Education Week - November 6, 2013 - 27

ily relationships. In her studies of TIPS, Frances
L. Van Voorhis, a principal investigator
with the program, found that families reported
more enjoyment around homework, and students
earned higher grades and test scores in
the subject for which TIPS was assigned.
Second, practicing teachers need support and
encouragement to meaningfully engage families
in their children's education. District and
school leaders can support such teacher practices
in two ways. For one, teacher evaluations
should formally recognize and hold teachers accountable
for strong, ongoing communication
and engagement of families.
Expectations for teachers to involve students'
relatives in their education need to be explicit
and rewarded by school systems. In addition,
principals and other school leaders (such as
mentor-teachers) need to encourage and model
strong family- and community-engagement
practices.
This recognition and modeling of community
engagement shows that families are valued as
partners in the education of students, rather
than looked to merely to support school efforts.
Professional learning communities can be
formed around family and community engagement,
with teachers helping one another understand
how to draw in families as important
allies in learning.
By incorporating family engagement into the
way prospective and veteran teachers view student
learning and development, our definition
of a "good teacher" can evolve.
Good teachers do more than excel at instructional
delivery. Good teachers are those who are
able to connect with students' families, helping
those families see what their children are
learning at school, what the children need to
learn, and how they can help students excel
through high school.
All parents want their children to do well academically;
good teachers provide families the
knowledge and opportunities to help make this
goal a reality. n
STEVEN SHELDON is an associate professor in the
school of education at Johns Hopkins University,
in Baltimore. He is also the director of research
for the National Network of Partnership Schools,
also at Johns Hopkins. His research examines the
development and effects of school, family, and
community partnerships.
Bob Dahm
Missing in Action
A National Education Policy for
Empowering Low-Income Families
By Arnold F. Fege
L
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et's face it. When it comes to
the transformation of public
education, families and
students are at the bottom
of the partnership feeding
chain. And our poorest families
often wield the least
power and have little po-
litical or social capital. Their voice is hardly
ever sought after, and their children attend
the lowest-performing schools. Missing
in action are the well-integrated national
education policies that should assure these
families that they have a voice at the reform
table. The landscape for low-income parents,
however, was not always this bleak.
As a young staffer for the late Sen. Rob-
ert F. Kennedy of New York, I remember
distinctly an exchange that the senator
had with President Lyndon B. Johnson's
administration officials, when the original
Elementary and Secondary Education Act
was being debated in the Senate education
committee in 1965. Sen. Kennedy peppered
them with questions about why poor
parents were not given more power to hold
school districts accountable for the federal
money they were receiving under the ESEA'S
Title I. He contended that parents in the
South Bronx should have the same clout
over education decisions as the parents in
Westchester County, an affluent community
just north of New York City.
In promoting federal mechanisms that
evened the playing field in the early years
of the ESEA, Robert Kennedy saw the role of
parents as one of mobilizing, organizing, and
changing the power relationships to ensure
that federal funding would be used to desegregate
the schools as well as build demand for
improved student performance. That discussion
raised some of the first questions about
the relationships between instructional quality,
assessment data, and the use of that information
by low-income parents to demand improved
public schools-an issue we continue to
grapple with today. In essence, the legislation
dramatically changed the relationship that
low-income parents had with school officials.
But there were many school districts that
either resented the federal parent requirements
or that were threatened by the increase
in parent participation. They staged
mass resistance against parent organizing
and, during the 1980 ESEA reauthorization
process, persuaded Congress to gut the core
of the parent-involvement provisions. That
significant shift sent a national message
that administrator control was more important
than collaboration or
shared decisionmaking, and
that parental involvement
would now be voluntary and
not protected by federal law.
Today, the rhetoric of fam-
ily engagement has overshadowed
any serious policymaking.
We have shifted
from an ESEA that was primarily
community-based
and into building relationships
to one that is highly
school- and test-based, and
inhumanly technocratic.
And while the U.S. Department
of Education talks a
good game, charter schools,
teacher evaluation, and
competitive grants like Race
to the Top have trumped
family engagement as national
priorities. Curiously, instead of building
on the new research that demonstrates
the importance of linking families to school
transformation, the Education Department
has actually diminished family provisions.
It eliminated statewide Parent Information
and Resource Centers, failed to monitor
the family provisions in the No Child
Left Behind Act (the current version of the
ESEA), and emasculated the parents'-rightto-know
provision of NCLB, which endowed
parents with the right to inquire about the
qualifications of their children's teachers.
All of those are tools to support low-income
families.
"
When asked at a National Press Club
presentation last year how he would grade
the Education Department's family-engagement
policies, Secretary Arne Duncan gave
his agency a D. The department has not
been a safe haven for low-income parents,
and Congress and the Obama administration
have largely been unable to incorporate
the family evidence we have into the
policies we need.
For many state and local leaders in fam-
Our poorest
families often
wield the least
power and
have little
political or
social capital."
ily engagement, Congress and the Education
Department have become irrelevant
forces in helping to level the playing field
in the balance of power and
school-family collaboration,
as well as in helping to build
demand for schools that are
responsive to the particular
needs of low-income parents.
This unfortunate void
leaves low-income parents
to fend for themselves and
build from the ground up-
school by school and district
by district. And here is some
advice: Don't expect your federal
government to help in
this process. Parental choice,
market models, and rhetoric
do not substitute for family
mobilization, advocacy, or organizing.

We know sound family
policies work. They help grow
district capacity, teacher
and administrator professional development,
community engagement, integration
of services, funding, best practices, communications,
and respect for voices and needs.
When coordinated, these elements build a
seamless link between school and family, increasing
student success and performance.
If we give up on our families, we give up
on our community. If we lose our community,
we lose our democracy. If we lose our
democracy, we lose the public. And if we
lose the public, we lose public education.
The stakes are too high for our national
policymakers to ignore what makes sense. n
ARNOLD F. FEGE is the president of the
Washington-based Public Advocacy for Kids and
a national advocate for parental and community
engagement in education.
EDUCATION WEEK | November 6, 2013 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary | 27
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Education Week - November 6, 2013

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