Week 2 Discussion 1 Group Focus

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the changing context of schooling in the United States, the research evidence that examines the influence of families on children’s school success, and the evidence on the influence of schools on families. We highlighted the revolutionary changes in teacher beliefs and practices that undergird educators’ current efforts to build more culturally responsive relationships with students and their families. These new practices require educators to (a) build on students’ and families’ funds of knowledge, (b) share the role of expert with families, (c) practice no-fault problem solving, and (d) create opportunities for nonproblematic family–school interaction. We described the benefits and barriers to be derived from these new ways of interacting with families. Finally, we discussed the philosophy and goals that underlie the development of this book.

Activities and Questions

1. Consider the dramatic demographic changes in the student population, ages birth to 17, that are predicted in the next 10 years. How might these changes affect your ideas about whom you might be teaching when you enter the profession?

2. In contrast to the traditional ways that educators relate to families, describe four ways that collaborative educators are connecting with families. Which specific changes in these teacher beliefs and practices of interacting with their students’ families seem most different from the teacher practices that you or your family experienced during your elementary and high school years of schooling?

3. Is there any evidence that parent–family involvement in their children’s schooling matters? If so, what is it?

Resources

ChildStats.gov www.childstats.gov

ChildStats.gov provides information on key national indicators of U.S. children’s well-being on an annual basis.

Children’s Defense Fund www.childrensdefense.org

The Children’s Defense Fund provides effective advocacy for all children in the United States, with a particular attention to the needs of impoverished children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. This organization offers current data related to trends in children’s well-being and highly relevant publications.

CHAPTER 1 Connecting with Families: A Nice or a Necessary Practice?

Ellen S. Amatea

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you will be able to

■ Describe the changing demographics of the student body and teacher workforce in U.S. schools.

■ Summarize the research documenting the differences in educational outcomes and school conditions among low-income, racially and ethnically diverse students, and middle-income student populations.

■ Describe the influence of families on children’s learning and the influence of schools on families.

■ Describe the fundamental changes in how educators who seek to make schools more responsive to culturally diverse students and their families teach and structure their relations with students, their families, and other persons in the community.

■ Explain the basis of the belief that undergirds the development of this book—that working with students’ families is a necessary, not simply a nice, aspect of educational practice.

■ Outline the benefits of these new ways of interacting with students and their families and the challenges to traditional family–school roles and practices that these ways imply.

In all likelihood, today’s teachers will work with students whose backgrounds and lives are quite different from their own. Drawing on information collected from Census 2010, it is predicted that, although some 45% of the school population is now from racially and culturally diverse groups, by 2035, children of color will be in the majority; by 2050, they will represent 62% of the school population. However, researchers predict that this population growth will be uneven across the United States. According to Humes, Jones, and Ramirez ( 2011 ), “Most of the population growth in the past ten years has been due to an increase in the Hispanic and Asian populations; but then, as now, the minority population growth was concentrated in the South and West with 10 states containing 90% of the Hispanic population, 10 containing 90% of the Asian population, and 7 with both” (p. 17).

A comparison of the racial–ethnic background of U.S. children ages 0 to 17 for 1980 and for 2010 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010b ) illustrates how this segment of our population is shifting. As seen in Figure 1.1 , in 1980, White, non-Hispanic children made up 74.6% of this population, but by 2010, they made up only 54% of all U.S. children ages birth to 17. There was a slight decrease of U.S. children who were Black/non-Hispanic, from 14.5% in 1980 to 14% in that category in 2010. The most dramatic population growth occurred among Hispanic children. In 1980, they made up 8.5% of U.S. children, but by 2010, they made up 23% of all children in the birth-to-17 age bracket. Similarly, although 1.7% of U.S. children were Asian or Pacific Islanders in 1980, by 2010, they made up 5.9% of the total group. Moreover, students of two or more races increased to 5% of the total group. Yet the distribution of these demographic changes occurred unevenly across the country. In only seven states (Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas) and the District of Columbia, 50% or more of the students are children of color. Not only does Figure 1.1 depict the percentage of U.S. children from birth to 17 years by race and Hispanic origin from 1980 to 2010, but also the projected percentage from 2010 to 2050. For example, by 2050, the White, non-Hispanic population is projected to decrease to approximately 38%, and the Hispanic population is projected to increase to about 39%.

Figure 1.1 Percentage of U.S. Children Ages Birth to 17 Years by Race and Hispanic Origin, 1980–2009; and Projected, 2010–2050

Source: childstats.gov . (2010). America’s Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-being. Retrieved June 18, 2011, from www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/ .

Note: Data from 2000 onward are not directly comparable with data from earlier years. Data on race and Hispanic origin are collected separately; Hispanics may be any race. In 1980 and 1990, following the 1977 White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) standards for collecting and presenting data on race, the decennial census gave respondents the option to identify with one race from the following: White, Black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, or Asian or Pacific Islander. The Census Bureau also offered an “Other” category. Beginning in 2000, following the 1977 OMB standards for collecting and presenting data on race, the decennial census gave respondents the option to identify with one or more races from the following: White, Black, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. In addition, “Some other race” category was included with OMB approval. Those who chose more than one race were classified as “Two or more races.” Except for the “All other races” category, all race groups discussed from 2000 onward refer to people who indicated only one racial identity. (Those who were “Two or more races” were included in the “All other races” category, along with American Indians or Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders.) Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates and Projections.

Meanwhile, as a result of the declining enrollments of Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans in teacher education, today’s teaching force is becoming increasingly White European American. White teachers currently account for some 83% of the teaching force, and teachers of color collectively account for only 17%. Moreover, most teachers are White European Americans from middle-class backgrounds and speak English only, yet they have many students who are people of color, live in poverty, and/or speak a first language that is not English (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010a ). Because of these differing life circumstances, teachers find that they do not have the same cultural frames of reference or points of view as their students, and they live in “different existential worlds” ( Gay, 2000 , p. 23). As a result, teachers often label such children and their families as deficient and have difficulty serving as role models for their students or as cultural brokers helping students bridge the differences between their home and school worlds ( Gay, 2000 ; Goodwin, 2000 ). Teachers also have difficulty in developing curriculum, instruction, and classroom interactions that are culturally responsive ( Ladson-Billings, 1995 ).

Indicative of the difficulties that White, middle-class educators have had in effectively teaching students who are not like themselves is the staggering disparity in the educational outcomes and conditions for students from diverse cultural groups who are poor. The United States has the highest rate of children who live in poverty among advanced nations worldwide ( Children’s Defense Fund, 2010 ), and the percentage of school-age children living in poverty increased from 15% to 19% from 2000 to 2009 ( Center for Educational Statistics, 2010 ). Moreover, the number of Black and Hispanic children who live in poverty (35% and 31%, respectively) far exceeds the percentage of White children (16%). Further, more than 20% of children under age 5 are poor, with more than 40% of Black and more than 33% of Hispanic children under age 5 being poor ( Children’s Defense Fund, 2010 ).

The achievement levels of Black and Hispanic students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics and reading assessments are markedly lower than levels for White students, as are high school graduation rates ( National Center for Education Statistics, 2010a ). Villegas and Lucas ( 2002 ) assert, “The consistent gap between racial/ethnic minority and poor students and their White, middle-class peers... is indicative of the inability of the educational system to effectively teach students of color as schools have been traditionally structured” (p. 9).

In addition to the staggering differences in educational outcomes are major differences in the allocation of resources (e.g., teacher quality, equipment, supplies, physical facilities, books, access to computer technology, class size) to urban, suburban, and rural schools ( Darling-Hammond & Young, 2002 ). In addition, growing evidence shows that children of color and children who live in urban or poor areas are the most likely to have teachers who are less experienced, less well prepared, and less likely to have a regular teaching license (Clotfelter et al., 2007).

Take a moment and consider your expectations for the children you will teach by completing Reflective Exercise 1.1.

REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 1.1 Your Vision of Your Future Life as a Teacher

Imagine yourself 5 years from now. You may be starting your third or fourth year as a teacher and are reflecting on your previous experience as you prepare for the new school year. Describe the following:

1. Whom do you envision you will be teaching? (What student grade level? What type of student population in terms of race, socioeconomic status, disability?)

2. Where do you envision you will be teaching (e.g., geographic location and school site, such as urban or rural; private/public school/parochial school)?

3. What will you be teaching? (What subjects do you most enjoy? Why? What subjects do you least enjoy? Why?)

4. How will you be teaching? (What does your classroom look like? How is it equipped? How are you interacting with students?)

5. Are you interacting with anyone else?

6. How and when are you interacting with adults from students’ homes? How and when are you interacting with other adults at your school? What do you most appreciate about your relationships with these other adults?

7. Why are you teaching? (What are the personal results you want to create in the world? What is the legacy you want to leave to the children, other educators, or community with whom you work?)

Reflection: What was it like creating your answer to this assignment? What was the hardest part to imagine? What was the easiest?

From your vision, consider the assumptions and expectations that you are noticing about the following:

What will your classroom of students be like? (Who will be your students?)

How will you teach your students so that they can learn?

What will be your role with families and the families’ role with you?

How do you expect other school staff to be involved with you?

How much did your past experiences help shape your vision about how families of students should be involved with you?

Which assumptions do you think must be examined more carefully?

1.1 The Influence of Families on Children’s School Success

What does all of this mean? Are children from poor or culturally diverse families destined to fail in school? Are such families incapable or unwilling to help their children succeed in school? As early as the 1980s, researchers who studied the family’s impact on children’s academic achievement began reporting that some children from low-income and culturally diverse families did very well in school, and that it was not the family socioeconomic status (SES), the cultural group membership, or the type of family structure (e.g., single-parent versus two-parent) that was the main predictor of children’s school success or failure ( Clark, 1983 ; Dornbush, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, & Fraleigh, 1987 ). What appeared to make the difference was not the families’ social class position but their engagement in their children’s learning and development. As Clark ( 1990 ) asserts, “It was not class position that determined a family’s ability to support their children’s learning, rather it was the child’s development of ‘survival knowledge’ for competent classroom role enactment resulting from the positive attitudes and communication encounters they had with family members” (p. 121).

Since the early 1990s, many more researchers have studied the specific ways that non-White, low-income families function together to positively influence their children’s school achievements. Edin and Lein ( 1997 ), for example, interviewed 379 low-income, single mothers and discovered that many of these families lived in conditions of extreme poverty and deprivation yet demonstrated surprising resilience and creativity in building strategies to help their children overcome these poor life conditions. Even with low incomes and the struggles of getting and keeping public assistance, many of these families were able to keep their children in school, set family rules, get children to school on time, monitor their children’s whereabouts, organize their households, and engage their children in developmentally appropriate activities. As a result, young children in these families experienced early school success ( Hill & Craft, 2003 ), and older children had higher grades and test scores, better long-term academic achievement (Jeynes, 2003), better student attendance and attitudes about school ( Eccles & Harold, 1996 ), greater maturation, and more positive self-concepts (Bempechat, 1998).

What does all of this add up to? First, teachers and schools do not educate alone. Instead, a child’s family can make the difference in whether the child succeeds in gaining an education from schools. Second, educators cannot simply blame families or invoke income or social class as explanations for children’s failure to learn. Instead, educators must connect with families to bridge the chasm between the school and life experiences of those without social, cultural, racial, and economic advantages. Such an effort requires fundamental changes in the ways teachers teach and structure their relations with students, their families, and other persons in the community ( Cochran-Smith, 2004 ).

1.2 Changing Models of Teaching and Learning

Historically, teachers and schools have been expected to be the exclusive experts at “delivering” education to children. They are supposed to be all-knowing, make no mistakes, be completely organized, have everything under control, and have all students on task (McCaleb, 1994). Children’s social, economic, and cultural backgrounds have often been viewed as obstacles to be addressed or overcome outside the classroom through provision of parent education or specialized mental health or social services (Dryfoos, 1994). The basic structure of roles in schools has been top-down and bureaucratic. In the past, teachers and schools did not place much value or invest much effort in building collaborative relationships with students or with their families. Instead, students and parents were expected to accommodate the school and follow its lead. Those parents who do not “come when called” by the school for various events or conferences were viewed as “not caring,” “deficient” (i.e., lacking time, interest, or competence), “hard to reach,” and “having little to offer to the education of their children” ( Lott, 2001 , p. 248).

Yet there is now overwhelming evidence that parents from all income groups care about their children, want them to succeed in school, talk about the importance of schools, and say they would like to be more involved in the school or at home in helping their children. However, many parents, especially those from lower socioeconomic groups, feel reticent about communicating with the school. These parents report feeling unsure about how to help their children succeed in school because they lack confidence, communication skills, and knowledge about the teaching and learning processes used in schools (Lareau, 2003).

In contrast to affluent parents, the communication that low-income parents have with schools is typically negative and problem-focused. Most of these parents perceive themselves as being talked down to and blamed when required to interact with school staff. Despite wanting an equal, person-to-person relationship and not a professional–client relationship with school staff, many parents report that they are often dissatisfied with school personnel who are “too business-like” or “patronizing” or who “talk down” to them. Culturally disenfranchised groups are particularly vulnerable to feelings of judgment and blame. As a result, parents often avoid contact with school staff or view them as adversaries ( Lott, 2001 , p. 255).

As schools have grown larger and busing has become a fact of life for most students, many schools have become distant and impersonal organizations for families. Although some schools are apparently committed to programs that invite community input and reflect family values, many ethnic minority parents report feeling intimidated by the large and institutional structure of the school. For some, this feeling may be based on unhappy memories of their own schooling experiences. Others may be intimidated because they are brusquely received, spoken to in a language that they do not understand, or confused by expectations that they do not think they can meet ( Finders & Lewis, 1994 ; Lott, 2001 ).

Many educators are now recognizing that these traditional ways of thinking about their roles with students and their families do not work for today’s students. As educators learn more about the disparities between children’s home worlds and culture and the world and culture of school, they are discovering that the traditional ways of delivering instruction actually undermine the sense of identity and efficacy of many children ( Trumbull, Rothstein-Fisch, Greenfield, & Quiroz, 2001 ).

1.3 Building on Students’ and Families’ Funds of Knowledge

When researchers began to look more closely at the educational disparities that exist among middle-class suburban and working-class and poor children, they discovered that children from different home, community, and economic backgrounds learned different “funds of knowledge” ( Velez-Ibanez & Greenberg, 1992 ), and that these funds of knowledge are not treated equally in school. We use the phrase funds of knowledge to mean the various social and linguistic practices and the historically accumulated bodies of knowledge that are essential to students’ homes and communities ( Moll & González, 1993 ). For example, in her influential study Ways with Words, Heath ( 1983 ) describes the language practices of three communities in the rural Piedmont Carolinas. One was a working-class, predominantly White community; one was a working-class, predominantly Black community; and one was a middle-class community with a history of formal schooling. Heath found that, although the people in these communities lived within a few miles of one another, they socialized their children into talking, reading, and writing in profoundly different ways.

As she followed the children into school, Heath discovered that the differences in language practices among these three groups had significant implications for the children’s academic success. To varying degrees, the children from the working-class families, both Black and White, found that they did not know how to show their teachers what they knew in ways the teacher could recognize. Further, these children were often asked to engage in activities that they did not fully understand, and found that their teacher talked in ways that were unfamiliar and confusing. Thus, from the start, the culturally diverse, low-income, or working-class children often found school to be a confusing and sometimes uncomfortable place because their ways of knowing were not culturally compatible with the schooling environment (i.e., curriculum, teaching practices, structure, content, materials, and organization). In contrast, children from the middle-class homes, where the funds of knowledge corresponded nicely to those that were valued at the school, experienced much less discontinuity. They knew what the teacher was talking about most of the time, and if they did not, they knew how to ask for help in ways that the teacher recognized. In addition, they were likely to know how to tell stories in ways that the teacher understood. As a result, school failure was a much less likely outcome for the middle-class than for the working-class children. The children from the working-class families, both Black and White, fell behind in school—some early on, others more gradually—and, eventually, dropped out of school. In contrast, the children from the middle-class families, although not all top scholars, ultimately graduated from high school.

Building on Heath’s work, other researchers have also described the discontinuities that children from diverse economic and cultural backgrounds can experience between the world that they know at home and the world of school. Valdes ( 1996 ) examines how schools ignore the Hispanic language and culture of its students, whereas Delpit ( 2006 ) demonstrates the inadvertent effect of schooling in undermining African-American students’ cultural ways of knowing. These researchers concluded that when the “ways of knowing” of the home and community are discounted or rejected (i.e., when the student believes that people at school do not value the ways of knowing that they brought with them to school), a student’s sense of competence and identity is threatened. Students then often feel forced to choose between allegiance and respect for their teacher(s) or loyalties to their family and home community, and to accept one set of ways of knowing and talking and reject the other. Other children report that they feel ashamed of the language and culture of their parents and other family members. Some children believe that if they take on one identity, they must give up the other.

Influenced by these findings, many educators (Ada & Campoy, 2003; McIntyre, Roseberry, & González, 2001 ) began to see teaching and learning in a new way. They began to realize that they needed to pay attention to students’ different ways of knowing and talking and not view these abilities as deficits in need of remediation. If they could focus on what students’ households and communities actually do, they could bring multiple dimensions of students’ lived experiences to life in the classroom. Further, these funds of knowledge could become the foundation for student learning of school-based funds of knowledge. For example, González, Moll, and Amanti ( 2005 ) and McIntyre, Roseberry, and González ( 2001 ) described how teachers first interviewed families to learn about their distinctive funds of knowledge and then used that knowledge to contextualize their instruction and curriculum. In a similar vein, Heath ( 1983 ) describes how she coached teachers to help their students use their own ways of knowing and talking as a foundation for learning the language system of the school. Rather than attempting to destroy or replace the language or knowledge that the students brought to school, teachers encouraged students to identify the differences between their familiar world and the unfamiliar world of the classroom. “They became researchers into the reality of their dual language and knowledge worlds, and they gained a new sense of self awareness as they reconstructed a social and cognitive system of meanings” (Heath, 1983 , p. 202). By inviting students to articulate how the knowledge that they had gained from their homes and communities related to what the school wanted them to know, they became more successful learners.

The latest research that assesses the effects of various bilingual education approaches mirrors these new ways of thinking about teaching and learning. Many of these programs that build on the home language of non-English-speaking children through a dual-language immersion approach (in which there is a dual emphasis on speaking and reading in the primary or home language and culture and in the secondary language of English) result in stronger academic gains than those resulting from traditional monolingual instructional methods (Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence, 2010). In the dual-language immersion approach, the goal is student bilingualism. The students start off in their primary language, but over time, the secondary language is introduced during a portion of the day so that gradually the primary and secondary languages of instruction are balanced out across the school day. Parents are closely involved in this instructional effort, both in agreeing to this dual language focus and in reinforcing the home/primary language skills and the secondary language skills.

1.4 Sharing the Role of Expert with Families

Discovering the value in using children’s home and community funds of knowledge to contextualize new, school-based knowledge resulted in many educators rethinking how they might develop their relations with students’ families. Rather than relegating family members to an invisible role or calling on them only when a student has difficulties, these educators are creating strong and ongoing working relationships with students and their families, centered on sharing the role of expert with families. This means working with and learning from families instead of doing to or for families.

To build such relationships effectively, educators must examine their own beliefs and expectations about how roles should be structured and how power should be shared. Many traditional parent involvement efforts are based on the belief that something is wrong or lacking in families when their children struggle in school, and that because educators know what parents should be doing, the educator’s job is to help parents change their ways of relating to their children and to have parents teach their children the skills that schools deem are important (and in the same manner as the school). As a result, educators often devise practices such as (a) giving parents guidelines, materials, and training to carry out school-like activities in the home; (b) training parents in effective parenting; (c) teaching parents about the culture of American schooling; and (d) developing parents’ language and literacy skills. These practices inadvertently convey the message that the schools’ and educators’ knowledge and ways of knowing are all important and that the families’ knowledge is not important or valued.

However, a growing body of research evidence indicates that families successfully use a wide range of “non-school-like” experiences to teach their children. For example, Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines ( 1988 ) studied the literacy practices and experiences of children in poverty-level families and found that, although direct parental instruction in school-like literacy tasks did not occur, families used significant experiences that occurred on a regular basis—such as family outings, a visit to the clinic, or a game of cards—to enhance their children’s literacy. The most important aspect in determining whether these were successful literacy experiences seemed to be that children were engaged on a regular basis in activities that were integrated into their lives in meaningful ways.

As a result of these findings, teachers are inviting parents to become significant participants in their children’s learning by contributing their oral or written words, ideas, and experiences as part of the text of schooling. For example, Ada and Campoy ( 2003 ) developed a project in which Spanish-speaking parents and their first-graders were invited to coauthor books that depicted their life and values. These books then become the texts that were used to teach reading and writing in the children’s first-grade classrooms.

1.5 Practicing No-Fault Problem Solving

Teachers are also inviting parents to participate in new ways resolving children’s academic and behavioral difficulties. Traditionally, teachers have met with parents, usually the mother, when children are experiencing difficulties at school ( Christenson & Sheridan, 2001 ). Parents usually dread these encounters with the school for fear of being blamed for their children’s difficulties, and teachers dread them as well ( Lightfoot, 2003 ). Students are usually left out of these conversations or included only as a punitive measure. Because these are the most common and the most anxiety-producing encounters that teachers have with parents, a number of educators ( Amatea, Daniels, Bringman, & Vandiver, 2004 ; Weiss & Edwards, 1992 ) have put considerable effort into redesigning these meetings to change the pattern of fault-finding endemic to them. Amatea et al. ( 2004 ), for example, introduced a “no-fault” parent–teacher conference format in which both parents and students are invited to play an active, co-expert role with teachers, and renamed these meetings family–school problem-solving conferences. The message is that the student/child can be helped only when everyone—including the student—works together. The school staff develops a concrete action plan with the family (student and parents) in which everyone (family and school) has a task to do to help the child. This action plan is written down and a copy is made for the family and the school. Unique features of this conference format are its task focus, blocking of blame, and involvement of all members of the family as persons who can contribute to resolving the child’s problems. Although the development and implementation of a concrete action plan usually helps a child significantly, the more important outcome is the change in the relationships among the students, school staff, and family members. Data from parents and students reveal that they like this new format because it provides a specific approach for the student, teacher, counselor, and family to work together in a nonblaming context to develop solutions to students’ behavioral or learning problems. Data from teachers reveal that what they most value in this new format is having time to think through possible ways of solving a student’s problem together with families and other staff while keeping the blaming between parents and teachers at a low level so that people can remain calm and level-headed while solving problems (Amatea, Daniels, Bringman, & Vandiver, 2004 ).

1.6 Creating Opportunities for Meaningful and Nonproblematic Interaction

Educators are recognizing that to develop more collaborative relations with students and their families, they need opportunities to have positive and nonproblematic contacts in which the student and family can play meaningful roles. Rather than assign parents to the usual passive roles of audience member or supporter, educators are creating opportunities for parents and students to demonstrate their interest in their child and interact more directly with them. One illustration of this shift to more meaningful roles is the student-led parent conference, in which students are given an opportunity talk about their goals and share their academic work with their parents ( Austin, 1994 ; Benson & Barnett, 2005 ). Not only do students share their school progress (academic and behavioral) and develop a plan together with their parents for how to move forward, but also they learn an approach to cooperative planning and problem solving that gives them ways of communicating with their parents in a respectful and cooperative manner.

1.7 Discovering the Benefits of Connecting with Families

Powerful benefits result from these new ways that educators are connecting with families. First, researchers report positive changes in student achievement when educators involve families in their children’s learning at the preschool, elementary, middle, and high school levels. More specifically, researchers report that for preschool- and elementary-age children, family–school involvement is associated with early school success and with increased language and literacy skill development and social competence ( Dearing, Kreider, Simpkins, & Weiss, 2006 ). Second, researchers report long-term benefits to children whose families are involved in their learning during early childhood. For example, in a longitudinal study of 704 parents in Chicago, Miedel and Reynolds ( 1999 ) found that the number of school activities in which parents participated while their children were in preschool and kindergarten was significantly related to higher reading achievement, to lower rates of grade retention by the time the student was age 14, and to fewer years of needing special educational instruction. In a subsequent study that followed up on this same sample of families, Barnard ( 2004 ) reports that family involvement during the elementary school years was significantly associated with lower rates of high-school dropout and greater rates of on-time graduation. In another study, elementary students’ reading literacy improved significantly when their families were involved with their children at home in specific learning activities around reading ( McCarthy, 2000 ).

Homework completion, report card grades, and attitudes about school and teachers are also positively affected by the involvement of families of elementary, middle, and high school students (Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008). For example, Scott-Jones ( 1995 ) reports families’ involvement in monitoring and interacting with their high-school-age children about homework, and particularly family discussions about schoolwork, courses, grades, and the future, had strong positive effects on high school students’ report card grades and attitudes about school and teachers.

Second, parents reap benefits from participating in their child’s schooling. Not only do parents develop a greater appreciation for their important role in their child’s learning, but also family–school connections enhance parents’ sense of adequacy and self-worth, strengthen their social network, motivate them to resume their own education, and enhance their view of their child’s teacher and school ( Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2005 ). For example, a study of parent involvement in elementary schools found that parents’ confidence in their ability to help their children with school tasks was increased when teachers coached them on how to help their children with schoolwork ( Dauber & Epstein, 1993 ). In addition, teachers’ practices of reaching out to students’ families strongly influences what families do to support their children’s learning and schooling. In fact, what teachers do to connect with the families of their students appears to be a much stronger predictor of a parent’s involvement in their children’s school progress than family background variables, such as race, ethnicity, social class, marital status, or mother’s work status ( Green, Walker, Hoover-Dempsey, & Sandler, 2007 ).

Third, many teachers report significant benefits from collaborating with parents, such as (a) strengthened school programs through expansion of teaching resources, (b) improved student academic achievement, (c) improved student behavior and reduced student discipline problems, (d) greater retention of student skills over the summer because of work conducted at home during the vacation, (e) more favorable perceptions of families, and (f) reduction in their feelings of isolation and nonsupport ( Sheldon & Epstein, 2002 ). For example, researchers report that when children and their peers receive similar messages about appropriate behavior from their parents and teachers, they demonstrate less problematic social behaviors and less confusion about expectations ( McNeal, 1999 ).

Several studies of parent involvement in elementary schools note that parents and principals rate teachers higher in overall teaching ability and interpersonal skills if the teachers frequently use practices of parent involvement. In a large-scale study of elementary teachers, parents, and students, it was found that teachers who were “leaders” in the frequent use of parent involvement did not prejudge less-educated, poor, or single parents ( Dauber & Epstein, 1993 ). Instead, teachers who frequently involved families in their children’s education rated single and married parents and more and less formally educated parents equally in helpfulness and follow-through with their children at home. By contrast, teachers who did not frequently involve families gave more stereotypical ratings to single parents and to those with less formal education, marking them lower in helpfulness and follow-through than other parents.

1.8 Identifying the Barriers

The ways of working that we describe in this book take time, reflection, and an openness to change. We know that many teachers and administrators say they would like to interact more with their students’ families but have neither the time nor the know-how to go about building such positive and productive relationships and, consequently, are fearful of trying ( Epstein, 2008 ). Some teachers do not believe that encouraging parent involvement is a part of their professional role and see it as interfering with the teaching tasks that have been entrusted to them ( Christenson & Sheridan, 2001 ).

The culture and work norms of many schools present significant barriers to developing these ways of thinking and working with students and their families. Swap ( 1993 ) notes that many teachers expect to be self-sufficient in their teaching practice and to operate independently from their colleagues and from students and parents. “Adult collaboration in any form is relatively rare in schools.... The traditional approach to managing schools emphasizes hierarchy, individualism, and technology rather than dialogue, relationship and reciprocity” (p. 17). Moreover, traditional family–school interactions are often designed to avoid conflict by minimizing opportunities for personal contact and expression of differences. Teachers expect to channel parents into passive roles as audience members or supporters at family–school events. Students are often expected to be either absent from such encounters or passive participants.

As a result, there are few opportunities for educators, students, and families to develop skills in working together to enhance student learning, resolve conflicts, develop educational plans, or solve student problems. Krasnow ( 1990 ) contends that schools are characteristically structured to withhold negative information to avoid conflict, and neither interpersonal nor intergroup conflict is discussable at school. Because schools fail to learn how to deal constructively with conflict, they fail to improve as organizations that represent a broad-based constituency.

In addition, many teachers feel overburdened by expectations to teach in new ways, to develop new curriculum, and to help all students learn and perform well in high-stakes testing. Collaborating with families may not seem possible. Because we know that time is in scarce supply in the lives of educators, we have found that these ways of working can be time-efficient in the long run. We are proposing that teachers not add to what they do but change their existing ways of doing things. Showing educators how to work differently—not add on more work—is our goal in writing this book; thus, you will see examples of how both individual teachers and entire school staffs have changed how they involve families in their children’s school lives. Clearly, this new way of working is more effective when it can extend across the whole school. However, a teacher’s influence may not span the entire school. Hence, we showcase the individual teacher’s experiences with these changes in practices.

1.9 The Philosophy That Underlies Our Approach

This book is based on our experiences working in schools with educators, students, and families, and in teaching pre-service courses on family–school involvement to elementary and middle school teachers, counselors, and administrators. As a result of our front-line experiences, we believe that developing strong working relationships with the families of students is not only a nice activity, but also a necessary step for developing effective ways of reaching and teaching all students. In this book, we describe various ways of learning from students and families and how to use that knowledge to build instructional activities that foster children’s learning and development. We believe that interacting with families is a means to an end for improving students’ learning and school achievement, not simply an end in itself. In addition, we do not offer one approach that we assume will work for everyone. Hence, you will see many different ideas are showcased concerning how you might change your teaching practices.

Because these ways of working with students and their families are a radical departure from traditional practices and beliefs, information about these new teaching practices, the research on their effectiveness, and the theories that underlie their development have not been a standard part of teacher preparation programs. Consequently, most beginning education professionals continue to have an exceedingly narrow conception of the role that families might play in their children’s schooling—conceptions that all too often keep families in a marginalized and disempowered position.

This book is designed to acquaint you with the new ideas and practices in the field of family–school relationship building and to highlight the changes in thinking that underlie these new educational practices. In this book, we hope to describe

■ The changing context of schooling in the United States and the challenges to traditional beliefs and practices about how we, as educators, should interact with students, their families, and their communities.

■ What practitioners and researchers are learning about how families’ beliefs, values, and interactions contribute to children’s success in school.

■ A new approach to family–school relations, the family–school collaboration approach; the theories about child development and culturally responsive teaching and learning that undergird it, and the distinctive beliefs and practices that characterize it.

■ Everyday instructional and noninstructional routines that individual teachers use to communicate, build collaborative partnerships, and forge a sense of co-ownership and connection with students’ families and the larger community.

■ How school staffs are changing the school-wide norms and routines to support a more collaborative way of working with students, their families, and their communities.

CHAPTER 2 From Separation to Collaboration: The Changing Paradigms of Family–School Relations

Ellen S. Amatea

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you will be able to

■ Explain what is meant by a mental model or paradigm.

■ Describe how educators’ mental models/paradigms of family–school relationships have changed over time as a result of changes in theory, research, and legislation.

■ Summarize the distinctive assumptions of the separation, remediation, and collaboration paradigms and their influence on educational practice.

■ Describe the benefits and drawbacks of each paradigm of family–school relations.

■ Explain your current mental model or paradigm of family–school relations and how you may wish to modify it.

How are you planning to interact with the families of your students? Would you prefer to have parents come to school only when their child has a problem, or will you encourage them to drop in at will to observe your classroom activities? Do you hope to invite parents to share their expertise and knowledge about their children and their family’s culture, or do you believe that information is unnecessary? Do you expect to have “the final say” on decisions that you make about your students, or will you share your decision-making power with their parents?

Each of us—whether educator or parent—operates from a particular mental model or map that consists of certain beliefs as to how roles and relations between educators and families should be structured and responsibilities allocated. These beliefs are socially constructed, shaped through our interaction with others and their ideas. As we move through the world, we build up our beliefs about what the world is like by means of our conversation with other people. The beliefs we hold about how we should interact with students, their families, our colleagues, and our superiors grow out of responding to the (a) specific implicit or explicit expectations and norms of members of our key reference groups (e.g., our work associates at school, our students and their families, our professional organizations); (b) larger cultural stories or beliefs that shape our own personal conceptions about how we should behave; and (c) actual role experiences and behaviors that we learn to perform ( Harrison & Minor, 1978 ).

Our mental model is like a windowpane, both clarifying and distorting what we see. For example, as clearly and objectively as we think we see things, we may discover that other people may see the same set of circumstances quite differently based on their own apparently valid and objective point of view. Sometimes we may find that our mental model of family–school relations is not supported by the policy (written or unwritten), customs, and culture of the school in which we work. For example, one teacher who wanted to design her classroom’s “back to school night” event to include children as well as their parents was met by the response, “We just don’t do that around here.” In another case, a principal who wanted her teachers to learn more about their students’ lives reported that she got raised eyebrows when she suggested that the school staff put on a parent workshop in one of the housing projects where many of the school’s students lived. Often, however, our mental models are so widely shared by others in our world that they are difficult to see. Only when a new mental model or paradigm emerges can we see more clearly the features and assumptions of the old paradigm. As we compare the features of our old mental model, or way of thinking, with the new way of thinking, we experience “news of a difference” that allows us to revise or change our old mental model or paradigm.

Three different mental models or paradigms of family–school relations have emerged in the field that prescribe how roles should be structured between home and school. Each of these paradigms is based on distinctly different assumptions about the purposes of family–school interactions, the responsibilities of each role participant, the structure of power relations, and the preferred styles and methods of interaction. As a result, educators in the same school may hold widely differing mental models about how adults at school and at home should relate with one another. Similarly, parents may hold very different mental models that shape their ideas about how they should interact with their children’s teachers.

Before you interact with your students’ families, you must become aware of your current mental model of family–school relations and discover what other options you have for how you might structure your relations with students and their families. In this chapter, we describe three different mental models or paradigms for how educators should interact with students’ caregivers and families: (a) the separation paradigm, (b) the remediation paradigm, and (c) the collaboration paradigm. Each of these paradigms represents a consistent pattern of assumptions, goals, attitudes, behaviors, and strategies that help us understand how people believe that families and school staff should behave with one another. You will find educators who operate from each of these paradigms in today’s schools. In this book, we hope to encourage you to move toward a more collaborative paradigm in working with the families of your students. First, however, let’s explain what we mean by a paradigm.

Summary

In this chapter, we described a typology of mental models/paradigms of family–school relationships that can provide a framework that can be used to reflect on the nature of your own beliefs as well as to locate in which paradigm other educators operate. Two out of the three paradigms—the separation/separate spheres paradigm and the remediation paradigm—locate parents in more limited and passive roles, whereas the other—the collaboration paradigm—offers opportunities for both parents and educators to take on active roles in which all parties can bring their knowledge and strengths to improving students’ academic achievement and social and emotional competence. We end this chapter with a discussion of the change process you may experience as you experiment with ways of thinking and working with families that may be new to you.

Activities and Questions

1. Imagine that you have been asked to create an advertisement to “sell” one of the three family–school relationship paradigms to a group of parents and community members. Develop a specific advertisement and accompanying jingle to sell this audience on the benefits of this approach to family–school relating.

2. What impact do our lived experiences have on the development of our thinking about family–school relating? What types of experiences should we create for ourselves to develop more comfort with the collaboration paradigm?

3. Discuss three assumptions about family–school relating that undergird the separation paradigm, then do the same for the remediation paradigm.

4. Describe some benefits of relating to families using the collaboration paradigm.

Resources

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) U.S. Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue SW Washington, DC 20202 Phone 800-USA-LEARN (1-800-872-5327) www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml

Provides information on NCLB’s key principles. It also has a teacher’s toolkit and parents’ guide as well as opportunities to sign up to receive email updates.

National Head Start Association

1651 Prince Street Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone: 703-739-0875 www.nhsa.org

Comer School Development Program (SDP)

55 College Street New Haven, CT 06510 Phone: 203-737-1020 www.info.med.yale.edu/comer

2.1 Understanding Paradigms

The word paradigm comes from the Greek and was originally a scientific term; today, it is more commonly used to mean a model, theory, perception, assumption, or frame of reference. In the more general sense, it is the way we see the world—not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of how we perceive, understand, and interpret the world. A paradigm depicts distinctive ways of “ordering experience” or of “constructing reality” ( Bruner, 1996 , p. 11). For our purposes, a simple way to understand family–school paradigms is to think of them as “mental maps depicting how our relationship should operate.” ( Bruner, 1996 , p. 15) Of course, we all know that the map is not the territory; that is, a map is simply a depiction or explanation about certain aspects of a territory. That is exactly what a paradigm is. It is a theory, a system of explanation or model of something, a larger cultural story or discourse that describes how our particular social world operates, how we expect to behave with students’ caregivers, and how we value or judge the ways in which students’ caregivers interact with us.

Why might you want to examine your paradigm? Suppose you want to arrive at a specific location in central Miami. A street map of the city would be a great help to you in reaching your destination, but suppose you are given the wrong map. Through a printing error, the map labeled Miami is actually a map of Orlando. Can you imagine the frustration and the ineffectiveness of trying to reach your destination? You might decide to work on your behavior—you could try harder, be more diligent, or double your speed. However, if you are using the wrong map, your efforts to find your way to your destination in Miami may only succeed in your getting you to the wrong place faster.

Or you might decide to work on your attitude—you could think more positively. However, you still might not get to the right place using the mislabeled map as your guide, but perhaps you do not care. Your attitude is positive, so that you are happy wherever you were. Our point is, with the wrong map, you are still lost. The fundamental problem has nothing to do with your behavior or your attitude; it has everything to do with having a wrong map. If you have the correct map of Miami, then diligence becomes important, and when you encounter frustrating obstacles along the way, then attitude can make a real difference; however, the first and most important requirement is the accuracy of the map.

Each of us has many different mental models or maps in our heads about various aspects of our social worlds. We interpret everything that we experience through these mental maps, yet we seldom question their accuracy. We simply believe that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. For example, we may believe that the inclusion of students with disabilities into regular classrooms or the tracking of students by ability levels is the ideal way to organize schooling and instruction. As a result, we see the evidence to support these beliefs much more readily than evidence that does not support them.

More important, although each of us tends to think that we see things as they are and that we are objective, in fact we see the world not as it is but as we are—or as we are taught to see it by others in our social world. Consequently, when we open our mouths to describe what we see (in our classroom, our school, our community), in effect, we describe our perceptions and mental models. When other people disagree with us, we immediately think that something is wrong with them. However, sincere and clearheaded people can see things quite differently because they are following their own mental map.

This does not mean that no facts exist. However, the more aware we are of our basic mental models or paradigms and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for them, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, and thereby get a larger picture and far richer view.

2.2 The Power of a Paradigm Shift

Perhaps the most important insight to be gained from studying the different ways that people look at their social world is in the area of paradigm shifting—what we might call the Aha! experience, as if a light were suddenly turned on inside their heads and when someone finally sees a certain situation in another way. The more bound people are by their initial perception, the more powerful the Aha! experience. The term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn ( 1970 ) in his highly influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn showed how almost every significant breakthrough in various scientific fields is first a break with tradition, with old ways of thinking, with old paradigms. For Ptolemy, the great Egyptian astronomer, Earth was the center of the universe, but Copernicus created a paradigm shift—and a great deal of resistance and persecution as well—by placing the sun at the center. Suddenly, everything took on a different interpretation. The Newtonian model of physics was a clockwork paradigm that is still the basis of modern engineering, but it was a partial and incomplete view of the world. The scientific world was revolutionized by the relativity paradigm proposed by Einstein that had much higher predictive and explanatory value. According to Kuhn ( 1970 ), when a paradigm becomes established and dominates public discourse, it becomes difficult for other systems of explanation to emerge and become institutionalized. When one paradigm replaces another, Kuhn states, a scientific revolution takes place. However, in education and the social sciences, rarely does one paradigm replace another. More typically, new paradigms compete with established ones, and they coexist. So the educational world is characterized by competing paradigms and explanations.

The educational world has experienced two significant paradigm shifts regarding family–school relations in the United States. The first paradigm shift involves a shift from educators who assume that they can operate successfully on their own in educating students despite what students experience at home, to believing that they must educate and remediate families to support the school’s efforts to educate their children. For example, the separation paradigm was depicted in the 1960s by educators and policymakers who made no provision for interaction with parents and believed that educators alone could minimize the impact of low-income conditions by offering compensatory education to remediate children from low-income families. This separation paradigm was represented in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the federal compensatory education initiative, in which the assumption was made that the school environment could “mitigate the poor or negative experiences provided by the home and compensate for the disadvantaged background of certain students” ( Swap, 1993 , p. 34). By the 1970s, however, educators and policymakers had shifted to a remediation paradigm, in which educational programs that served economically disadvantaged children were required to involve parents in their children’s education. This remediation paradigm is illustrated in the development of Head Start, a preschool program that was designed to provide economically disadvantaged children the opportunity to get a head start before entering school. An important feature of Head Start is the expectation that parents be involved and taught to work with their children ( Greenberg, 1990 ). The Education Amendments of 1978 also made explicit reference to the requirement of parent participation in programs designed for economically disadvantaged children.

We are now experiencing another paradigm shift in family–school relations as the educational world is revolutionized by the paradigm of collaboration. With this shift in thinking, school staffs embrace the idea of seeing students and their families as collaborators or partners in the effort to educate children. Instead of assuming the role of expert and believing that the school staff know best about how to fix students or families, educators are reaching out to students’ families, viewing them as co-experts and sharing power with them, and identifying together those resources that exist in the family and school for taking action to enhance children’s learning or resolve their difficulties.

Several factors have contributed to this second paradigm shift toward family–school collaboration. First, theories of child development, such as Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory ( 1979 ; 1997 ), shifted the focus from exclusively emphasizing how the family influences the child’s development to underscoring how the broader sociopolitical context influences the attitudes and resources that shape how schools and communities interact with students’ families. Hence, rather than just looking at family life, educators began to see how a child’s family, school, and community collectively influence a child’s development by means of their interactions. In addition, theorists—such as Vygotsky ( 1978 ), a Soviet psychologist who studied how children learn—revolutionized how educators think about the teaching and learning of children from low-income and culturally diverse families. A basic premise of his approach is that the teacher must recognize and use (rather than ignore or erase) a child’s existing conceptual repertoire as a bridge to learning new concepts ( McIntyre, Roseberry, & Gonzãlez, 2001 ).

Second, researchers who study what families do to support children’s learning and development have repeatedly documented the powerful influence that families have on the in-school and out-of-school socialization of children ( Weiss et al., 2003 ). For example, whether through home-based modeling, instruction, and reinforcement or school-based activities or parent–teacher communication, family influence and involvement have been repeatedly documented to be positively linked to indicators of student achievement, including teacher ratings of student competence, student grades, and achievement test scores (e.g., Epstein & Van Voorhis, 2001 ; Hill & Craft, 2003 ). Family involvement and influence have also been strongly associated with other indicators of school success, including lower rates of retention in grade, lower dropout rates, higher on-time high school graduation rates, and higher participation in advanced courses ( Barnard, 2004 ; Trusty, 1999 ). Family involvement has also been linked to important psychological processes and cognitive, social, and behavioral attributes that support student achievement, such as students’ sense of personal competence or efficacy for learning (“I can do this work”; e.g., Frome & Eccles, 1998 ); their mastery orientation ( Gonzalez, Holbein, & Quilter, 2002 ); their perceptions of personal control over school outcomes ( Glasgow, Dornbush, Troyer, Steinberg, & Ritter, 1997 ); their self-regulatory knowledge and skills (“I know how to do this work”; e.g., Brody, Flor, & Gibson, 1999 ); as well as their beliefs about the importance of education (“I want to do this work”; e.g., Sheldon & Epstein, 2002 ).

Third, federal policies for family involvement established in various laws began to link families and schools explicitly and encouraged educators to consider how school policies and practices influence their relationships with families. For example, the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 (Public Law 103–382) includes detailed parental involvement components designed to empower parents to be a part of their child’s educational program, while requiring that Title 1–funded (formerly Chapter 1 of the Education Consolidation Improvement Act of 1981) schools provide avenues for them to do so. In addition, National Education Goals 1 and 8, presented in Figure 2.1 , lay out the expectation that every child will start school ready to learn, and that every school will promote partnerships that increase parent participation in facilitating the social, emotional, and academic growth of children (National Education Goals Panel, 1999).

These ideas were further explicated in other legislation, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA; U.S. Congress, 1999 , 2004 ), the IASA Title 1 (U.S. Department of Education, 1997), and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 Title 1 and Title 3 (U.S. Department of Education, 2002), all of which underscore the pivotal role that families play in developing children’s learning habits and values. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (U.S. Congress, 1999 ) and its reauthorization ( U.S. Congress, 2004 ) require state education agencies and local education agencies to provide every student who has a disability with a free and appropriate public education. Part B of the law provides for the education of students ages 3 through 21; part C provides for the education of infants and toddlers from birth to age 3. Figure 2.2 describes the six key principles of IDEA that have contributed to an awareness of the need for more collaborative relationships between schools and families.

Figure 2.1 National Educational Goals 1 and 8

Source: From Goals 2000: Educate America Act, Public Law 103–227.

Figure 2.2 Six Key Principles of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Public Law 107–110) embodies six principles of parental involvement that empowers parents to be a part of their children’s educational and explicitly commanded Title 1-funded (formerly Chapter 1 of the Education Consolidation Improvement Act of 1981) schools to provide avenues for parents to do so. Not only does this law increase the means for parents to monitor and evaluate the academic progress of their child, but also it requires schools to inform parents about the performance of the whole school and their options if their child’s school is not making adequate yearly progress in meeting state-mandated achievement outcomes. Figure 2.3 describes NCLB’s six principles for school reform.

Figure 2.3 Six Principles of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB; Public Law 107–110)

2.3 A Typology of Family–School Paradigms

How might we make sense of these changing ideas about family–school relations? At first glance, the term family–school collaboration may be easily confused with the term parent involvement. Yet these terms represent significantly different paradigms about the nature of the family–school relationship. Whereas parent involvement depicts a one-way flow of information between schools and parents, family–school collaboration involves a two-way exchange of information ( Christenson & Sheridan, 2001 ). In addition, although parent involvement focuses on parents becoming involved in their children’s education, family–school collaboration focuses on the joint involvement of parents/caregivers and school staff in children’s education.

Let’s look more closely at how researchers depict these varying beliefs about how family–school relations should be structured. Swap ( 1993 ) describes four distinctive philosophies of family–school relations held by educators: (a) protective philosophy, (b) school-to-home transmission philosophy, (c) curriculum philosophy, and (d) partnership philosophy. Henderson, Jones, and Raimondo ( 1999 ) identify four philosophies that characterize a school’s relations with families: (a) fortress mentality, (b) “come when called” mentality, (c) “open door” mentality, and (d) partnership mentality. In contrast, Lewis and Forman ( 2002 ) identify three distinctive “narratives” about parents depicted in the conversations of school staffs: (a) in loco parentis narrative, (b) deficit narrative, and (c) relational narrative. Although each of these typologies emphasizes different aspects of family–school relations, they consistently point to the importance of two basic dimensions. The first dimension depicts variations in the structure of power relations between parents and educators (i.e., the extent to which one role participant has more social power than the other). The second dimension concerns the extent to which educators and parents view their roles and responsibilities as shared and overlapping or as specialized and separate. We have integrated the thinking of Swap ( 1993 ); Henderson, Jones, and Raimondo ( 1999 ); and Lewis and Forman ( 2002 ) into a typology of three different family–school paradigms. In the following sections, we describe each of these paradigms and identify the expectations as to the roles and responsibilities that educators, students, and parents should play; the purposes and styles of communication and decision making; the structure of power relations; and the specific practices in which educators engage.

The Separation Paradigm

Some educators believe that home and school should be separate spheres, each having separate goals and responsibilities and providing different inputs to the education and socialization of children ( Epstein, 2010 ). These educators might say, “The school’s job is to help children learn; the parents’ job is to inculcate values which prepare their children for learning and schooling. If parents have any role at all in the school sphere, it is that of encouraging children’s compliance with the school’s socializing and academic demands” ( Weiss & Edwards, 1992 , p. 219). According to Swap ( 1993 ), this philosophy is driven by three assumptions: (a) that parents delegate to the school the responsibility of educating their children, (b) that parents hold the school personnel accountable for the results, and (c) that educators accept this delegation of responsibility.

Educators who operate from this paradigm assume that parents rely on their expertise, and that direction and discussion with parents (or with students) to do their job are not needed. They believe that the teacher’s job is to provide an academic, and often social and emotional, education with very limited or no participation from students’ families. Parent involvement in decision making or problem solving is seen as an inappropriate interference with the educator’s job. Instead, educators believe that their decisions (whether about classroom instruction or individual children’s class placement) do not require negotiation and hence can be made independently of interaction with students’ families. Educators who embrace the separation mindset consider this arrangement ideal for minimizing conflict and for maintaining their professional autonomy. These educators assume that, because parents delegate children’s learning to the school, conversations with parents are necessary only when there are problems. As a result, communication between parents and educators is implicit, limited, indirect, and based on tacit agreement and presumed mutual goals.

The origin of this philosophy that home and school are separate spheres has been attributed to the school management theory that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many schools faced the challenge of inducting large numbers of children of immigrants into the American culture ( Reich, 1983 ). In this bureaucratic management theory, educators viewed their purpose as educating students to be American citizens. They saw schools as giant factories organized to educate children for their role in society on a high-volume, large-batch basis. There was often a rigid boundary constructed between the school and the home so as to reduce the cultural impact of the home and increase the school’s socializing influence in producing American citizens. Schools were managed in a top-down, hierarchical fashion, with the separate operation of each part, or component, determined by a grand design developed by the organizational layer above it. For example, teachers were individually responsible for designing and delivering to their batch of students an educational experience in a specific and separate domain whose content was determined by standards set at higher organizational levels (e.g., district and state level curriculum mandates/standards for first grade level or for eleventh grade English).

Educators who embrace this philosophy assume that interaction between educators and families is inherently conflictual and should be kept to a minimum to minimize the inherent/inevitable conflict between these two parties. This should be done primarily through the separation of parents’ and educators’ functions. Second, this clear separation of functions should also be based on the idea that schools clearly have more competence at teaching, have been delegated responsibility for teaching the child, and see families as deficient in educating their children. Thus, the role of expert is not shared. Swap ( 1993 ) labeled this mental model the protective model, because its aim is to protect the school/ teacher from conflict and interference by parents. The following teacher’s comment illustrates the expectations for desirable parent behavior held by teachers operating in this paradigm:

Parents should adhere to the rules and trust teachers to do what is right by their children. They should trust the fact that the teachers are following the program. ( Swap, 1993 , p. 29)

As a result, in this paradigm the preferred style of interaction between educators and families is a very distant and impersonal one. Events are impersonal and highly ritualized (such as the traditional open house in which educators tell parents about their program), communication is one-way (from educator to families), and opportunities for authentic dialogue (i.e., two-way communication) are greatly restricted. One of the consequences of using this philosophy is that it is generally very effective at achieving its goal of protecting teachers against parental intrusion in most circumstances. However, it assumes that teachers are familiar enough with each child’s context to be able to function effectively in place of the parent, knowing what each child needs. Unfortunately, as Swap ( 1993 ) describes, the negative consequences of operating from this paradigm are that

this approach to family–school relations often (a) exacerbates the conflicts between home and school by creating no structures or predictable opportunities for preventive problem solving, (b) ignores the potential of home–school collaboration for improving student achievement, and (c) rejects the rich resources for enrichment and school support available from families and other members of the community that could be available to the school. (p. 29)

For example, when a student experiences academic or emotional difficulties, school staff often do not call on a student’s parents until all other avenues within the school have been exhausted. When they do meet with parents, educators often delegate responsibility to the family to “fix” the child and assume that the parents will think like them regarding their child’s difficulties. Viewed this way, educators often see that the solution to children’s learning problems is to “take over the job of educating and socializing children and put it in the hands of real experts since the parents obviously are not equipped to prepare their children” ( Swap, 1993 , p. 30).

Educators who operate from this paradigm assume that working-class and poor parents generally are not capable of contributing in significant positive ways to their children’s education and development. Lewis and Forman ( 2002 ) captured the essence of this thinking in their observation: “Many urban schools have taken the posture of educating students in spite of their families rather than in concert with them” (p. 82). As a result, educators have high expectations for students, but limited or low expectations for their parents.

Evidence of this paradigm can be found in several recent reform initiatives that exhort educators to raise their expectations for the potential of their working-class and low-income students and to work to narrow the achievement gap among students of different classes and races, yet do not articulate a significant or visible role for parents in accomplishing these objectives. For example, in the popular Success for All reading initiative, parents are not mentioned in any particular area of work, but are identified only in terms of supporting them in getting their child to school or being the recipient of social or psychological resources. Although the role of parents may be evolving in this project, it would appear from the written materials that the relationship between parents and educators is one of separate spheres. As a result, the nature of family–school relations in the separation paradigm might be depicted as a tall fortress with a deep moat around it ( Figure 2.4 ).

A fortress is an appropriate illustration of this philosophy of interacting with families because not only does it depict educators structuring their roles with families so as to have a great deal of protective distance from them, but also it shows the lack of a permanent structure for interacting with them.

Figure 2.4 The Fortress Mentality of the Separation Paradigm of Family–School Relations

REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 2.1

Most school districts now require teachers to conduct back to school orientation activities. What might your back to school orientation activities look like if you adopted an approach to family–school relating that is shaped by a separation paradigm? For example, how would you structure your role and that of students’ families? Who would be involved in planning and decision making about the orientation? What would be the purpose of the orientation? What would you do (and have caregivers do) in this activity? How does the process of thinking how you would plan such a required activity reveal the advantages and disadvantages of using a separation paradigm of family–school relating?

The Remediation Paradigm

In the 1950s, educators began to recognize that the impact of family life strongly influences children’s school success, and that to succeed in educating students, educators need students’ families to support the school’s efforts. Fueled by the growing interest in looking at the social context of the developing child and the discrepancies in academic achievement observed between students from affluent and those from economically deprived backgrounds, educators began to shift their thinking from believing that they could educate children in spite of their families to believing that their efforts at educating students were undermined by the problems and pathologies of their families. Embracing the deficit view of family life promoted by social scientists and mental health professionals of that era, educators believe that some families are flawed by problems or deficiencies and that these parents must be remediated by showing them how to create environments that support their children’s school success. As a result, unlike the “hands off” philosophy depicted in the separation paradigm, educators who embrace the remediation paradigm expect to be very involved with parents in encouraging them to actively adopt and support the values and “ways of being” that have traditionally led to children’s success in school.

In the remediation paradigm, educators believe that their views of what students must learn to succeed should be dominant, that they know best. Consequently, educators who operate from this philosophy are focused on enlisting the parent to support the objectives of the school. Swap ( 1993 ), who termed this the family-to-school transmission philosophy, asserted that this paradigm is

based on the assumptions that (a) children’s achievement is fostered by a continuity of expectations between home and school, (b) educators know which values and practices outside the school contribute to school success, and (c) parents should endorse educators’ ideas regarding the importance of schooling, reinforce school expectations at home, provide conditions at home that nurture development and support school success, and ensure that the child meets minimum academic and social requirements. (p. 30)

Many current parent involvement efforts are based on this philosophy. In contrast to the separation paradigm, the remediation paradigm acknowledges that there is (and should be) a continuous interchange between the home and school, and that parents have an important role in enhancing children’s educational achievement. Epstein ( 1987 ) illustrates this viewpoint:

The evidence is clear that parental encouragement, activities, and interest at home and participation in schools and classrooms affect children’s achievements, attitudes and aspirations, even after student ability, and family socio-economic status are taken into account. Students gain in personal and academic development if their families emphasize schooling, let the children know they do, and do so continually over the school years. (p. 120)

In her early work, Epstein ( 1987 ) proposed four ways that parents might support their children’s schooling: (a) providing the basic necessities to their children, such as food, clothing, and shelter; (b) communicating with the school; (c) involving themselves at school; and (d) involving themselves in learning activities in the home. More recently, Epstein ( 2010 ) expanded this typology by proposing six types of school-related opportunities for parent involvement in their children’s learning: (a) assisting parents in child-rearing skills, (b) communicating school information to parents, (c) involving parents in school volunteer opportunities, (d) involving parents in home-based learning, (e) involving parents in school decision making, and (f) involving parents in school–community activities.

As a result of these role expectations, educators who embrace the remediation paradigm perceive that their job is to tell parents what they must do at home to support their children’s learning. Henderson, Jones, and Raimondo ( 1999 ) refer to this philosophy of family–school relations as the come when called model. Educators expect that parents will fulfill two very important roles: First, parents are expected to endorse the importance of schooling with their child, ensure that the child meets the minimum academic and behavioral requirements (e.g., attending school on time, making sure child completes homework), reinforce the educators’ expectations for desirable social and academic behavior, and follow through in changing any home conditions that educators deem necessary. Second, educators expect parents to spend enough time with their children to transfer to them what has come to be known as cultural capital—that is, the ways of being, knowing, writing, talking, and thinking that characterize those who succeed in this culture (Delpit, 2006). A minimum version of this hope/expectation is that parents will read to their children and listen to their children read to them. Ideally, by spending time with their parents, children will extend and enrich what they learn at school.

In contrast to the separation paradigm, the family remediation paradigm explicitly assumes that there should be an interchange between home and school. However, the home is to take a subordinate role to the expertise of educators. In this paradigm, the parents are assumed to have the significant responsibility of helping their children succeed within the guidelines specified by the school culture. According to Swap ( 1993 ), “The parent role includes preparing their children to begin school, encouraging them to succeed in school, and transmitting values, attitudes, and skills that characterize those who succeed” (p. 30). Students do not have an active role in the interaction between home and schools in this paradigm. The educator’s role is to define the goals, values, and programs in which parents are to participate. Neither two-way communication with parents nor student inclusion is viewed as necessary or sought out, because the goal is for the parents to understand and support the school’s objectives. Figure 2.5 illustrates the nature of the remediation paradigm of family–school relations as a drawbridge. The control of the drawbridge connecting the worlds of school is exclusively in the hands of the school staff.

This perspective is clearly depicted in the words of a teacher working in an urban school who explained her concept of desirable parent involvement:

Parents should be trained to parent, talk to their kids more—interact with children and take them places. (By desirable parent involvement, I mean) parents cooperating with homework, looking at it, reading notices, coming to school when called, taking an interest in their child’s education. ( Swap, 1993 , p. 31)

Figure 2.5 The One-Way Drawbridge of the Remediation Paradigm of Family–School Relations

In this perspective, if educators invite parents into the school, they are asking parents to support the teacher’s plan and routine, not to contribute to it. Parents may be asked to perform a myriad of tasks at the school or for the school (e.g., helping in the library, preparing food for school parties, building playgrounds, raising money, serving on advisory boards or in parent–teacher associations), but in each of these they are expected to play a subordinate role.

Many parent involvement programs now being developed in school are based on this philosophy. One advantage of the remediation paradigm of family–school relations is that parents receive a very clear message from the school about the social and academic skills that children need to succeed in school and about their role in helping their children succeed. A second advantage noted by Swap ( 1993 ) is that, because this paradigm maintains educators’ control over parent involvement, it can provide a framework for a transition from an isolating separate spheres mentality of the separation paradigm to a co-expert/collaborative paradigm. If the teacher and parents begin to develop trust and comfort with each other, it might lead to a more comfortable and mutual exchange of ideas and joint planning between adults at home and at school.

However, Swap ( 1993 ) notes some distinct hazards that are inherent in the use of this paradigm. First, because this paradigm is organized around developing the parents’ expertise, it is grounded in a mindset of perceived parental deficits. Educators often describe parents or caregivers—especially members of immigrant, low-income, or culturally diverse families—in terms of their deficiencies. For example, describing their conversations with the principal and other school staff as they prepared to set up interviews with parents in an elementary school in Northern California, Smrekar and Cohen-Vogel ( 2001 ) wrote:

These officials suggested that most of the parents in the school were lazy, irresponsible, and apathetic when it came to school involvement and that these attitudes were inextricably linked to the low performance of their children.... School officials warned that it was unsafe and unwise to enter the school neighborhood and conduct interviews at parents’ homes. Teachers warned that we would be lucky to get one-third of the initially contacted parents to participate.... Contrary to expectations of the school staff, all but one of the 15 parents we contacted were willing to participate in their interviews, and the parents welcomed us warmly and politely into their homes. (p. 85)

As a result, strategies built on this paradigm often reveal an inherent resistance to considering the parent on an equal footing with educators. For example, parents may receive a contract from the school about what the school considers are their obligations with little to no appreciation of the parents’ constraints. Workshops or activities may be designed to make parents more effective in their role, implying that parents are deficient and that educators know more than parents about how to parent.

Second, all parents may not be able to devote sufficient time and energy to the level of parent involvement expected by the educators if faced with certain life conditions that command their attention (e.g., hazardous living conditions, unstable employment, chronic illness). Moreover, parents may be asked to teach children certain skills despite the emotional and financial costs to the family and then blamed if these interventions fail. However, if educators could recognize these constraints and provide a link to resources that would address them, they might be able to build community and school programs that would be stronger safety nets for families.

Third, there is a danger of demeaning the value and importance of the family’s culture in an effort to transmit the values and culture of the school. This becomes increasingly important as we think about the growing diversity of the student body and growing homogeneity of the teaching profession. Teachers who operate from the remediation paradigm think in terms of identifying the needs or deficits of parents and develop an experience to direct/train them to be better parents. Parents are told how they are expected to carry out their role; they are expected to cooperate with educators and follow directions. Many parents do just that. Some reluctantly go along with these mandates. However, many parents resist these directives, are labeled unmotivated or resistant, and judged as minimizing their deficiencies and refusing to own up to their problems.

REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 2.2

What might your back-to-school orientation activities look like if you adopted an approach to family–school relating shaped by a remediation paradigm? For example, how would you structure your role and the roles of students’ families? Who would be involved in planning and decision making about the orientation?

What would be the purpose of the orientation? What would you do (and have caregivers do) in this activity? How does the process of thinking how you would plan such a required activity reveal the advantages and disadvantages of using a remediation paradigm of family–school relating?

The Collaboration Paradigm

In the 1980s, a third paradigm shift began to emerge in the thinking of many educators and social scientists. Educators began to realize that their own beliefs about children’s development and learning not only influence how they teach students and structure their relationships with students’ families, but that these beliefs also had a reciprocal influence on how students’ families responded to them. This realization contributed to a shift in philosophy of working jointly toward a common goal with families and sharing power.

Two theories—Bronfenbrenner’s ( 1979 ; 1997 ) ecological systems theory of child development and Vygotsky’s ( 1978 ) theory of learning and teaching—strongly influenced the development of this paradigm. According to the ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner 1979 ; 1997 ), a child’s development is influenced either directly (e.g., through daily routines and interactions that occur in the child’s immediate context) or indirectly (e.g., through more distant factors with an impact on those routines and interactions). A primary idea of ecological systems theory is that every level of the ecological system (e.g., the child’s home or classroom, the caregiver’s workplace, the family’s and school’s neighborhood) is interconnected and thus can influence all other levels of the system. Thus, persons across each system level reciprocally influence persons at other levels. For example, the way that teachers and other school staff structure their classroom routines and interactions and school routines and interactions with family members affects what happens in the child’s home, and vice versa. Moreover, larger social and economic policies and resources (considered distant from a child’s everyday experience) also influence the routines and interactions that occur in the child’s immediate contexts of the home and classroom. For example, the revision of federal welfare laws mandating the training and employment of poverty-level parents significantly affected their available time for teaching and socializing their children.

Thus, rather than focus only on how families influence their children, educators who embrace this theory began to “hold a mirror up” to examine the ways that their interactions with families may affect how families interact with them or with children. This led many researchers to examine what school staffs believe about teaching and learning and interaction with low-income/low-status families and how that influences educators’ behavior with students’ families. For example, Davies ( 1988 ) interviewed 150 teachers and administrators who worked with poor children in Boston, Massachusetts; Liverpool, England; and Portugal and who “thought of low-income/low-status families as being deficient and dwelled on family problems while ignoring family strengths” (p. 53). Interestingly, the educators’ convictions about the apathy of “hard-to-reach” parents were not supported by data from the parents. Davies ( 1988 ) found that despite teachers’ negative attitudes toward parents, parents in all three cultures expressed active interest in their child’s progress at school and in getting involved in school; they admitted that they just did not know how to get involved. Lott ( 2001 ) examined the research literature to determine whether educators held stereotypes about low-income adults that influenced their responses to poor parents. She reported that, in numerous research studies, researchers discovered that the beliefs about low-income children and adults held by many teachers and administrators are negative, discouraging, and exclusionary and are communicated to parents in myriad ways. For example, as compared to middle-class parents, low-income and working-class parents receive fewer warm welcomes in their children’s schools; their interventions and suggestions are less respected and attended to; and they are less able to influence the education of their children. Epstein’s ( 1987 ) research adds another interesting wrinkle to this discovery of the educators’ influence on parents. In her survey of 3,700 teachers in Maryland, she discovered that “Teachers who used parent involvement frequently rated all parents higher in helpfulness and follow-through with learning activities at home, including parents with more or less education and single and married parents” (p. 128).

Second, Vygtosky’s (1978) work provided an additional theoretical tool that allowed educators to recognize that many of their current instructional practices were based exclusively on transmitting middle-class funds of knowledge and ignoring the existing funds of knowledge that low-income children bring to school. Vygotsky devoted his career to studying how children learn, and describes learning as a process that involves social as well as cognitive transformations. His writings emphasize how interactions between people are central to the ways in which individual learning and development occur. He argued that children internalize the kind of help they receive from others and eventually come to use it independently to direct their own problem solving. For Vygotsky, the shift from needing help to accomplish a task to accomplishing it independently constitutes learning. Central to his theory is the belief that children learn best when parents and teachers create instructional activities that use what children already know as resources for learning new knowledge and practices.

These two theoretical traditions—Ecological System Theory and Vygotsky’s learning theory—influenced the thinking of many educators who recognized that they needed to work in a different fashion with all students’ families and, particularly, those families who were culturally and economically diverse. Envisioning that the goals of educating all children could only occur if families and community members were involved as equals, these educators proposed a fundamental restructuring of educators’ attitudes and roles. Rather than involve parents only when there was a crisis or problem to be solved or telling them how to parent their children, these educators created opportunities to collaborate with families on a regular basis.

But what exactly is collaboration? According to Merriam-Webster’s ( 1985 ) definition, collaboration means “to work jointly with others or together... to cooperate with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected” (p. 259). This definition seems simple and straightforward, yet most individuals believe collaboration is difficult to define. Seeley ( 1985 ) offers an elegantly simple definition: “Collaboration is a common effort toward a common goal by participants who share power” (p. 65). Describing how collaboration would look in a family–school context, Weiss and Edwards ( 1992 ) define it “as a cooperative process of planning and problem solving that involves school staff, parents, children, and significant others so as to maximize resources for students’ academic achievement and social–emotional development” (p. 215).

Implicit in all of these definitions is not only the recognition of common goals, but also the assumption that power—the ability and intention to use authority, influence, or control over others—and responsibility for children’s school success should be shared. For example, in a U.S. Department of Education publication, Moles ( 1993 ) proposed that family–school roles should be conceptualized as a shared responsibility and specified five distinctive roles shared by families and school personnel: co-communicators, co-supporters, co-learners, co-teachers, and co-decision-makers.

Christenson and Sheridan ( 2001 ) illustrate the specific actions that characterize each of these five co-roles. The shared role of family and school as co-communicators can be implemented as both family and school address the need to exchange information to assist children’s learning. A variety of techniques, including written, face-to-face, telephone, and formal and informal meetings, can be used to increase the shared meaning and understanding about students’ performance. The shared role of family and school as co-supporters addresses not only the needs of the partners to support the child, but also to support each other. Families can show support to children by providing positive encouragement for learning, and to schools by attending back-to-school nights and student performances. Schools can support families by being responsive to their questions and providing a welcoming climate. Teachers can support families by calling at the first sign of concern and inviting them to visit the classroom or school. The role of families and schools as co-learners entails providing opportunities for educators (e.g., administrators, teachers, support personnel) and families to learn about each other and how to work together to support student learning. For example, families may want information about school policies and practices, whereas school staff may need opportunities to learn about the cultural knowledge in the home and community so as to enhance instructional effectiveness. The shared role of family and school as co-teachers recognizes the formal teaching of students in school settings and the ways families teach, support, and encourage learning at home and in the community. Finally, the shared role of home and school as co-decision-makers, advocates, and advisors focuses on participation in formal organizations and committees.

Viewing parents and families as co-experts challenges the established ways in which power has been distributed in most schools in the past. Recall that in the separation and remediation models, educators are placed at the top of the relationship and families at the bottom. The use of hierarchies and professional dominance represents how power is distributed within these relationships. Educators (and parents) in this sense hold very narrow conceptions about the roles that parents can play in the school or in their child’s learning. More often than not, parents are relegated to the passive roles of audience members or supporters, and teachers are the isolated and overburdened experts who are expected to have all the answers.

Collaborative educators view these traditional role conceptions as unnecessarily limited. As a result, these educators are now designing family–school activities in which parents have meaningful and active roles. They are also routinely involving families in planning and decision making about their children’s educational experience. These more meaningful role expectations fit with the role that researchers report parents prefer to have with their children’s school. For example, in a major review of the research on low-income parents’ preferences for involvement with their children’s schools, Lott ( 2001 ) reports that low-income parents describe their involvement with the school as meaningful when (a) they have opportunities for informal communications with school staff and feel “invited in,” (b) they have a meaningful role in school activities other than that of consent-giver or signing of notes, (c) they can rely on teachers and administrators to bridge the gap between themselves and school staff, (d) they can sense that teachers and administrators value their role in their child’s learning, and (e) they believe that their involvement makes a difference in their child’s educational experience and can see the direct benefits of their involvement for their children.

Hence, rather than assume that families are deficient, educators who operate within the collaboration paradigm assume that families may already have their own ways of teaching their children important social and cognitive skills (such as how to set a goal or define a problem, how to set priorities for action, and how to design solutions).

Consequently, these educators believe that they share common goals and roles with parents, have a reason to work together with them, and draw the boundaries of their role with families quite differently from those who view their roles as separate or as needing to educate or remediate families. Rather than exclude families or control all communication and interactions to protect their autonomy, collaborative educators look for ways to include families to maximize resources for children’s learning. Hence, communication between educators and parents is explicit, regular, and directive. Decision making about children is based on negotiation, open communication and consensus, when group problem solving is actively promoted, and when students are included in problem solving. Lewis and Forman ( 2002 ) describe the parent conferences in an elementary school guided by such a collaborative paradigm:

Parent conferences were not viewed as a time for teachers to report to parents about a child’s academic progress, but as a way for the important adults in a child’s life to share not only academic information but also social and emotional information. Expert status was understood not as the sole purview of school staff but as something shared with and encouraged in parents.... Parents were rarely called upon to be fundraisers, bakers, or room moms. Instead, they were involved as members of a community as educational collaborators with important information about their children and as comrades in struggles related to keeping the school functioning. (pp. 77, 78)

As a result of such new ways of working, parents and students come to view themselves as co-experts with the school ( Hoover-Dempsey, Walker, Sandler, Whetsel, Green, Wilkins, & Closson, 2005 ; Lareau & Horvat, 1999 ). They see themselves as having an integral role together with the school in educating their children. Parents pride themselves on using their own home learning activities (e.g., cooking together, attending church events) to facilitate their children’s academic and social learning and to monitor their child’s progress. They expect to be informed about their child’s progress by the school, and might say, “I really need to know what is happening in school to help my child.” They also expect to be involved in decisions that the school makes concerning their children’s educational progress and to exert control over those decisions.

The collaborative paradigm of family–school relations can be contrasted with the separation and remediation paradigms in which the authority (e.g., teacher) identifies the concern or problem that merits attention, decides what type of solution is necessary, and decides how the clients (i.e., student and family) should be involved with a philosophy of “doing to” or “doing for” the client. In both the separation and remediation paradigms, educators assume unilateral or dominant roles in educational decision making and action. In contrast, in the collaborative paradigm, educators interact with students and their families to identify together those resources that exist in the family and school for taking action to solve children’s problems or to celebrate their learning. Many other differences exist between the remediation and the collaboration paradigms (see Table 2.1 ).

These differences are significant and have to do with the focus of the relationship; the roles of the educator, student, and parents/caregivers; the nature of the relationship, including the goal toward which it is directed; the nature of the activities and the expected outcome; the assumptions about the roles and responsibilities of educator, student, and parent; the purposes and styles of communication and decision making; and the structure of power relations.

TABLE 2.1 Comparison of Role Expectations and Power Relations in the Remediation and Collaboration Paradigms

Focus Diagnose and treat the academic/social problem of the student.	Foster a process of cooperative planning and problem-solving between the family and school to maximize the resources for children’s learning and socioemotional development.
Educator’s Role Expert who does “to” or “with” the family; serving as the central decision maker or problem solver.	Professional working “with,” not doing “to”; resource person who shares leadership and power with family.
Student’s Role Often is excluded from family–school interaction or has a passive role; assumed not to know their own needs.	Has active role in all family–school activities in determining own progress, problems, and solutions.
Parent/Caregiver’s Role Often passive recipient of “service/activity” that is defined by school professional.	Has active role in all family–school activities; seen as capable and competent in deciding how to contribute to student’s learning or to solving student problems.
Nature of the Relationship Distant, sometimes adversarial; frequently characterized by overt or covert blaming by each party. Roles are set: Educator is to lead; parent is to follow.	Cooperative, nonblaming atmosphere created to promote problem solving. Roles are flexible and change according to situational demands; educators and parents defer to each other in their respective domains; reciprocity is valued.
Goal To have contact between the two parties only when there is a problem to be resolved and need information from parents that would help educator solve the problem.	To design opportunities to get to know one another and establish a partnership to prepare the child for learning and success in school.
Nature of the Activities School staff communicate with parents only when they need to assess a problem and prescribe the necessary cure. Parents are expected to be compliant with the school’s decisions.	Parents and students are seen as important resources for problem solving and learning, so there is a regular communication between home and schools to routinely share information on issues of mutual concern.
Expected Outcomes Crisis or problem is resolved.	Increased family involvement in the student’s school experience; improved academic performance; fewer “insoluble” discipline problems.
Assumptions Regarding Power and Politics Schools know best what a child needs. Do not need to consider possible differences between home and school.	Adults at school and at home have different kinds of information useful in helping a child learn and succeed, which are shared openly and directly.
Contact is limited to very structured, ritualized events; each expects to be blamed or manipulated by the other.	Time is taken to build trust and engage in regular communication. Educator and caregiver share information and communicate openly about concerns, expectations for child, and so on.
Therefore, educators and caregivers adopt blaming, deficit-labeling attitude with each other, focusing on who caused the problem.	Educators and caregivers adopt a troubleshooting attitude, looking for what might solve the problem, assuming responsibility for discovering possible solutions without being blamed for causing the problem.
Emphasis is placed on protecting the autonomy of the educator by not giving caregivers too much information or control. “Either/or thinking”–either preserve autonomy or submit to control by family; either school has responsibility or home.	A shared belief that teacher autonomy and family interests are interdependent and reciprocal; both individual teacher and family interests can be met.
Problem solving is imposed by the educator.	Problem solving grows out of a consensus facilitated by the educator.
Power for others or against them.	Power with others.
Win/lose orientation.	Win/win orientation.
Differential power; aggressive educators, passive family members.	Shared power; educator does not express superiority of expertise or knowledge, views family and school as being in a reciprocal relationship, each affecting the other.
Preserving the family–school relationship is sacrificed in the service of the school’s own interests. Only do as much as other does.	Initiate and engage in behaviors to build the relationship and advance the interests of both parties.

Initiate and engage in behaviors to build the relationship and advance the interests of both parties.

Figure 2.6 illustrates the nature of family–school relations in the collaboration paradigm as a stationary bridge. Why is a bridge an appropriate illustration of the ways of interacting between educators and families? The answer lies in the purpose that the bridge serves. On one side of the bridge is the child’s life at school; on the other side of the bridge is the child’s life at home and in their community. The purpose of the bridge is to form a stable and connecting path between the worlds of home and school that students traverse each day.

The bridge denotes the quality of the home–school relationship. In a solid bridge that parents trust to have their child cross, the family–school relationship is strong, predictable, and positive. If the family–school relationship is weak, the bridge offers no predictable support to the child traversing the path between home and school. Hence, the child cannot depend on it as a trustworthy resource.

Figure 2.6 The Permanent Two-Way Bridge Depicting the Collaboration Paradigm of Family–School Relations

How are schools translating the collaborative paradigm into practice? One set of principles, developed by the staff at Ackerman Institute’s Family School Collaboration Project ( Weiss & Edwards, 1992 ) provides a clear template for changing family–school relations. Successfully tested in schools in the United States and Canada over a 15-year period, this set of principles helps school faculties successfully transform their current family–school activities to “connect the two key systems in a child’s life—the home and the school—in ways which create a shared commitment to children’s learning” ( Weiss & Edwards, 1992 , p. 215).

The first principle is that the school commits to building relationships with all parents whether or not the parents can come to school. To do this, educators must make clear to parents how their active participation in their children’s educational experience directly enhances their children’s achievement and development. In addition, the educator must look for ways to communicate a genuine interest in connecting with the parents of all of the students to ensure these outcomes. Consequently, if some parents are not able to come to the school because of work or family demands, the school staff signals their belief that these parents still care deeply about their child’s learning by providing them with the means to understand and keep up with what is happening in school (e.g., through use of summary letters describing an event they missed, regular newsletters, and homework assignments).

A second principle is that all family–school activities are planned to maximize student learning. Rather than simply trying to get parents involved, school staff use the family–school relationship to meet specific educational goals, solve problems, and celebrate the children and their achievements. Rather than be organized only around discussion of problems, the school maintains a dialogue about learning and about the school’s interest in each child. Consequently, the school staff looks for opportunities for parents, students, and staff to interact with one another in ways that emphasize family involvement in children’s planning, decision making, problem solving, and learning. To do this, the staff examines the various aspects of the school experience (e.g., curriculum, administrative and communication procedures, special programs, after-school activities, assessment and evaluation programs, health programs) to design opportunities for families and school staff to experience each other differently.

In keeping with this emphasis on maximizing student learning, the third principle is that the child is included as an active participant in virtually all family–school interactions. To do this, children of all ages are taught to function as active participants in family–teacher (i.e., the old parent–teacher) conferences. Because it is their life at school that is to be discussed, they come to such meetings as “experts on themselves” who must be there to describe their own experience, thoughts, and feelings. As the children contribute to the solution of their problems and the improvement of their own school experience, they gain confidence and a sense of efficacy. Family–school interactions that involve the children are embedded in orientations, classroom instruction, homework routines, celebrations, presentations of new curriculum, transitions to new grade levels and programs, procedures for home–school communication, and for resolving difficulties.

A fourth principle is that parents should be actively involved in all family–school events, not as an audience, but as full participants. Rather than unnecessarily restrict the role that parents can play to that of classroom volunteer, instructional support person, or audience member, family–school events are designed to underscore the role of parents as active co-decision-makers and illustrate the belief that everyone—parents, teachers, and students—has a job to do to ensure the students’ educational success. Reflective Exercise 2.3 provides an illustration of one parent’s account of how a routine school orientation was redesigned with these collaborative principles in mind.

REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 2.3 A Parent’s View of a “Collaborative” Fall Orientation

Read the following parent’s reaction to a fall orientation designed in terms of the collaborative principles and then contrast how this orientation compared with the previous two orientations that you planned.

• Discuss how the role of the teacher and the care-giver and student were structured, what you think was the purpose of the orientation, and how activities were planned to meet this purpose.

• How does this example of a back-to-school orientation reveal the advantages and disadvantages of using a collaboration paradigm of family–school relating?

Dear Sis,

Do I have news for you! After years of dutifully attending school “open house” events at Tim and Stephen’s schools, I thought I had them all figured out. Was I ever surprised by the back-to-school night put on by Stephen’s teacher and school! I had expected for this fall orientation to be like every other one I had attended. I would sit in a large auditorium, listen to a parade of speakers talk to a huge audience of parents and a few wiggly children (whose parents had not been able to get baby-sitters), and then “race” to each teacher’s classroom in which I had a child. My purpose for going was to, at least, show my face and let these teachers know that I was interested in meeting them.

This orientation night was far different. First, Stephen was invited to come with me (as a matter of fact, he invited me to accompany him to the orientation). Second, Stephen and I spent the evening just with his teacher, classmates, and their parents. (The school had organized a schedule in which the grade levels met on different evenings so that parents would not feel rushed to get to every child’s room in the same evening!) Third, his teacher had organized an activity in which, after greeting us and giving us a preview of the evening’s activities, she asked each parent and child to talk together privately for a few minutes about what their goals were for the student’s learning this year and what the parent might do to help their child accomplish these goals. After Stephen and I talked, we had a chance to share our ideas and to hear the ideas of his classmates and their parents. The teacher listed all these ideas up on the board and then talked about how our ideas fit with her goals and plans for the year. It was obvious, when all those ideas got written on the board, that we shared many of the same goals and concerns about the new school year!

Not only was this activity useful for showing us as parents what we have in common, but also it provided me with an experience interacting with my child at school, which I had never had before. Usually, parents expect to come to these types of events and be quiet and listen; if a parent has to bring his or her child (due to not getting baby-sitting), the parent is expected to be quiet and entertain the child. This time it was different; we were asked to talk with each other during a school event. I was surprised by how seriously Stephen took what I had to say to heart about him doing his homework without me having to nag him to get down to work. (Of course, we’ll have to see just how much he follows through on this!) I think that he liked being treated and talked to as a grown-up. I certainly liked my opinion being asked for too!

More important, this activity gave me an opportunity to see up close how Stephen’s teacher relates to him and to the other children. It is obvious that she cares about each one of them. It showed in the way she solicited their participation in the discussion and took their answers seriously. So, I’m relieved that he’s got such a caring teacher. What’s more, I’m amazed that with just this one orientation night, I’ve gotten a very different view of what this year may have in store for me as well as for Stephen!

Love,

Anne

Another major effort to create more collaborative partnerships between schools and families is Comer’s School Development Program (SDP). Created by James Comer ( 1980 ; 1991 ; Comer & Haynes, 1996 ; Comer, Haynes, Joyner, & Ben-Avie, 2004 ), this program illustrates how some schools are changing their social psychological climate so as to be more inviting to low-income and culturally diverse families. Comer and Haynes ( 1991 ) developed an approach in which teachers, administrators, and other school personnel make decisions about the school. Parents also participate in this decision-making process. The goal of this process is “the creation of a sense of community and direction for parents, school staff, and students alike” ( Comer, 1991 , p. 271). A recent description about the Comer process emphasizes the importance of all adults working together to improve the schools:

The key to the Comer process is that schools must make adjustments to bring all adults in the community together in a supportive way—to create an ethos, tone, feeling—that is supportive of children.... An additional key aspect of the Comer process is the inclusion of parents in all levels of school activities: SPMT, volunteers, conferencing, “make and takes,” PTA, PTO, special programs, subcommittee, etc. Parents are truly welcome and home–school relationships are fostered. ( Comer, 2004 , p. 45)

The SDP is designed for whole-school implementation, with the goal of improving the ecology of the school by improving the school governance system, the functioning of the mental health team, and the development of a parent program that allows parental participation in school governance and school activities. Started in New Haven, Connecticut, Comer’s program is now being implemented in a number of other U.S. cities. (We describe this program in more detail in Chapter 7 .)

These types of collaborative interactions transform the way families and schools experience each other. As parents learn they can make a difference in their child’s learning, they invest in school. As staff learns to build on the strengths of children and families and to block blaming from undermining the collaborative process, they create a shared vested interest in the child that brings the family and school closer together. When each person feels known, understood, and cared about by the other parties, a sense of community and common purpose unites the classroom and school with the families of school-age children.

2.4 Implications for Your Professional Practice

As in any change effort, it is important to recognize that personal change does not happen overnight. Instead, for change to be lasting, we often go through a series of stages. The first stage is that of recognizing an area of your life in which you wish to change, while a second stage consists of assessing where you are, where you want to be, and what will be the costs and benefits of getting from where you are to where you want to be. A third stage emphasizes preparing yourself for the change effort by getting concrete ideas about how you might change, whereas the fourth stage involves trying out these ideas, gathering feedback to learn how they work, and then deciding what to modify or continue doing.

Where are you now in your thinking about family–school relating? A growing body of research on pre-service teachers reveals that most teachers in training embrace a traditional way of thinking about family–school roles that has, in all likelihood, been shaped by their own early experiences of education. For example, Graue and Brown ( 2003 ) interviewed teachers in training and report that most expected to assume an “expert” role with parents rather than a collaborative one, and viewed the ideal parent as someone who “knows her place, who is supportive but recognizes that she does not have the professional knowledge held by the teacher and thus does not have knowledge that counts in educational decision making” (p. 727). Moreover, the pre-service teachers in their study expected their interactions with students’ caregivers would consist of families responding to the teachers’ needs rather than the other way around.

We strongly believe that one can only change their preferred ideas for family–school relating when one can imagine different possibilities for how family–teacher relationships might be structured. We hope that by introducing you to the distinctive paradigms of family–school relationships that are dominant in the field, you can gain a clearer picture of both where you are now in terms of your current thinking and where you might want to go or change in terms of how you structure your relationships with the caregivers/families of your students. At this point, you may be tempted first to look outward at what you see and hear as the expectations for how parents and educators should relate in your professional training context or in the schools with which you are familiar. However, we believe it is critical first to look inward to consider which paradigm is most prominent in your thinking about your relationships with students and their families. What do you notice in your own thinking about the kinds of relationships and style of contact you expect to have with the parents/ caregivers of your students? Use Reflective Exercise 2.4 for questions to guide you in this self-assessment process.

REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 2.4 Assessing Your Current Thinking about Family–School Relations

What do you notice in your own thinking about the style of contact and the decision-making power you expect to have with the parents/caregivers of your students? How do you envision interactions with your students’ families?

For example, under what circumstances would you prefer parents/caregivers to contact you or visit your classroom?

Who do you think has the necessary knowledge and expertise to determine what and how to plan students’ learning experiences?

Who should have the decision-making power in planning what is learned or in resolving your students’ academic and behavioral difficulties?

What do these answers reveal about the paradigm which is most prominent in your thinking about the relationships you expect to have with your students’ families/caregivers?

As you think back on your first exercise in Chapter 1 in which we asked you to describe your future vision of yourself teaching, which of the three mental models/paradigms seems to most closely reflect the thinking about relationships with families that you depicted in your vision?

Where did your expectations and paradigm preferences come from?

What types of family–school paradigm did you see modeled by teachers during your schooling?

What type of paradigm do you think your parents and grandparents experienced in their schooling?

How did your parents’ interactions with your teachers influence the development of your current mental model/paradigm of family–school relations?

Given that our first paradigms are very influential, what evidence or experience would you need to decide to shift your mental model/paradigm?

What do you think would be the hardest shift for you? Why would this be the hardest shift for you?

Once you have some clarity about your own paradigm, you may want to listen to the language and observe the everyday interactions of educators in your training program or at the schools in which you work to discern in which paradigm(s) they seem to be operating. To assist you in this task, consider the following questions:

■ What language is used by the professors in your training program or by the principals and teachers in the schools you visit or work in when they talk about parents? Does their language reflect high or low expectations for parents’ positive influence on their children’s academic success?

■ Are there different expectations for parents marginalized by poverty or language differences?

■ Is an adversarial or a collaborative style of interaction anticipated in contacts with parents?

■ What kinds of implicit and explicit cues do educators give parents about their “proper” role in the school? Do they expect parents to be passive recipients of knowledge from them, the “experts,” or do they expect parents to have knowledge about their children and their children’s worlds that would facilitate the learning process?

■ Do the staff expect that they alone define the priorities of the school, or do they expect parents to help define the priorities and issues the school needs to address to improve?

■ Do teachers and other staff members regularly collaborate by making joint decisions and plans, or do they operate separately from one another?

■ Are there times and places during the workday where school staff talk with each other about their hopes and concerns for the school as a whole as well as for their classrooms? Is there time for conversation with parents not only about their children but also about the school as a whole?

Obviously, the paradigm shift from separation or remediation to one of collaboration represents a change in power dynamics between parents and educators. The usual power arrangement in most public schools (particularly those that serve the urban poor) excludes parents from knowledge about the school’s functioning and from important decision making about their children, much less about the school as a whole. As a result, educators may have strong reactions to requests to treat parents as co-experts on their children. Instead, some teachers view parents as needing instruction or guidance in parenting and believe that their role as teachers is to provide expert guidance or advice. Other teachers will view their role with parents as an expert/advice-giving role and see it as an additional burden to an already over-demanding instructional role with students. Still others who view that their role should be a parent educator or advice-giver feel inadequately prepared to function as parenting experts with parents and thus avoid interaction with them. (See Reflective Exercise 2.5 for samples of the varying attitudes and styles that teachers may demonstrate as they interact with their students’ families.)

REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 2.5 Assessing Other Educators’ Attitudes Toward Students’ Families

What do you notice in the thinking of the school staff discussed here about the kinds of relationships and style of contact they expect to have with their students’ parents or caregivers? Given the paradigm they are operating under, what could you expect from this teacher if you were a parent of a student in their class?

TEACHER 1:	Why should I worry about making connections with my students’ parents? It’s not my responsibility to teach parents how to raise their children or help them figure out how to help their child. They need to learn how to raise their children on their own. I think we do too much for parents as it is, like providing public housing and welfare for many of these parents. How will parents learn to be responsible, with us doing for them every step of the way? My parents raised four children without any teacher working with them and telling them how to do it.
TEACHER 2:	I’ve been teaching elementary students for twelve years now, and believe me, the majority of parents don’t seem to care. I’ve knocked myself out planning meetings to teach them the things they should do with their children. Most of them never show up, and those who do, don’t change. You tell them what they should do and they keep on doing what they were doing before. I find myself saying, “Why bother? I have better things to do with my time!”
TEACHER 3:	I already spend a lot of my free time trying to figure out how to teach my students and run my classroom. Now you want me to think up things to do with parents. I have enough to do as it is. Besides, I wasn’t trained to work with parents. I am really much more comfortable working with children than talking with their parents. I don’t know what I would tell parents to do, and I’m not sure what I have to offer them. What’s more, I don’t want parents asking a lot of questions about what I am doing or why I am doing it.
TEACHER 4:	I have discovered that if I ask parents, they can give me a real head start in getting to know their children. I used to think that I was the one who had to “have it all together” and that I shouldn’t contact them until I could show them that I knew their child and knew what to do to help their child. But I am learning that parents and families can teach me a lot, not only about their particular children, but they can also help me be more effective in solving children’s problems and making my teaching more relevant.
TEACHER 5:	Over the years, I have come to realize that I not only depend on students’ families to deliver their children to school, fed and cared for, but also I depend on them to help their children want to learn and succeed in school. So I now think of them as vital working partners in my job of educating children. Without them, I can’t succeed.

Once you develop a sense of your current mental model/paradigm, you can decide whether and how you might want to work toward changing both your beliefs and your professional practice. Obviously, having concrete examples of different ways of relating to parents and students and recognizing that acquiring new ways of thinking and working take time, persistence, and the cooperation of others are important resources in this change effort. Often, however, there is a need to discover how this change in thinking might benefit them personally. In the following vignette, two students describe the “aha” paradigm-shifting moments they experienced in discovering the personal benefit that resulted from thinking about how they might relate differently to the families of their students.

It was only when I started to look at how I expected to make all the decisions about what my students needed and how I expected to teach them that I realized how limiting was my thinking about parent knowledge. When I began to consider that I will probably teach children who have very different life experiences from mine, and that I never expected to consult with parents or consider any real input from parents in planning how I would teach their children, I realized that I had overlooked a very important resource for my learning that could make my job a lot easier!

As a young teacher who wasn’t married and had no children of her own, I was really anxious about interacting with parents, and was afraid that they would not see me as competent. So I was planning to keep them at a distance and call on them only when I had tried everything else to handle their children’s difficulties. Yet the idea of “building a relationship with them before I needed it” by conveying that I cared for them like I cared for their children has helped me get past the fear I had about interacting with them.

In the following chapters, you will see a chronology of other stories by educators who decided to change their ways of working with students and their families and made the change. In each of these stories, you will hear showcased the thoughts and feelings of the educators as they experimented with making these changes, their specific changes in practice, and the thoughts and reactions of parents and students as they experienced these different ways of working.

Summary

In this chapter, we described a typology of mental models/paradigms of family–school relationships that can provide a framework that can be used to reflect on the nature of your own beliefs as well as to locate in which paradigm other educators operate. Two out of the three paradigms—the separation/separate spheres paradigm and the remediation paradigm—locate parents in more limited and passive roles, whereas the other—the collaboration paradigm—offers opportunities for both parents and educators to take on active roles in which all parties can bring their knowledge and strengths to improving students’ academic achievement and social and emotional competence. We end this chapter with a discussion of the change process you may experience as you experiment with ways of thinking and working with families that may be new to you.

Activities and Questions

1. Imagine that you have been asked to create an advertisement to “sell” one of the three family–school relationship paradigms to a group of parents and community members. Develop a specific advertisement and accompanying jingle to sell this audience on the benefits of this approach to family–school relating.

2. What impact do our lived experiences have on the development of our thinking about family–school relating? What types of experiences should we create for ourselves to develop more comfort with the collaboration paradigm?

3. Discuss three assumptions about family–school relating that undergird the separation paradigm, then do the same for the remediation paradigm.

4. Describe some benefits of relating to families using the collaboration paradigm.

Resources

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) U.S. Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue SW Washington, DC 20202 Phone 800-USA-LEARN (1-800-872-5327) www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml

Provides information on NCLB’s key principles. It also has a teacher’s toolkit and parents’ guide as well as opportunities to sign up to receive email updates.

National Head Start Association

1651 Prince Street Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone: 703-739-0875 www.nhsa.org

Comer School Development Program (SDP)

55 College Street New Haven, CT 06510 Phone: 203-737-1020 www.info.med.yale.edu/comer