Useful Story About Trying To Force Parents To Participate In Schools
July 9th, 2010 by Larry Ferlazzo
With the on-going effort to force parents to be involved with schools or face punitive action, it was interesting today to read about an attempt two years ago in Washington, D.C. to require TANF (welfare) recipients to attend PTA and parent-teacher meetings.
Susie Cambria writes:
Welfare and education advocates alike educated the CM [Council Member] about the real reasons for poor parent engagement (including the failure of schools to make attempts to engage parents) and convinced him there was a better way to achieve the policy and practice goal.
One can only help that advocates can have similar luck in Detroit..
“Providence’s Bailey Elementary School combines education, community outreach”
I’ve previously written several posts about community schools. Typically, community schools are ones that host multiple social services, as well as regular school classes. Some of them, but I suspect not most, work with parents to design and structure their efforts. But even if they’re done through the lens of looking at parents as “clients” instead of “partners,” they are an honest effort at recognizing that schools need to be pro-active at
Update On Proposed Michigan Law To Jail Parents Who Don’t Attend Parent Conferences
Update On Proposed Michigan Law To Jail Parents Who Don’t Attend Parent Conferences
Last month, I wrote about a Michigan prosecutor who had the ill-conceived notion of jailing parents who didn’t attend a teacher conference in their child’s school.