Want to Increase Parent Engagement at Your School? Here’s How.

Our nation has long engaged in a debate about why American public schools are struggling to keep pace with the rest of the world. Some blame families — citing a lack of investment due to the challenges of poverty and other social ills. Others believe that blaming families is an excuse, and that schools alone can and must do far more to help students achieve academic success.

At Success Academy — a network of 46 school serving mostly low-income, minority students that collectively scores in the top 1% of all New York State schools — we think these arguments present a false dichotomy. We know that parental investment is absolutely essential to educating children at a high level. But we also know that parental investment is not static: schools can take meaningful steps to grow the kind of engagement that helps children succeed.

Early on, I learned that I could make a huge difference by actively involving parents. When we opened our first Success Academy in Harlem in 2006, students were frequently tardy and often didn’t do the nightly reading. This was not surprising: Many public schools are plagued by chronic lateness, absenteeism, and homework neglect, and such problems are often attributed to uninvolved parents.

We refused to accept these issues as immovable, however, and took immediate steps to address them. We called parents and followed up with them at drop off and pick up; we found out what was preventing them from being on time and completing reading logs and asked how we could help. We worked to inspire their commitment by explaining the why behind our insistence. Thanks to these efforts, tardies dropped from twenty a day to only two, and reading completion shot up from 37% to 98%!

Over the course of the year we also engaged parents around behavior. We established clear systems and informed parents every single day about how their children were doing. If students were struggling to meet expectations, we asked parents to address it at home. When students made progress, we asked parents to recognize their child’s efforts. Our goal was to  work as a team — educators and parents — to present a united front.

As Success Academy has expanded, we have codified this approach. Today, all of our staff members are trained around investing parents in our work at school. We have a parent handbook that clearly lays out expectations, a contract that parents sign, and monthly “parent investment cards” that give them a snapshot of how well they are doing. But equally important, we give parents lots of ways to celebrate their children, organizing events with their schedules in mind: spelling and math bees, multicultural potlucks, performing arts showcases, literacy fairs, soccer games, and chess tournaments.

All of these strategies are informed by five principles which all schools can employ to help parents be invested.

1. Schools must demonstrate the same level of investment that they seek from parents. When a teacher, principal, or other staff member responds immediately to a parent’s concern, that parent will be more likely to respond quickly when the school calls. Similarly, if teachers take active notice when homework is not handed in, or is done in a haphazard manner, parents will be more likely to feel a sense of urgency about their children completing it.
2. Prioritize expectations for parents and communicate them clearly and frequently. Schools often squander opportunities to engage parents by sending out a barrage of information that does not make explicit what the school expects from them. We clearly lay out parental expectations, keeping them simple and laser-focused on academic success. We reiterate these expectations in all family communications, explain why they are important, and hold parents accountable for meeting them.
3. Create systems to regularly inform parents about key metrics related to academic performance. Parents can’t address what they are unaware of. As recent research bears out, regularly updating parents about important metrics like attendance, homework completion, and performance on assessments gives them clarity about where to focus their limited time and energy.
4. Enlist parents to support expectations for children’s behavior at home as well as in the classroom. When children persistently struggle to follow behavior guidelines, schools should give parents clear directions about how they can reinforce these behaviors at home. Parents will be far more willing to collaborate if you build trust and goodwill by making it a habit of also reaching out with positive news about their child.
5. Staff your school to support parental investment. Working closely and intentionally with parents takes time and energy. Besides training teachers and leaders in effective approaches to building productive family relationships, schools should hire staff to support this work. All of our schools have community relations coordinators and education managers who help parents address and navigate challenges that come up outside of school that can make it difficult for them to fulfill their responsibilities.

Over more than a decade of serving parents, I have never met one who does not want his or her child to be successful, regardless of the challenges they face. Schools should tap into this universal desire and direct it toward supporting their work in the classroom. We can’t deliver true educational opportunity without parental investment, but schools can and must do a much better job at cultivating the commitment of which parents are capable. When both parents and educators are invested in a child’s learning, the dividends are amazing!