Seeing is Believing: Promising Practices for How School Districts Promote Family Engagement

This policy brief from Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) and the National Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) examines how six United States (US) school districts across the country have used strategies to create and sustain family engagement. Findings point to three core components of successful systems: creating district-wide strategies, building school capacity, and reaching out to and engaging families. Drawing from districts’ diverse approaches, the report highlights practices that promise to ensure quality, oversight, and impact from their family engagement efforts. It also proposes a set of recommendations for how federal, state, and local policies can promote district-level family engagement efforts that support student learning.

Key policy recommendations include:

1. Creating infrastructure for district-wide leadership for family engagement - "This includes superintendents and senior leadership linking family engagement to their district’s instructional goals, the creation of an infrastructure that elevates and communicates about the importance of family engagement, and mechanisms to assess progress and performance along the way....Communication for family engagement is designed to cut across administrators in district offices and departments, school staff, and families and community members." Suggested strategies include creating, staffing, and training district-level family engagement offices.
   
2. Building district capacity for family engagement through training and technical assistance - "District-level resources and support enable schools to acquire the capacity to carry out family engagement in strategic ways that align with instructional goals. This happens through ongoing professional development and technical assistance for principals, teachers, and other “family-facing” staff in school buildings....Districts devote significant time to creating training curricula, tool kits, materials, and other resources that can be replicated across schools and with families." Sharing these across districts could be done through intermediaries, such as the state Parental Information and Resource Centers (PIRCs).
3. Ensuring reporting, learning, and accountability for family engagement - "District-level staff who coordinate family and community engagement call for more proactive monitoring to ensure compliance with family engagement provisions across the educational system." This can include engaging families in performance evaluations once clear expectations are set.
   
4. Helping districts understand, design, and implement strong evaluation strategies - "...[M]any districts are struggling to develop an evaluation strategy that assesses the impact of their family involvement efforts and need support in capturing the important intermediary outcomes that then lead to positive student achievement." Developing ways of assessing differences in behaviours, knowledge, and attitudes among parents and school staff, from changes in school culture to changes in parenting skills at home, is a possible step.
   

Communication-based lessons learned include some of the following:

• Through workshops that focus on academic success, parents learn to advocate for their children and to create action steps that support learning.
  
• School-based parent liaisons can be trained to help tailor the school's work to meet student and family needs.
  
• ”Parent Academies” are designed to provide parent education on topics such as financial literacy and English as a second language classes, helping to strengthen parents’ overall functioning and give them the skills to advocate for their children’s needs
  
• “Men Make a Difference Day” seeks to make fathers feel invited and needed in supporting their child’s learning.
  
• Schools can increase their range of methods of information dissemination to reach all families by including grassroots efforts, such as making phone calls and visiting community gathering places, and using technology and mass media, such as creating radio messages and hosting a family engagement blog.
  
• A district distributes an annual parent satisfaction and school climate survey and works with district-wide data coaches to help schools use this information in their planning and improvement. This entails sorting through survey data to generate short- and long-term goals.
  
• The creation of a district-level department, funded to carry out family engagement development activities, can ensure a consistent level of quality and commitment across all the schools in the district.
  
• School-based Family and Community Outreach Coordinators (FCOCs) can focus on building relationships between schools and families and help develop schools’ capacities to authentically engage families.
  
• The “Parent University” of one district will house all of the district’s parent education efforts, such as its 10-week literacy programme, English-language learning curriculum, and math handbook for parents. Parents will earn credits for participating in Parent University-sponsored classes, and can graduate after earning 9 credits (after 12 credits, they’ll be able to graduate with honours). The district is holding focus groups with parents to find out what parents would like to learn from such classes; this feedback, as well as input and resources from community coalitions, will influence the development of course offerings.
  
• A parent observation day was promoted by the African American parent group.
  
• A district has developed a rubric and training for family engagement: "This self-assessment includes descriptions of a continuum of increased sustainability in the areas of learning, leadership, advocacy, and systems. Schools that receive training were provided with examples, tips, and tools to promote and improve their family engagement strategies."
  
• Building on developing grade-level cohorts of parents, this school holds events several times during the school year at which parents have the opportunity to get to know one another, talk to teachers about the curriculum, review classroom lessons, and then go into a classroom and actually practice teaching a lesson to a small group of students. The school has created a user-friendly collection of forms, lessons, and other resources in order to facilitate the spread of this cohort model across the district.
  
• Due to a plurality of languages within families, written communication was augmented by alternate ways of communicating with families - hosting community-based forums, reaching out to housing programmes, and making videos to distribute to families.
  

According to one of the districts studied: "Family engagement must be part of who the district is, not just what it does."