Increasing Parent Engagement
If we had a road map to what parental involvement in schools should be, what would it look like? Would it be a straight line, or a complicated maze of cross streets going in every direction?
University of Washington researchers studied The Road Map Project, a collaborative effort to dramatically improve student achievement in seven school districts in South Seattle and South King County. In their report after a yearlong study of the initiative, they found that students were most successful when schools and communities found creative and culturally responsive ways of engaging parents.
“The Road Map Project was very clear that parent-community engagement was one of the key mechanisms for achieving its 2020 goal, to double the number of young people who are on track to college and career and to close the opportunity gap,” said Ann Ishimaru, assistant professor in the UW College of Education and co-author of the report.
The UW is also one of many community partners of the project.
The idea of The Road Map Project is to go beyond traditional involvement such as parent-teacher conferences and associations and school open houses to offer parents more relevant ways to help their children succeed.
“We know from decades of research that it makes a difference when parents are involved in their child’s education,” Ishimaru said. “It helps not only students’ test scores, but also their behavior in school, attendance, the coursework they take. They are involved in higher-level programs and they’re more likely to graduate. Our study suggests promising ways to create more meaningful opportunities for family participation, especially in a region of such dramatic cultural and linguistic diversity.”
Districts in the project are Auburn, Federal Way, Highline, Kent, Renton, Seattle (only South Seattle schools) and Tukwila. Of the 119,000 students in that region, 66 percent are students of color, 58 percent come from low-income families and 167 different primary languages are spoken. Ishimaru and colleagues studied two of those districts – Federal Way and Kent – plus a community effort called White Center Promise Initiative.
Each Road Map Project entity is engaging parents in different ways. Federal Way uses family liaisons to help parents cultivate good relationships with school staff, and parents are given a “menu” of choices about how to be involved, from using specific tutorials at Education Research Report: Increasing Parent Engagement: