Archived: Bringing Schools and Communities Together in Preparation for the 21st Century: Implications of the Current Educational Reform Movement for Family and Community Involvement Policies

A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

Systemic Reform: Perspectives on Personalizing Education - September 1994

Policy Recommendations

As the above discussion makes clear, current efforts to reform schooling force us to reconsider both the basic structures and routines of the school and the traditional relationships between the home, community, and schools. Thus, the first set of recommendations to policymakers and practitioners alike concerns the need to reconceptualize "parent involvement," so that:

Parent involvement comes to mean parent, family, neighborhood, and community involvement. Those with stakes in local schools go beyond the immediate guardians of a school's student body.
Family and community involvement is no longer seen as "us against them," with the community as the outsider fighting against the professional school staff, or the staff trying to protect the school from the community. Rather, we need to consider families, communities, and professional staff as members of the same team working toward the same general purposes.
Family and community involvement involves a wide range of activities, necessarily going beyond support for learning in the home.
There is no "correct" form of family and community involvement. Participation will naturally vary from place to place; such variation should be respected.

Working from these basic premises, we can develop a set of more specific recommendations regarding state, district, and federal policies to support family and community involvement. Policymakers should:

Provide schools significant flexibility. Policymakers should avoid overly prescriptive requirements--for example, defining the specific areas parents have to be involved in and outlining how many times a certain activity has to take place.
Develop policies within the context of a broader reform agenda. Family and community involvement should not be viewed as a project to be accomplished or a program to be implemented, nor should it be considered as separate from more sweeping attempts to change schools. One clear lesson of the research on educational change over the past few years is that shifts in the relationship between the home and school form an integral part of shifts in instruction, governance policies, and accountability mechanisms. So, for example, we should not think restructuring leads to changes in parent involvement, nor do changes in parent involvement lead to restructuring. Rather, restructuring involves changes in all structures and relationships, including those involving the community.
Utilize the power of the bully pulpit. Changing schools from the bottom up and creating new relationship between schools and their communities are extremely difficult tasks. Educators need to be convinced that such changes are essential; the public needs to be convinced of the importance of supporting these changes. High-level leaders (federal and state policymakers, district superintendents and school board members) can exercise significant influence by identifying themselves with the needed changes, "selling" them, and building the necessary political coalitions.
Assist schools to develop the capacity to involve families and communities. Asking school staff and community members to assume new roles vis-a-vis one another requires skills that many do not possess. One of the most effective roles played by higher-level policymakers is helping locals develop their own capacity to create these new relationships. Such capacity building involves the provision of staff and parent development, the dissemination of effective models, and expenditure of the funds necessary to release school staff from other responsibilities and to reimburse some community members for their time.
Give policies enough time to work. Again, the tasks we are expecting schools and communities to accomplish are formidable ones. One clear mistake policymakers have made in the past is to expect change to happen quickly and then to shift policy in midcourse before schools have had time to really change.
Include policies that provide the community a decisionmaking voice at the school site. As districts and states provide schools more authority over key instructional, budgetary, and personnel decisions, parent and community members have to be given a voice in that process.
Hold schools accountable to their communities. Schools must be accountable to their immediate constituents. Policymakers need to ensure that families and communities are kept informed of the progress of their schools and that, after a certain period of time, parents should be provided a no-cost option of choosing other schools if their current schools are not working.

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[The Current School Reform Agenda: Creating New Relationships with Families, Parents, and Communities]

[Recommendations for Further Research]