Chicago parent organizers who this week lost their plea to keep 49 public elementary schools open, primarily on the city's impoverished south and west sides, say will continue to press their concerns even as they prepare for the transition and what they fear will be more closure announcements.

We interviewed several parents in the aftermath of the Chicago Public School board's decision on May 22 to shutter a record number of schools in the fall, despite a protracted outcry at a series of hearings to keep the schools open. The parents' voices combined with those of teachers, community members, and students opposing the move.

Some parents are talking already about boycotting the first day of school, says Natasha Dunn, vice president of the Black Star Community PTA, which is an outgrowth of the Black Star Project, a Chicago-based organization that works to improve the quality of life in Black and Latino communities by eliminating the racial academic-achievement gap. "They [the CPS school board] threw the gauntlet down real quick and simple. We'll see."

The school board, appointed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat, took the stand that the schools being closed are underperforming and underutilized.

Dunn believes the solution will result in "overutilization and overcrowding." She says one priority will be monitoring the promises made by CPS. "We're trying to make sure all the things CPS says it's going to do—like make it easy [in the transition] and be on alert for safety—that they actually do them," said Dunn.

Julie Woestehoff, executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education, which has been involved in protesting the closings, expects a push to change the school board from mayor-appointed to one elected by the citizens. "We have a fairly strong base of angry people here in Chicago right now," she said. "We do think the legislature is a place to go [for change.] So many of our elected legislators have felt dismissed in these discussions. They're feeling the same way that a lot of parents, students, and teachers are feeling—which is that the decisions that are being made are being made against the best interests of the community and children."

Next Steps for Parents

For families immediately affected by the closures, decisions will need to be made about how to prepare their children for a new school year in a new school, farther from home.

Michelle Harris Hunt, a mother of five with four children who attend Horatio May Elementary Community Academy—which is scheduled for closure—says the board's action will require that she either transport her children to their new school, or she will have to pay for them to take a city bus in the next school year. This will be a hardship since the new school is a mile and a half away, and no free, city-provided transportation is available for students.

"My personal concern is for the parents. If we could form a strong parent group and get parents more involved, then some changes will be made. Additional funds and grants will be found," she said. "If parents get together for these kids, and don't just talk, but form strong parent groups, we will make an impact."

Woestehoff says there is reason to be concerned for the sense of safety and security for the children who have to move and for their educational continuity. "Losing Track," a Catalyst Chicago report of what happened last year when four elementary schools closed, said that 11 percent of the children "fell through the cracks"—with no official knowledge of where they went.

"A comprehensive study on the impact of closings found that most students displaced by shut-downs between 2001 and 2006 landed in new schools that were not strong enough to help them raise their academic achievement. The study was done by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research," wrote Sarah Karp of Catalyst Chicago, which provides independent reporting on education.

At Leif Ericson Scholastic Academy, Sonya Collins whose daughter is a 3rd-grader there, said she "felt like she won the lottery" upon learning that her school was one of only four that escaped closure. "We have parents who stood together. We fought. We had data, and we proved why we should keep our school open," she said.

Collins said she and other parents at her school will continue to support the majority who lost their bid to keep their schools open. She offered advice for parents in schools threatened next year: "Go to Springfield [the state capital.] Get your data to prove you're right."

Dunn of the Black Star PTA, says: "We want to know what services, what plans do you have in place so that these schools are going to be safe, and able to adequately educate our kids? We're upset about this, but now that it's happened, what are we going to do?"

Dunn, who says she fights for all Chicago's children, pulled her elementary-school-aged twins from CPS last year so they could focus on education first at home, then enrolled them in a private school to which she pays tuition.

"We were organized; we spoke up. But at the end of the day, they closed doors at a historic rate. It's not over. Next year, they'll be back to close more, and we have to be ready," says Dunn. "We have to think about our good strategies."

See our full coverage of parent empowerment issues.

Posted by Michele Molnar at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A new toolkit to engage parents in improving students' attendance in schools was released on May 20 by Attendance Works, a national and state initiative that promotes better policy and practice around school attendance.

"Bringing Attendance Home: Engaging Parents in Preventing Chronic Absence" is a 24-page, in-depth examination of how parents can become champions of school attendance, and why engaging them is key to any school's efforts to decrease absenteeism.

The toolkit begins with a quote from Olga Nunez, a California parent, who says, "Even though I went to college, I didn't know that missing 18 days or just two days a month—even in kindergarten—could put my son behind academically." That message on absenteeism is the one that Attendance Works strives to convey—including the fact that, by 6th grade, missing only that much school is strongly linked to course failure and even eventually dropping out of high school.

The organization created the parent-engagement toolkit with the help of practitioners who have succeeded in the area of working with families to improve attendance. Age-appropriate tips are provided for parents whose children attend elementary, middle, and high school.
The toolkit offers:

• Research about the positive relationship between parent involvement and attendance;


• Information from new studies that look at parents' attitudes about school absences and their implications for messaging and action;


• Key principles that are useful in engaging parents to promote attendance;


• Materials to share with parents about the importance of good attendance; and


• Interactive exercises to spark awareness, conversation and action with groups of parents about the consequences of poor attendance on their children's futures.

Posted by Michele Molnar at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Identifying parent "support" cards as a potential way to boost family engagement is one school success strategy that is being studied in the collaboration announced May 9 between the National Center for Family Literacy, a Louisville, Ky.-based nonprofit, and the U.S. Department of Education.

The cards are used to track various volunteer and involvement activities of families with students at Eccleston Elementary, a school in Orlando, Fla., that has a large Title I population. Parents earn points for participation and accomplishment. At the end of the school year, those who attain certain point levels receive a certificate and a T-shirt honoring their involvement in a ceremony much like a graduation.

"For many, it's the first time they are crossing the stage themselves. The parents are gaining a sense of accomplishment and enthusiasm, for themselves and their entire families," says Emily Kirkpatrick, vice president at the national center, who was part of the "listening tour" at the school.

Her nonprofit and the U.S. Department of Education are looking for ways to encourage parents to participate in school activities and educational endeavors with their children, and to advance themselves as learners, too. The report/support cards at Eccleston have been very effective in the 18 months they have been used, according to Kirkpatrick. "There's actually a healthy competition among parents," she explained.

Best of all, this simple concept, which the school carried out on a shoestring budget, has the potential to be scalable. In talking with educators and community organizations in Orlando, Kirkpatrick said they brainstormed about how the school could ask for help from the groups to get contributions of food or incentive rewards.

This is just one idea that will be considered for recommendation at the end of the year's collaboration. Together, representatives of the department and the center for family literacy plan to visit five communities around the country, observing practices and discussing opportunities to boost family engagement.

Kirkpatrick said expected outcomes include:

• Input on a second draft of the department's "Family Engagement Capacity Building Framework" original draft report released in December 2012.


• A synthesis of leading practices with family engagement in education (a report or matrix; documentation of practices that are worthy of additional study and potentially scalability).

"My expectation is that it will be much easier for schools or other entities to know what practices are available out there that they wish to emulate or adopt, she said.

The May 9 announcement about the year-long partnership and its scope is available here.

Posted by Michele Molnar at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform, at Brown University, on Wednesday released a commentary on urban education critiquing the "top down" federal policy that forces schools and school districts to compete against one another, rather than finding collaborative solutions from a "bottom up" approach.

The institute's paper argues that the current model based on competition has been ineffective in addressing inequities in education.

Instead, "democratically engaging parents and residents in low-income communities of color can build the power and public will necessary to improve struggling schools and hold public institutions accountable for better-quality services," the report states.

"The current federal education transformation policy impacting schools across the country was developed and implemented with little input from community stakeholders," write Richard Gray, director of the institute's Community Organizing and Engagement, and Sara McAlister, senior research associate. "This top-down approach impeded the development of a sense of ownership and sustained support from key stakeholders including students, parents, teachers, business leaders, and other community members for the transformation process."

In "How Federal Policy Can Encourage Authentic Community Engagement," the authors favor the "Sustainable School Transformation" model created by the Communities for Excellent Public Schools, a group dedicated to the preservation and betterment of public schools in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. The institute identifies the core elements of this model as:

• A strong focus on school culture, curriculum, and staffing;


• Using education reform models that are research-based and have a demonstrated record of success in the field; and,


• Collaboration with families, communities, and local stakeholders to foster shared ownership and accountability.

The authors also posit that the U.S. Department of Education should move forward with a new framework for family engagement, based on recommendations in a draft report the department released in December 2012. Prepared by Karen L. Mapp, a family engagement expert, lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and director of its education policy and management program, the "new framework would provide an excellent basis for recasting family and community engagement as a core priority in federal school turnaround policies," the institute's commentary says.

Read the institute's full commentary here.

Posted by Michele Molnar at 7:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

UPDATED

For the third time since California's "parent trigger" law passed, parents have filed a petition for the transformation of a California elementary school, with parents this time demanding that the school's administrators be removed.

The petition was filed Monday in Los Angeles by the Weigand Parents Union, which has received support from Parent Revolution, the organization that pushed for passage of the first parent trigger law in 2010 in California. Weigand Avenue Elementary School is a low-performing school in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.

This particular petition does not involve a search for a charter operator to replace the existing structure. Instead, it favors keeping Weigand's teaching staff in place and replacing leadership at the low-performing school. As Llury Garcia told The Sun, a newspaper in San Bernardino, "We support our teachers."

Yesterday, the petition from Weigand parents—61 percent of whom signed it—received approval from the Los Angeles Unified School District Board. The vote was 5-2 to approve the petition. On April 16, the board ratified a partnership between the district and Crown Preparatory Academy to operate 24th Street Elementary School after parents there petitioned for a change at that school.

Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, California was the first in the country to have officially approved any aspect of implementing a parent-trigger law, which allow schools to be restructured through a majority vote of parents. There, the parents ultimately embraced a non-profit charter school to turn around their failing school. At 24th Street Elementary, the parents selected an unprecedented partnership between the Los Angeles school district and a high-performing non-profit charter school. Weigand is the first pure in-district reform.

David Phelps, national communications director for Parent Revolution, said parents at Weigand are asking for "the least disruptive" of all the options under the parent-trigger law. "It allows the teachers and parents and a new principal to work together on a school improvement plan," he said.

Asked whether Parent Revolution anticipates any more activity this school year in California, Phelps said no more parent-trigger petitions are in the pipeline.

"We are doing our process where we look at schools that would be eligible for a parent trigger—not only in LA and Greater Los Angeles, but in California. We'll review those and decide whether we want to make an approach to parents in those schools," he said. "Generally, if we're going to make an approach, it would be because we're aware that parents have tried previously to make changes and have not been successful. There may be ways we can support that," he said.

"At the same time, given the attendant publicity around Desert Trails and then 24th Street and now Weigand, we are receiving a lot of proactive requests from parents to see if we could work with them and assist them. We have to look at those carefully, to determine whether there are parents on the ground in the community who are willing to form a parent chapter, take leadership roles and really follow this through," Phelps said.

The parent-trigger law has been criticized by opponents as a way for private charter-school operators to establish a foothold where local schools traditionally operated. Ben Austin, founder of Parent Revolution, is quoted in The Sun as saying: "If you're against what the Weigand Avenue Elementary parents are doing, you're against parent power."

All three elementary schools will open as newly transformed schools this fall.

Note: This post was updated with the news that the Los Angeles Unified School Board approved the petition last night.

Posted by Michele Molnar at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A new poll released today by a pro-school-choice foundation finds that 66 percent of mothers with school-age children support educational vouchers, and 69 percent support tax-credit scholarships to choose their children's schools.

The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which favors school choice, hired Braun Research, Inc. to conduct the study of 1,000 adults between April 1 and April 8, with a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults.

Mothers surveyed gave low marks to the current course of K-12 education: 61 percent said it has "gotten off on the wrong track," and 79 percent rated the federal government's involvement in education as "fair" or "poor."

Public schools' grades are slipping, too, in the view of moms surveyed: 43 percent gave their public schools an "A" or "B"—a drop of 19 points since 2012, when 62 percent gave their public schools those grades.

Mothers with school-age children also voiced more confidence in private school settings than in traditional public schools, the researchers found.

As of the 2012-13 school year, about 255,000 students used voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs in 22 states and Washington, D.C. As of the fall of 2011, 54.7 million students were enrolled in public schools.

The survey's questionnaire, full results, and methodology are available here.

Posted by Michele Molnar at 5:52 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The "collective impact" of school-community partnerships is increasingly seen as a powerful solution to improving K-12 public education, and parents often need training to effectively participate in that collaboration, according to Karen L. Mapp, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the director of its education policy and management program.

Mapp shared her perspectives on family engagement during a panel discussion today in New York City sponsored by Learning Leaders, a non-profit that trains 8,000 volunteers to work in 500 New York public schools, and equips parents to foster their children's education development.

"Collective impact" is a term for getting stakeholders from within schools, and beyond, to work together for educational improvement. It incorporates the efforts of businesses, community organizations and nonprofits alongside those of educators, school administrators, and families.

Mapp referred to "collective impact" as described by Stanford University's Social Innovation Review.

"If we're going to solve the problems of education, we need everybody at the table to be part of that discussion," she said. More school superintendents are adopting this model. She cited Baltimore schools' CEO Andres A. Alonso, who is leaving the school system at the end of this school year and becoming a Harvard faculty member, as one superintendent who understands this paradigm.

Baltimore community organizing groups were hired "to build parent capacity to engage in those conversations," Mapp explained.

"A lot of parents get invited to the table, but they haven't been trained in how schools work," she explained. "They are there just to rubber-stamp whatever the district is moving forward."

To truly engage parents requires that they understand how to participate in the process. That's where capacity building comes in, Mapp said.

Posted by Michele Molnar at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Town hall meetings to address bullying will be held around the country in a partnership between the National PTA and Discovery Education. The first will be held May 9 in Charlotte, N.C.

In a joint release, the non-profit parent-teacher group and the for-profit Discovery Education, which offers standards-based digital content for K-12, announced their plan to discuss bullying prevention and intervention‐as well as mental health assistance—with students, parents, educators and other community members across the nation.

The two entities say that the town halls are intended as a "meaningful response" to President Barack Obama's call for anti-bullying and comprehensive school safety initiatives.

The second town hall will be held in Cincinnati on June 20 as part of the 2013 National PTA Convention and Youth Summit. Additional cities for meetings have yet to be announced.

"Of these, some of the town halls will focus on family-school partnerships, while others will focus on student interventions," according to the release.

An experienced panel of experts who will provide information about, and solutions to, bullying behaviors will be part of each town hall. Advice about how to access mental health assistance will also be part of the program. The town hall will promote interaction and discussion between the panel members and all attendees. Discoveryeducation.com also will host content that addresses contemporary issues that students face around bullying.

"Not every incident of bullying makes headlines, but each and every one is a significant disruption to a student's learning and affects their social and emotional development," National PTA President Betsy Landers said in the release.

Posted by Michele Molnar at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Two mothers who launched a grassroots movement against the Common Core State Standards in Indiana aren't resting on their laurels as they wait for the state's governor to sign into law House Bill 1427, which requires a policy and fiscal review of the standards in their state. Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, is expected to sign the legislation sometime next week.

Heather Crossin, whom Tuttle affectionately calls her "partner in crime" as co-founder of Hoosiers Against Common Core, has already spoken to approximately 1,000 parents in three presentations in Ohio, and Tuttle says she is fielding calls from concerned parents in California, Wyoming, Alabama, and Missouri.

In Indiana, their odyssey of opposition found them making presentations in living rooms and airplane hangars, ultimately taking their case to the statehouse.

Asked her organization's view of the final version of the bill, Tuttle said that, while they would have preferred repeal of the common core, "we're happy with the outcome. It's strong language, and it gets done what it needs to get done."

Precisely what this legislation's impact will be is still open to some interpretation, as my colleagues are writing in the following coverage:

• "What Does Indiana's Common-Core Bill Really Mean?" by Andrew Ujifusa in his State EdWatch blog


• "Indiana Could Back Out of Common-Core Tests" by Catherine Gewertz in her Curriculum Matters blog


• "How Will Indiana's 'Pause' Affect Its NCLB Waiver?" by Michele McNeil in the Politics K-12 blog

"But at the end of the day, the people of the state still matter. Our opinions still count and they're acted upon. Believe me, Heather and I are usually the only constituents down there [at the statehouse.] Otherwise it's wall-to-wall lobbyists," she said. "You have to remind yourself that this is the people's house, and the more people who are there, the better off we will be."

Posted by Michele Molnar at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Even in an era when more parents than ever have easy access to information at home via technology, they find libraries to be important, according to a study by The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released May 1.

Pew researchers conducted interviews with 584 parents of children under 18 late last year, and found that:

• 94 percent say libraries are important for their children;


• 84 percent indicate a major reason is that libraries help inculcate their children's love of reading and books; and,


• 81 percent say libraries provide their children with information and resources not available at home.

Kathryn Zickuhr, research analyst at the Pew Internet Project, believes parents' connections to libraries are particularly impressive given parents' higher rates of ownership—compared to other adults—of techno-tools like smartphones, computers, and tablets. Still, libraries are relevant for information-gathering and different kinds of sources for children's homework. "Many parents said the atmosphere at the library, and having staff available to help with research, are other reasons they bring their children to the library," she said.

"Lower-income parents are more likely to say they've used the library's internet or computers than families with higher incomes," said Zickuhr, of her and her associates' findings in the study entitled, "Parents, Children, Libraries and Reading." Of the parents whose children went to the library in the past 12 months, 37 percent went to use the internet. Of those, 43 percent were ages 12-17.

In addition to borrowing books, which is the main reason children went to the library, more than half (55 percent) went to do schoolwork. Among children ages 12 to 17, that is the reason 77 percent went to the library.

Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Margaret Bernstein writes that the rave reviews libraries receive suggest "that some parents respect the library even more than they do their child's school. And that puts libraries in a position of real influence, one they can wield to prod parents to get more involved in their child's academic success."

Zickhur said that among those surveyed, "a big priority of parents [is that] libraries should definitely coordinate more with schools. In focus groups, parents said they wish the libraries would coordinate more with schools— to make sure enough copies of books on required reading lists are available, or for homework, and so tutors could help with what students are studying,"

For its part, the American Library Association, through its Association for Library Service to Children, offers an online repository of successful cooperative partnerships between school and public libraries.

Pew's full study is available here.

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