The Future of Parent Engagement

Updated: August 16, 2019

Software Development, EdTech, Technology, Teachers

Schools and parents don't always communicate often or well. In today’s hyper-connected society, there is no excuse for this.If you ask parents, they’ll often blame it on the school or its staff. Conversely, if you ask educators, you get the opposite — it is parents who do not get engaged.

As with most things in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Communication is a Two-Way Street

The fact that the school-to-home communication gap exists at all is a shame. After all, parental and educational goals are aligned. Both parties want students to succeed.

In 19 years working in public education, I’ve yet to meet a parent or teacher who openly said: “I do not care about my child” or “I do not care about my students.” In fact, the research bears out that the ‘parent who doesn’t care’ is largely a myth. Overwhelmingly, parents love their children and want only the best for them. Conversely, teachers truly want their students to exit school well prepared for a better life.

If the goals of these two parties are aligned, then why does the inability to communicate effectively exist in the first place?

At SchoolStatus, we’ve been looking into this issue for several years. While our goal has always been helping schools gain efficiencies through data analytics, our core mission is to change education, forever. We’ve found that simply having data in one place is not a panacea of any sort. Data is only powerful when we do something with it. (In fact, if you are collecting data to make yourself feel better but aren’t doing anything with the resultant data sets, you can stop. You are doing yourself and your students a disservice.)

What is parental engagement?

During our research, I was surprised at the misnomer of what ‘parental engagement’ actually was. Is it attending an occasional Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) meeting? Showing up for a basketball game? How about volunteering to bake cookies? What comes to mind when you think of engaged parents? At SchoolStatus, we are fundamentally reimagining parental engagement and what it means.

We believe parental engagement exhibits the following traits:

1. Student-Driven: The conversation should ultimately focus on the student and their needs.

2. Purposeful: Conversations should have a purpose, keeping ‘fluff’ to a minimum. Teachers are busy. Parents are busy.

3. Actionable: Parents should be able to take away something actionable. Vague notions of a child ‘not doing well’ should be centered on specific steps a parent can take to help the student improve his or her performance.

4. Reasonable: Both parties should be working to accomplish tasks and goals that are reasonable. Expectations should be achievable and well-meaning. Also, both parties should have reasonable expectations about responsiveness and should be respectful about holiday and time-of-day concerns. (Hey, everyone has a life outside of work, even teachers.)

5. Continual: Once the lines of communication are open, keep them that way. Parents and teachers should have a constant, open dialog that isn’t just focused on a single problem, but should encompass a student’s holistic experience in the classroom.

This works out to SPARC. (We thought that was pretty clever, too.)

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems

In a society where e-mail, text messaging and calling are all ubiquitous ways to communicate, why is it so difficult to get in touch with a school and speak directly to a teacher?

Is it the money? In the United States alone, the Universal Service Fund (the FCC-administered fund that subsidizes K-12 telecommunication services and equipment) doles out nearly $4 billion USD annually to schools. Given the size of that investment, one would assume that schools are rapidly becoming more communicative and are overcoming serious communication hurdles; however, outside of small pockets of engaged parents and schools, that assumption has simply not proven to hold true.

Is it parental connectivity? In a recent study, cell phone penetration amongst parental-age (30–49) adults in the United States was 79% with 97% of smart phone users indicating they had their phone with them frequently and have sent a text in the past week. You only need to walk into a restaurant on a Friday night and see faces illuminated in the glow of a phone screen to know connectivity is not a lasting hurdle. Parental connectivity to mobile devices is more abundant than it has ever been in human history.

How about access to e-mail? I would challenge you to find a single teacher in this country who doesn’t have access to school-provided email of some kind. Conversely, weekly e-mail usage amongst adults in the United States is approaching 88.5% — more adults are online today than any time before.

So just what are the problems that create barriers between teachers and parents?

Barriers to Meaningful Conversations

I believe there are five barriers to meaningful conversations between school and home.

1. Time: There is not a lot of research about why teachers and parents don’t reach out more. However, a chief complaint from teachers is a lack of time during their work day. Anecdotally, one could then infer that contacting a parent takes time from their day that teachers don’t have.

4. Multiple Languages: The United States is often referred to as the great melting pot. This is no more apparent when you review the growth of English as a Second Language (ESL) and K-12 English Language Learners (ELL) students. Because a student speaks english, a teacher would be remiss to assume their parents do the same. Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, boasts 152,592 students whose native language isn’t english. Teachers often aren’t able to communicate with these families without the aid of native language translators.

The Future of Parent Engagement

Schools’ Secret Weapon