School-Family Compacts: A Powerful Tool for Improving Student Learning Anne T.

Henderson and Judy Carson In this paper, we explain how a routine requirement in United States education law has become a powerful tool for collaborating with families to improve childrens progress in learning. In 2008, the Connecticut State Department of Education began a project to revitalize school-family compacts, which every school receiving federal Title I funds for low-income children must produce. Although the law requires compacts to describe how parents and teachers will work together to improve student learning, over time the compacts have became pointless pledges that parents are asked to sign. What if the compacts were linked to the goals of school improvement plans and developed by both parents and teachers, using data on student achievement? What if, instead of empty promises to hold high expectations for all students and make sure students complete their homework, teachers and parents shared strategies to help students develop skills that need strengthening? Using the new process piloted in Connecticut, teachers and parents have focused conversations about learning at each grade level, so that families can ask meaningful questions about what their children are learning in class and teachers can extend effective learning strategies into the home. As a result, participating schools have developed better designed programs for family engagement that are both linked to the goals of the school improvement plan and respond to families ideas and concerns, leading to improved student outcomes. Background Despite two decades of education reform, only about a third of students in the USA are proficient in reading and math, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Important new research suggests why this may be the case. i A rigorous study of Chicago public schools compared schools that had made significant improvement with those that had stagnated or declined, over two separate five-year periods. The characteristics of the improved schools in both data sets were the same. (Bryk et al., 2010) The researchers found five essential ingredients to the success of turnaround efforts, and they all contribute about equally. These are: 1. 2. School leadership: Principals track student progress, focus on instruction, promote parent-community engagement, and practice shared decisionmaking Professional capacity: Teachers have creditable background and experience, a strong work ethic and belief that schools can change, collaborate with each other, and participate in good professional development Academic content/instructional guidance: Teachers rely less on lecturing and rote learning and more on classroom discussion and use of higher order thinking skills Student-centered learning climate: Students perceive that school and

3. 4.

5.

grounds are safe, teachers are helpful and attentive, classrooms are orderly and focused Strong ties with families and the community: Teachers have knowledge of students cultures and community concerns; do home visits; shop and make field trips in the community; invite parents to observe in classrooms; and see good parent attendance at parent-teacher conferences and school events.

The following chart compares the likelihood that a school will make major improvement in reading when each ingredient is weak or strong. As you can see, schools that are strong in parent involvement are four times more likely to improve than schools that have weak parent involvement. To make significant and sustained improvement, a school must be strong in at least three of the five essential ingredients.

Clearly, engaging families and community in student learning is a core strategy for school reform, one that has a powerful impact on a schools chances for success. This is not a revolutionary insight, because thirty years of research documents the impact that engaging families can have on student outcomes. The evidence is consistent, positive, and convincing: families have a major influence on their childrens achievement. When schools, families, and community groups work together to support learning, children tend to do better in school, stay in school longer, and like school more. (Henderson and Mapp, 2002) ii 2

This statement summarizes the conclusion of A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family and Community Connections on Student Achievement, a comprehensive review of the research. Here are some key findings: Students whose families are involved in their learning earn better grades, take higher-level classes, have higher graduation rates, and are more likely to enroll in postsecondary education. Children do best if parents can play a variety of roles in their learning: helping at home, participating in school events and activities, guiding their children through the system, and taking part in key decisions about the school program. When families actively support their childrens learning, students tend to have more positive attitudes toward school, attend school more regularly, and behave better. Students from diverse cultural backgrounds tend to do better when families and school staff make intentional efforts to bridge the gap between home and school cultures. Middle and high school students whose families remain involved make better transitions to their new schools, maintain the quality of their work, develop realistic plans for the future, and are less likely to drop out.

When schools engage families in ways that are linked to improving learning, students make greater gains. If families are engaged in positive ways, rather than labeled as problems, schools can be transformed from places where only certain students prosper to ones where all children do well. iii (Henderson, Mapp, et al., 2007) Despite this large body of convincing research, teachers in the USA report they are unprepared to work with families, especially families from different class and cultural backgrounds than their own. According to the Met Life Survey of the American Teacher in 2005, teachers say that engaging families is the #1 area where they feel least well prepared, as well as their leading challenge.iv Clearly, schools need to learn about and use simple but effective processes that engage families as partners in improving student academic achievement. The Connecticut Project School-parent compacts under the US Education Law (Title I, Section 1118, Elementary and Secondary Education Act) were intended to serve as a catalyst for collaboration and better communication between school staff and parents by translating goals for student achievement into shared action statements (USDE 1996). As Judy Carson, director of school-family-community partnerships in Connecticut, found in reviewing compacts submitted by the states schools, such documents rarely describe activities that directly affect learning. Most compacts parroted general language in the law about parents responsibility to support childrens learning, for example, by monitoring their school attendance or TV watching. This is true across the United States; a report from the U.S. Department of Education concluded that the parent involvement requirements,

including compacts, are one of the weakest areas of Title I compliance (U.S. Department of Education, 2008). v In the summer of 2008, Connecticut launched its compact revitalization effort with a Compact Conference. Participants from urban districts across the state learned how to transform compacts into plans for partnership among teachers and parents at common grade levels. Revised compacts would list specific actions that parents, students, and teachers could take to improve performance; they would be linked to current school improvement plans and grounded in achievement data. Participants learned about promising practices to promote parent-teacher collaboration; explored practical home learning ideas; and made plans to seek parents input. The state also offered follow-up support: professional development and advice from team consultants. Since then, schools across the state have been revising their compacts. In the process, they have also redesigned their programs and activities for families in ways that give families a window onto the classroom, promote effective teacher-parent communication, and strengthen the home learning environment. To support the scaling up of this effort, Carson worked with a team of consultants to develop a stand-alone website, www.schoolparentcompact.org to lay out a process and make tools readily available. The site is organized around Ten Steps to Success, based on experience with schools in the pilot program; each step has video content from principals, district administrators and teachers, as well as simple tools to move the work along. 1. Motivate and Get Buy-in from the Staff At a staff meeting with teachers and the school leadership team, explain how compacts can contribute to student success. 2. Designate a Leader to Build a Team Pick a person with leadership skills: the assistant principal, a literacy or math coach, teacher leader, home-school coordinator, or school social worker. 3. Align the Compact with the School Improvement Plan Goals Review school data and the goals of the school improvement plan to determine specific skill areas at each grade level that the compact should focus on for the year. 4. Get Input from Each Grade Level At data team meetings, ask teachers to identify three goals for each grade and draft ideas for home learning strategies to share with families for their ideas and input. 5. Reach Out to Families Share grade level goals with parents/guardians in workshops, orientation events, class meetings, informal get-togethers, PTA/PTO meetings, newsletters, emails, parent nights, report card nights. Hold two-way conversations among teachers and families at the different grade levels. How can they work together to accomplish the goals? How can they support each other? Co-create specific home learning strategies families can use on a regular basis. 4

6. Dont Forget the Students After teachers and parents decide how to collaborate, ask students what they can do to be successful. How do they want their teachers and parents to support them? 7. Pull it All Together Create an attractive, family-friendly compact document that captures everyones input, including the students ideas. Design a roll out plan for introducing the compact to families. 8. Align All Resources Based on your Compact goals, what professional development do you need? Allocate funds to support school and home learning with speakers, supplies, and materials. Align the work of school volunteers and community members with the compact. 9. Market the Compact Seize the opportunity at every event to keep the schools goals in the forefront At conference time, discuss the goals and modify strategies with parents. 10. Review, Revise and Celebrate Progress Each Year Pull your compact team together toward the end of the year to review progress. What were your big successes? What could have been better? Draw up a plan for the compact process next school year, based on your review. Ask students to show off what theyve learned and how they took responsibility. Announce your successes at end-of-the year events and congratulate everyone involved! The Results The National Working Group on Family and Community Engagement has proposed reframing school-family partnerships along several dimensions, from old to new. (Weiss, Lopez, & Rosenberg, 2010)vi This framework can be used to illustrate how the schools that have revitalized their compacts have moved away from outdated thinking to create new and effective approaches to partnerships that improve student achievement. Traditional parent compacts Individual responsibility: Sending home a flyer that tells parents to make sure their kids get to bed on time before the state tests next week. Deficit-based and adversarial: Putting language in the compact that has parents promise to teach their children how to behave, and offering classes on parenting. Strategic family engagement program Shared responsibility: Holding a conversation about learning with parents to share student progress and model learning activities parents can use at home to improve specific reading and math skills. Strength-based and collaborative: Surveying families to find out what they are doing to help students at home and asking for their ideas on how to make homework more meaningful. 5

Random acts of family involvement: Lets send home backpacks with school supplies inside! Parents can chaperone the field trip. Maybe the parent group could hold a bake sale for new band uniforms. Add-on: Referring struggling students to a local tutoring program

Systemic and linked to learning: Meeting with pre-kindergarten families and using their ideas to design a three-day family orientation to kindergarten focused on developing readiness skills. Integrated: Re-designing back-to-school night; instead of one large meeting, families go to their childrens classrooms and develop a communications plan with the teacher to flag when students need extra help before they fall behind. Ownership: Holding data team meetings to identify skills that students need to strengthen. Then conferring with parents about workshops and information they would like to improve their childrens skills. Continuous improvement: Forming an action team to create a positive, inclusive school climate and survey families each year to get feedback for improvement.

Compliance: Running the district-drafted boilerplate Title I school-parent compact past the parent group for approval, then putting it on a shelf. One-time project: Holding a Math Night once a year.

To monitor change in the new compacts, Carson developed a rigorous 21-point rating scale. In the pilot project, the average rating increased 9 points with a low of 6 to a high score of 19. The pattern of change was dramaticvii: Compacts exhibited much greater variety. New compacts were plainly a product of their individual school community, addressing learning issues specific to the school and grade level. School improvement goals were stated and explained much more clearly. The compacts became a road map to how the school would achieve its goals. Instead of vague statements about improving student behavior, compacts became more focused on data-based strategies to strengthen students academic skills. Compacts created a sense of shared responsibility. Rather than list things parents and teachers could do in their separate spheres, compacts described how parents and teachers would communicate throughout the year to achieve specific goals. Keys to Success Several practices are key to turning compacts into catalysts for action. The most important is to create a setting for parents and teachers to know one another and talk about how to help the kids. The process tends to move from a conversation between a self-selected group 6

of teachers and parents, to discussions among many teachers, to one with the entire parent teacher association. Parent leaders emerge and begin to engage other families. Continuing follow-up by the principal is important. Administrators should affirm practices that teachers are already doingsuch as book drives and trips to the libraryand explicitly link existing practices to the compact and the school improvement plan. This integrates teachers' actions into a systematic plan for improving achievement. Working with grade-level colleagues inspires teachers. We found that developing compacts for each grade level made a big difference. At some schools, literacy coaches facilitated grade-level meetings and brainstormed specific activities for teachers in each grade. The Connecticut State Department of Education has now taken the program statewide as a best practice for Title I parent involvement, leveraging the language of the law to create a powerful strategy for parent-teacher collaboration. Other states such as California and individual school districts like Boston are now using the approach to launch similar efforts of their own. They are affirming that if parents are out of the loop, there is no loop, and the sustained energy needed to bring about lasting improvement will drain away.

Anne T. Henderson is a senior consultant with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform and coauthor (with Karen Mapp, Don Davies, and Vivian Johnson) of Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to FamilySchool Partnerships (The New Press, 2007); AnneTHenderson1@yahoo.com. Judy Carson, PhD is program manager for family and community engagement in the Connecticut Department of Education; Judy.Carson@ct.gov.
i

Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton. 2010. Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Anne T. Henderson and Karen L. Mapp. 2002. A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family and Community Connections on Student Achievement. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.
ii

Anne T. Henderson, Karen L. Mapp, Vivian R. Johnson, and Don Davies. 2007. Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family-School Partnerships. New York: The New Press.
iii

Harris Interactive. 2005. The MetLife Survey of The American Teacher: Transitions and the Role of Supportive Relationships.
iv

Stevenson, Z., Jr., & Laster, C. (2008). 20032006 monitoring cycle report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Student Achievement and School Accountability Programs. Retrieved from www.ed.gov/admins/lead/account/monitoring/monitoringcyclerpt1008.pdf
v

Weiss, H. B., Lopez, M. E., & Rosenberg, H. (2010). Beyond random acts: Family, school, and community engagement as an integral part of school reform. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from www.hfrp.org/content/download/3809/104680/file/PolicyForumPaper120710-FINAL.pdf
vi

Henderson, A. T., Carson, J., Avallone, P. A., Whipple, M. (2011). Making the most of school-parent compacts. Educational Leadership, 68, 48-53.
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