Equitable Family & Student EngagementHugh Davis, Executive Director, Wisconsin Family Ties There is no better way to ensure student success than to meet families where they are through equitable family engagement. Equitable family engagement encourages specific practices or approaches that reflect the values of families and intentionally prioritizes their voices in system planning, design, and operation. Equitable family and student engagement should include a special focus on families of students with disabilities, as well as families of color, immigrant, or refugee families whose success and opportunities have been historically predicted by race, ability, language, or economic status. The Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships, developed by Karen Mapp and Eyal Bergman, supports the development of family engagement strategies, policies, and programs. As the Dual Capacity-Building Framework shows, equitable family engagement is an essential component of a thriving school. Research has shown that consistent, comprehensive, and sustained outreach programs to families and communities is associated with many positive outcomes, such as: ● increased student achievement,
● credit completion,
● better attendance,
● higher graduation rates, and
● decreased incidence of discipline (Catsambis and Beveridge 2001; Child Trends 2013; Hill and Taylor 2004).
Despite the positive outcomes, many schools and families have struggled to build trusting and effective partnerships. Based on a school’s particular context, the Dual Capacity-Building Framework provides a compass, laying out the goals and conditions for schools to chart a path to engage families in ways that lead to student achievement and school improvement. The framework begins with recognizing the challenges that both families and schools face, (e.g., understanding dual capacity) and is vital towards understanding the obstacles that exist to forming healthy family-school relationships and partnerships. For example, educators experience challenges, such as lack of or inadequate training, while families with negative past experiences with schools or education find it challenging to initiate beneficial partnerships. In addition to recognizing the challenges, identifying essential conditions for family-school partnerships are a necessary part of the Dual Capacity-Building Framework. The essential conditions provide ways in which families, students, and educators can create strong partnerships. This includes both process and organizational conditions. Process conditions are those that focus on collaboration, assets, and linking to learning, while organizational conditions ensure systemic application by leadership and embedded family engagement throughout a school’s system. The Dual Capacity-Building Framework also outlines the 4Cs that focus on essential areas to build capacity of families and educators. The 4Cs encompass “capabilities”, “connections”, “cognition” (e.g., beliefs and values), and “confidence”. Focusing on the 4Cs with families and educators helps to build the confidence level towards initiating interactions and connections and expanding the capacity for networking with others to sustain healthy partnerships. Capabilities include the human capital, skills, and knowledge needed by school staff and families. School staff need cultural competency and an understanding of the strengths and assets of the communities in which they work. Families need access to knowledge about how their schools work and how to best advocate for their students. Connections include “important relationships and networks: staff and families need access to social capital through strong, cross-cultural networks built on trust and respect. These networks should include family–teacher relationships, parent–parent relationships, and connections with community agencies and services” (Dual Capacity n.d.). Schools and districts must prioritize joining existing family-centered coalitions or forming and co-designing new, strategic partnerships to draw on the resources of a wide range of community stakeholders. A key facet to this is acknowledging both real and perceived power differentials and working with them (Mapp and Bergman 2021). Cognition includes the assumptions, beliefs, and worldviews that school staff and families have related to education and their role in it. School staff need to value and commit to building strong partnerships with families, and families need to view themselves as partners with multiple roles in their student’s education. Confidence is the fourth and final capacity growth area and consists of “individual level of self-efficacy: staff and families need a sense of comfort and self-efficacy related to engaging in partnership activities and working across lines of cultural difference” (Dual Capacity n.d.). This is the belief that one’s actions can impact a situation’s outcome. School staff and families need to feel some comfort and efficacy in partnering with others, especially across cultural lines. Schools can drive school-wide adoption of the Dual Capacity-Building Framework through the employer-employee relationship. But how do we engage families in the process, especially if they have had negative past experiences with schools and educators? WI PLAN The WI PLAN family engagement model developed by Wisconsin Family Ties is one proven answer. The WI PLAN – Welcoming, Inviting, Perspective shifting, Listening, Accepting, Never giving up – is a research-based, six-element foundation for engaging families. It is unique in that it does not depend on the family doing something. Instead, engagement activities are entirely within the control of the person or organization seeking to engage a family. This approach is consistent with William Glasser’s Choice Theory, which is based on the simple premise that “every individual only has the power to control themselves and has limited power to control others.” It is essential since, as Mapp and Bergman note in the Dual Capacity-Building Framework, “families may feel disrespected, unheard, and unvalued.” On the surface, the WI PLAN may seem like common sense. It is; just intensely applied. Some may even think, “I already do this.” You probably do, with the students and families you find easy to like. The crucial matter is whether we can engage families whose values, choices, and lifestyle differ from ours. This is where the WI PLAN can help us focus on actions rather than feelings. The WI PLAN fosters a deliberate approach to how we think about families, seek to understand them, and interact with them. Improved engagement of families holds the promise of better student attendance, behavior, and academic success (Henderson and Mapp 2002), improved parental perception of the school, and increased support for the school in the community (Henderson et al. 1994). The Dual Capacity-Building Framework coupled with the WI PLAN provides a sound foundation for realizing meaningful family engagement imagined by former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: “My vision for family engagement is ambitious… I want to have too many parents demanding excellence in their schools. I want all parents to be real partners in education with their children’s teachers, from cradle to career. In this partnership, students and parents should feel connected—and teachers should feel supported.” References Catsambis, Sophia and Andrew A. Beveridge. 2001. “Does Neighborhood Matter? Family, Neighborhood, and School Influences on Eighth-Grade Mathematics Achievement.” Sociological Focus 34: 435 - 457. Child Trends. 2013. “Parental Involvement in Schools.”https://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=parental-involvement-in-schools. Dual Capacity. n.d. “The Dual Capacity-building Framework for Family-School Partnerships: Policy and Goals.” Accessed December, 2021.https://www.dualcapacity.org/framework-in-depth/policy-and-program-goals. Henderson, A., and Mapp, K. L. 2002. “A new wave of evidence: The impact of school, family, and community connections on student achievement.” Austin, TX: Southeast Educational Development Laboratory. Henderson, A. T., Berla, N., and the National Committee for Citizens in Education. 1994. “A new generation of evidence: The family is critical to student achievement.” Columbia, Md.: National Committee for Citizens in Education. Hill, Nancy and Lorraine Taylor. 2004. “Parental School Involvement and Children's Academic Achievement: Pragmatics and Issues.” Current Directions in Psychological Science. 13. 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00298.x. Karen L. Mapp and Eyal Bergman. 2021. “Embracing a New Normal: Toward a More Liberatory Approach to Family Engagement.”https://media.carnegie.org/filer_public/f6/04/f604e672-1d4b-4dc3-903d-3b619a00cd01/fe_report_fin.pdf. Additional Web Resources Wisconsin Statewide Parent Educator Initiative (WSPEI) Wisconsin DPI Special Education Team Family Support and Advocacy Organizations Wisconsin DPI Teaching and Learning Family Engagement webpage Wisconsin DPI Engaging with Families webpage Wisconsin DPI Special Education Family Engagement webpage Wisconsin DPI Trauma Sensitive Schools Modules: Engaging Parents as Partners Wisconsin DPI CCR IEP Family and School Engagement webpage Wisconsin DPI Promoting Excellence for All Family Engagement webpage |