National gurus of family engagement research such as Dr. Karen Mapp, Dr. Joyce Epstein, Anne T. Henderson, Dr. Steven Constantino and a handful of other family engagement researchers have all found through decades of research that all children benefit academically when parents and family members are engaged in the education of their children. Over the past 5 years, the California education landscape has changed dramatically toward local control. Legislation was passed in 2012 to the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) and districts are now mandated to create a Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) to design their respective goals and approaches towards meeting those goals. LCAP’s require schools to set goals around eight state priorities in which family engagement is one of those eight.
Through the new California Dashboard, parents, educators, and stakeholders will be able to access information about how K-12 districts and schools are doing on multiple measures such as test scores, graduation and suspension rates, and other measures of student success. The Dashboard will also identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas in need of improvement for schools and districts. Districts will have to report their outcomes on the eight state priorities as either a state indicator or a local indicator. Family engagement will be reported as a local indicator and is defined in a very vague way.
According to the California Department of Education, the performance standard for Parent Engagement (Priority 3) says the “LEA annually measures its progress in (1) seeking input from parents in decision-making and (2) promoting parental participation in programs. The standards for the local performance indicators are based on whether LEA’s:
- Measure their progress on the local performance indicator based on locally available information.
- Report the results to the LEA’s local governing board at a regularly scheduled meeting of the local governing board and to stakeholders and the public through the evaluation rubrics.
- LEAs determine whether they have (Met, Not Met, or Not Met for Two or More Years) for each applicable local performance indicator. LEAs make this determination by using self-reflection tools included in the evaluation rubrics, which will allow them to measure and report their progress through the California School Dashboard.”
So, what does this all mean? Districts will use tools that fit their respective needs to allow them to measure and report their progress through the California School Dashboard (the state rubrics being a tool) and to their respective stakeholders. Accountability on this priority will be at the local level with no reporting to the state. With all this being said, measuring family engagement is not an easy task. One thing is for sure, we cannot continue to do Family Engagement work without data. This blog is an attempt to help parents, education stakeholders and family engagement professionals gain some insight on the types of data collecting tools and some pros and cons to each.
Most districts measure their outcomes based on participation rates (e.g. attendance/sign-in sheets, visitor logs, classroom parent volunteer logs). Participation rates help satisfy compliance needs, but this effort doesn’t give us a true picture of parent engagement. It is low effort, easily accessible, and has regency. The question is: what does this measure? It will tell you we had an awesome turnout or we need to work harder to reach out to more parents. It can help identify parent leaders or champions. This method and tool is also a good way to measure involvement. But, we need to move beyond involvement and move to engagement (I hope to give a perspective of involvement versus engagement in part 2 of my series).
The next level of an evaluation tool is an Exit Ticket or a Post Event Survey. This is where we ask questions like, “Because of this meeting, I have a better understanding of what my child is learning in class” and we assign a response from “Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree.” This tool allows for easy accessibility to data, can be customizable and also has regency of information, but this tool can have selection bias and representativeness. It is high effort, can help us improve the presentation style of the information and give us some generalized feedback.
Climate and perception surveys are becoming more popular in gathering data. This tool can be used with all stakeholders such as parents, teachers, students, vendors, community partners and anyone who we have a touch point with. Climate surveys gather data on school climate and culture, types of relationships with stakeholders and safety. Perception surveys gather data around the way people feel, see and hear, and call it their reality. These tools give us immediate feedback, can have richer data, allows for the voices of absent families to give voice, and can give cross-school comparisons. An example of a question can be, “At my child’s school: adults who work at my child’s school treat students with respect.” We can use these very much like a “customer service satisfaction” approach to improve our family friendliness and formulate ways to improve our service to all we serve. It too is very high effort.
Many districts create goals of strengthening school, family and community engagement and will set various strategies to accomplish these goals. For example, “ensuring each school promotes a welcoming, supportive, safe and healthy environment.” Using a climate or perception survey can be used to get some data, but a good strategy to gather data could be recruiting a team of parents and community stakeholders to do a “family friendly walkthrough.” This strategy is an example of higher level measuring and engagement. A walkthrough will allow those participating to give suggestions and recommendations on improving or developing a “welcoming, supportive, safe healthy environment.”
Lastly, the best way to measure family engagement programs or initiatives is to use a method of research known as Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT). RCT’s are quantitative, comparative, controlled experiments in which people are studied for a long period of time. Normally you have a treatment and non-treatment group where data is studied from both groups. RCT’s are considered the most powerful ways to measure family engagement. When all the variables are equal between groups, on average, any differences in outcome can be attributed to an intervention. The data is generally very reliable but can take a high effort and investment. This method is not often used often because it can take years to see results and generally require an outside partner such as a vendor or research university. Also, this research has been done as previously mentioned by national parent engagement research gurus.
As school’s design programs and initiatives to genuinely engage parents, measuring parent engagement will be a critical task for schools/districts to report their engagement efforts and also help schools to effectively empower and partner with parents in supporting their children’s learning. Various tools will need to be created and used to accurately report progress on the California Dashboard. Goals and outcomes will need to be developed collaboratively and agreed by all stakeholders. Integration, alignment, and collaboration will be critical for the future success of our schools and communities.
Making assumptions is natural for all of us. It’s an easy way to respond or imagine what might be going on in someone’s else’s head or a coping mechanism to understand why a person has taken a particular course of action. We don’t normally do it consciously, but we make a guess based on our imagination, past experiences or wishful thinking.
reporting from planetmars 