showed that "teachers across the country believe that they simply cannot do their best job teaching because too many students lack the basic upbringing and supervision to make them ready to learn."

Parent involvement is much more complex than meets the eye. Today's parents know that education is of great importance to their children's success and they face a number of new pressures unknown to past generations, including the effect of the media and the internet on children. They already feel they are more involved than their own parents were in raising them. So what priorities need to change? How can parents and schools come to terms with these important issues?

The non-profit National ParentNet Association, through its work with more than 40 schools over a ten-year period, recently launched a new website, ParentInvolvementMatters.Org to encourage grassroots action in local school communities. The emphasis is placed on what parents do at home to support kids learning and how parent involvement programs must facilitate collaboration between parents and schools.

ParentNet is one program that has been used successfully to build a network of communication between parents and schools and to facilitate learning about the things that matter most to our kids. Although the website offers access to ParentNet and its materials for schools to freely use, it also provides a window to many other resources, articles, and success stories that are being developed around the country.

Much more discussion is necessary between parents and between parents and schools on the subject of parent involvement. As reformers work to improve education, we must ask some tough questions about how parents are currently "involved" and what that involvement may look like if it were to better support the learning goals of most educational institutions.

Marilyn Mitchell is a co-founder of the National ParentNet Association. A non-profit organization dedicated to improving parent involvement in schools and education.

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