PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT IN EDUCATION: ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL
Schools seeking to boost parental involvement will need to tailor their approaches to match parents' differing views and concerns, according to a new report from Public Agenda. The report, "Ready, Willing and Able? Kansas City Parents Talk About How to Improve Schools and What They Can Do to Help," indicates that parental involvement means very different things to different parents, with some drawn to advocacy and school reform while others are more comfortable participating in time-honored tasks like helping with school clubs, sports and bake sales.
While the research, underwritten by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, explores the views of Kansas City parents, it also echoes findings from a previous Public Agenda national study and raises important questions for education leaders nationwide.
Parents surveyed are divided on what kind of parental involvement will do the most to strengthen public schools: 52 percent say it is improving the quality of parental involvement at home versus 42 percent who say that it is getting parents more directly involved in running schools. Parents are also split on whether better teachers (27 percent chose this), more money (34 percent) or more parental involvement (34 percent) would do the most to improve their own children's school.
Just over half (51 percent) of the Kansas City region's parents acknowledge that they could be more involved at their child's school if they tried harder, though parents are divided on how they prefer to be involved. Many parents (27 percent) say they could help out more in traditional ways at the schools their children attend and nearly a third (31 percent) seem ready to embrace broader roles in shaping how schools operate and advocating for policy reform. Some parents (19 percent) are primarily looking for more guidance from their schools on how to help their own children succeed. In addition to exploring the similarities and differences among parents, the report includes a set of concrete and practical