Parents As Learning Partners

"The evidence is beyond dispute; parent involvement improves student achievement. When parents are involved, children do better in school."
(Henderson, 1991)

Thirty years of research have consistently demonstrated that parental involvement is critical to children's academic success. When parents are involved, children are motivated to do better in school, improve their daily attendance, complete homework more consistently, develop stronger self-confidence, and improve both social and academic skills.

While reform has led to more schools soliciting individual parental involvement, the larger issue of how parental involvement connects to classroom learning and student achievement has received little attention outside of the research institutions. At most schools, parental involvement activities tend to be under-funded, fragmented, and uncoordinated. In-depth, meaningful engagement has not been the norm. Most parent education classes focus on how parents can help children develop basic skills at home, not on how parents can participate in lessons tied directly to classroom learning. In addition, even schools with "high" parental involvement usually have only a small number of truly active parents. In middle and high schools, these numbers dwindle.

The Weingart Foundation has funded a five-year project, Parents As Learning Partners (PLP), for $4.9 million in two large urban school districts--Los Angeles and Long Beach. PLP's challenge is to empower parents to see their own potential as creators of and contributors to the school community; to train teachers to think of parents as learning partners at home and at school; and to persuade administrators to allocate staff and budget resources towards increasing meaningful parental involvement. PLP will implement innovative parent involvement strategies in three groups of schools, known as "school families", which will Benefit 31,600 students in 29 K-12 schools of low-income, ethnically diverse communities. This project is in collaboration with the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project (LAAMP) and the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN), and supports the work of the Design For Excellence Linking Teaching and Achievement (DELTA) project for teacher professional development covered in last year's Annual Report of the Foundation.

The Foundation anticipates PLP, in alignment with DELTA, will create effective parent/school models resulting in:

• Improved student achievement;
• Effective collaboration of parents, teachers, and administrators;
• School communities where parents participate as partners;
• Learning activities for parents, and parents together with children, using instructional capabilities and school facilities more fully;
• Improved home/school communication by taking advantage of new communication technologies; and
• An effective model of parental involvement that can be replicated in other school families.