Yesterday, I reacted very strongly to an article about parental involvement in schools. Here’s why.
In grad school, I worked for many years at a policy institute that specialized in education policy and public administration. My boss (and my dissertation adviser) was one of the architects of the community control movement in New York City schools in the 1960s. She strongly believed that local communities should have a voice in their local schools. They would act as a check on the bureaucracy. Also, she believed that by giving parents involvement in their schools, it would lead to great empowerment and involvement in other aspects of politics. Schools were a stepping stone to greater political activity.
Community control over schools in New York City had a rocky history. In some communities, a handful of individuals took over the school boards and made some very self-serving decisions. Laws without a real tradition of parental involvement led to corruption, rather than empowerment.
Right now, I’m in a community with high levels of all the various forms of parental involvement. Parents volunteer to arrange for art shows, science shows, spelling bees, and even the traditional bake sales. They speak up at PTA meetings and tell school administrators that they like this policy and hate that policy. They vote in school board elections. They attend Back to School Nights. They vote to increase the school budgets. Administrators, in turn, try to make the parents happy. They send parents surveys. It’s fascinating to witness all this activity.
Does all that activity raise the educational achievement of the kids? Can we separate that activity from other variables? Is this activity more important than middle class culture or the wealth of the community? It’s probably impossible to separate parental involvement from wealth and culture. It all goes together. But instead of throwing out parental involvement as important factor in explaining academic achievement, I think we should encourage more of it. If it is an element of all successful school districts, then let’s assume that it matters.
And my former boss really drummed into me that notion that parental involvement in schools is the most basic of all political activities.
Apt. 11d 
I think family engagement with schools is important regardless of whether it makes a positive improvement in children’s academic outcomes. There are likely intangible and hard to quantify benefits that come along with parents advocating for their and other children.
I also believe that at some point parental involvement is detrimental to learning. Anecdotes are fun so here is one from my son’s school which has a high level of parental involvement. Every single week this school, and often times more frequently than that, we’ve received an email or announcement about some special event that is going on in my son’s class or the school at large. The gist of these emails is usually “Help us make this a special event for our kids!” The word special is used a lot. What I’ve realized is: when everything is special, nothing is special. None of these events seem special to the kids because they’re totally bombarded by them at all times.
A month ago, in anticipation of the 100th day of school, my son’s K class had a pancake party planned. Why do they need to eat a bunch of pancakes on a Tuesday afternoon just because they’ve been in school 100 days? Who the hell knows. A few days before the party we got an urgent email “We’re short two volunteers for the pancake party!!! It might not take place!!!” My first thought was that maybe it would be a good thing if the pancake party was cancelled. Of course, two parents stepped up and the pancake party went on as planned.
Even though I know the parents who organize these events mean well, it’s this sort of busybodiness that I find unhelpful and the “bad” kind of parental involvement. Parents volunteering to help the teacher in the service of a project? Great. Parents engaged in the school to ensure a positive academic environment for all kids? Great. Parents hyperinvolved in the day-to-day goings on of the school? Bad.
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scantee said:
“The gist of these emails is usually “Help us make this a special event for our kids!” The word special is used a lot. What I’ve realized is: when everything is special, nothing is special. None of these events seem special to the kids because they’re totally bombarded by them at all times.”
Exactly.
Around here, preschool and early elementary school kids are showered in candy and sweets. I’ve seen individual preschool Valentines that contained more candy than we got as our entire take for the day in elementary Valentines 30 years ago. People don’t quite get it that 10X the candy is not actually 10X as good. Candy = Love.
I’ve just started throwing most of it away. It feels so wasteful, but I didn’t buy this stuff or ask for it–why are my kids bringing it home?
“A month ago, in anticipation of the 100th day of school, my son’s K class had a pancake party planned. Why do they need to eat a bunch of pancakes on a Tuesday afternoon just because they’ve been in school 100 days?”
I suspect that that was a stealth Shrove Tuesday (AKA Mardi Gras) celebration, but they didn’t have the guts to call it that if it was public school.
My kids’ Bapto-Catholic private school has done Shrove Tuesday pancakes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrove_Tuesday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslenitsa
In Eastern Europe they do crepes, which are even better.
“Even though I know the parents who organize these events mean well, it’s this sort of busybodiness that I find unhelpful and the “bad” kind of parental involvement.”
Yes. Why do you need my help to do stuff that I don’t want you to do?
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If we cannot separate parental involvement from demographics and culture, then you are just making an assumption that it helps based on an appeal to authority. So why should we encourage more of it? I am actually curious. Do you think it will further encourage other umc behaviors that will be ultimately beneficial? My understanding is that the public schools tend not to be all that welcoming of parental involvement in poorer neighborhoods, which make it even harder to be involved. You even note that some schools are not very responsive to parents. Do you think that the encouragement will actually change a district? Do you have any evidence?
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There is a ton of research about the impact of parental involvement in schools, but I can’t cite it off the top of my head. It’s been ten years, since I’ve done this stuff. There are several great books looking at the impact of Latino parent activist group in Texas (the name escapes me) and how this group successfully brought about change in poor schools. I was involved in qualitative research studies on parent/community activist groups in TX, PA, Chicago, and elsewhere. But all research is ancient. I’m sure that more work has been done in the past ten years. I’m just not up on it anymore.
Putnam’s Making Democracy Work looks at civic involvement in Italy. Where civic involvement is high, gov’t works smoothly. Because I’m a political scientist, I think of schools as a government function.
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Doesn’t it become circular at some point? UMC parents do certain things, such as reading to children and getting involved in schools. Can you really separate behavior, SES and culture? UMC is as UMC does. The same person who reads to her child, pays the mortgage for an UMC town, and volunteers in her child’s school. If things are going well at school, she may not need to join committees or become class parent. If no one else steps up to the plate, she may. If you live in an UMC town, there’s a very deep bench of involved parents. Parents will complain that other parents hog the volunteer opportunities.
Administrators really pay attention when an issue is important enough for _both_ parents to show up at school committee meetings. In this town, this means suddenly the dads show up. In between crises, very few people attend. If you were to try to study the behavior, you would say that attending school committee meetings does not make a difference for academic outcomes, because people only show up during crises. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a constant potential for parental school committee audiences, even when no one shows up.
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I’ve been reading along and feeling like a bit of a Grinch but I agree with scantee’s post times a million. My son’s school is kind of a ‘meh’ one; it’s a tiny neighbourhood school on the to-be-closed-someday list without proper administrative support, sort of a little orphan within a huge board. But being an Ontario board, the board is reasonably well-funded with decent provincial standards for all the sort of big issues.
The attitude of the school on a classroom level basically is that _everything_ is a parental involvement issue. We are essentially re-schooling my third grader through part of the year’s curriculum because when we investigated the slipping grades we learned he had been spending 1-2 hours _a day_ in the bathroom, with the teacher’s permission (going to the bathroom involves buddies, he was every boy’s buddy in a class with 15 boys in it.) Unsurprisingly, he is suddenly getting As rather than Cs. Math curriculum issues solved!
I feel like my involvement is at capacity. I’ve done the quote-unquote right things, council, fundraising, sucking up. I’ve also complained and dealt with pushback. Our parental involvement is probably going to end in us either moving or going private, and then sure, I bet my kid’s success will be higher.
But the parent council is largely throwing its energy at fun fairs and pizza days and 100 days and spirit days and candy, candy, candy, which is great (not sarcasm) for bringing in programmes like scientists in the schools when it raises money. But that’s it. The _political_ lesson for us has been don’t bother to throw your effort at the herd, focus on your own kid.
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JennG said:
“The _political_ lesson for us has been don’t bother to throw your effort at the herd, focus on your own kid.”
It’s funny you say that. My uncle and then my dad did long stints on my hometown public school board, and my dad at least found it tremendously unproductive. No matter what hopes you go in with, you find yourself swimming in cold molasses, making very little headway. As my dad sad during the end of his school board time, what he learned from the experience was “the only kid you can save is your kid.”
I suppose somebody with more political savvy and people skills might be able to get more done, but there’s tremendous inertia in the system. If other people don’t want what you want, it’s not going to happen.
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I have a bit of a problem with the fact that though we CALL it parental involvement, it’s really “Moms leaving work in the middle of the day to make things out of a crepe paper, cut things out of construction paper and make pancakes.”
I used to cry every week when the Tuesday envelope came home times three, because it usually contained at least three hours worth of things I didn’t want to do and didn’t have time to do, and I was already feeling stressed out about the work and the commute and the daycare situation and then the Tuesday guilt envelope came home with that note that said “Dear Parents” but really meant “Mom”. And my husband was usually deployed anyway, so who the hell knew how we were going to manage to find the time to buy the right color Sculpey for the project (the right color Sculpey being the color that the Native Americans would actually have used had they had access to sculpey, while the wrong color was presumably the color that the hypothetical Native Americans would have hypothetically not liked, had they had access to Sculpey — which they did not).
I know one guy who’s a single parent who also hates the Tuesday envelope more than life itself — but he’s the only guy I’ve ever met who even knows what a Tuesday envelope is.
I’m all for advocating for my kids when necessary, but I’m not for making working moms feel guilty by inventing projects for them because some people have a vastly different notion of what being an involved parent means. (Strange how in my day we were able to go to art class with just one art teacher and thirty kids and now art class involves an army of four parent helpers. I’m still not sure about that — is it a safety thing? They’re worried someone’s going to get injured with a paintbrush? Personally, I think it’s about moms who enjoy art class.) .
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Louisa said:
“Strange how in my day we were able to go to art class with just one art teacher and thirty kids and now art class involves an army of four parent helpers. I’m still not sure about that — is it a safety thing? They’re worried someone’s going to get injured with a paintbrush?”
That’s unique to your area, I think. Lucky you.
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