America's Promise Alliance

Overview and 3A Framework

America’s Promise Alliance and the Annie E. Casey Foundation are focusing on the need to bring stronger parent voice into the dropout prevention discussion. Parents and caregivers --arguably the most important stakeholders in a child’s educational success -- must be engaged.  This toolkit is intended to provide a set of resources to effectively reach out to parents, solicit their perspectives and engage them in the development of strategies that will lead to educational success for their children.

This section presents an overview of the issue of engaging parents in preventing school dropout and a framework for effectively engaging parents in the 3A Framework: Attendance Every Day, Achievement Every Year, Attainment Over Time. 

View and Download Materials:

• Chart of issues to consider at key transition points in a student’s academic career 
• Examples of promising practices across key stakeholders in a child’s educational success 
• Parent Engagement and 3A Framework PowerPoint Presentation 
• Attendance Every Day Handout
  (Attendance Every Day Handout Spanish version)
• Achievement Every Year Handout
  (Achievement Every Year Handout Spanish version)
• Attainment Over Time Handout
  (Attainment Over Time Handout Spanish version)

 

Background

The vision of the America’s Promise Alliance and its partnership with the Annie E. Casey Foundation is that all young people will graduate from school with the knowledge and skills they need for adult success. The economic and social well-being of our country depends upon our ability to nurture a next generation equipped to succeed in an increasingly global economy. Research shows, however, that many young people, especially students of color living in urban areas, are not being served well by our schools and communities.

Every 26 seconds, a student drops out of high school in America. That adds up to more than 1.3 million students per year. Young people who are low-income, children of single parents, or minorities are disproportionately affected. Nearly one-half of all African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans in public school do not graduate with their class. Future prospects are dim for young people who do not complete high school. When students drop out, all of us pay. The five year price tag for dropouts is estimated at $1.5 trillion given costs of incarceration, needed social supports and lost earnings for lack of a high school diploma.

Despite these dire statistics, dropping out is not inevitable but preventable. According to The Silent Epidemic[1], most dropouts are students who, before leaving school, had career aspirations beyond high school and the majority had grades of C or better. While the circumstances surrounding each student’s decision to leave school is unique, the work of Bob Balfanz suggests there are four broad classes of reasons for students dropping out including:

1. Life Events - Students drop out because something outside of school happens to them (e.g., become pregnant, get arrested or have to go to work to help support their family)
2. Fade Outs - Students stop attending school out of boredom, frustration or general lack of motivation to continue although they have achieved at grade level or even above.
3. Push Outs - Students are encouraged by school staff to withdraw or transfer or are dropped from the rolls because they are perceived to be difficult, dangerous or detrimental.
4. Failing to Succeed - Students do not succeed academically and attend schools that fail to provide them with the environments and supports they need to achieve. “For some, initial failure is the result of poor academic preparation, for others it is rooted in unmet social-emotional needs. Few students drop out after their initial experience with school failure. In fact, most persist for years, only dropping out after they fall so far behind that success seems impossible or they are worn down by repeated failure.[2]”

Generally, dropping out of school does not occur over night but is a gradual process of disengagement that can be interrupted when communities, schools and families work together to identify when and why their young people do not succeed in school and to ensure young people, especially those most at risk, receive the supports they need. Supporting student success needs to be viewed as a common enterprise involving educators, parents, communities and students themselves. Each has a stake and a role in the process recognizing that roles may evolve as key milestones are reached along the way (e.g., entry to kindergarten, transition to middle school, transition to high school).

Committed to improving the outcomes for all young people, the America’s Promise Alliance’s top priority is to reverse the dropout crisis and see that all young people graduate high school ready for college and work.  The Alliance is supporting 105 state and local Dropout Prevention Summits across the country in the next two years. These summits will increase awareness, encourage collaboration and facilitate action in those states and communities that want to improve their graduation rates.

Key Concepts for Parent Engagement

Parents are a key ingredient of any dropout prevention strategy. As each child’s first and arguably, lifelong teacher, a parent (broadly defined to refer to whoever is a child’s primary caregiver) is well positioned to provide a child with the on-going support and supervision he or she needs to be successful in school.  Whether or not children get on the path to high school graduation in the first place and stay on track throughout their school career is significantly influenced by the extent to which parents are able to support them in their educational endeavors.

A. Why Does Parent Engagement in Schools Matter?

A New Wave of Evidence [3]by Ann Henderson and Karen Mapp describes how, no matter what their family income or background may be, students with involved parents are more likely to:

• Earn higher grades and test scores.
• Be promoted, pass their classes, and earn credits.
• Attend school regularly.
• Have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school.
• Graduate and go on to postsecondary education.

B. What Does Parent Engagement in Schools Look Like?

Parent involvement in children’s education can take multiple forms. According to Joyce Epstein at The Johns Hopkins University, schools can foster parent engagement across a number of realms:

1. Parenting - helping all families establish supportive home environments for children:
2. Communicating – establishing two-way exchanges about school programs and children’s progress
3. Volunteering – restructuring and organizing parent help at school, home or other locations
4. Learning at home – providing information and ideas to families about how to help students with homework and other curriculum-related materials
5. Decision making – having families serve as representatives and leaders on school committees.[4]  

Such a broad spectrum of engagement is also reflected in the Standards for Family School Partnerships recently adopted by the national PTA. [5] Offering a wide variety of opportunities helps make it possible for parents from a range of backgrounds and with varying levels of availability (given work schedules) to participate, especially when outreach to families occurs in their home languages and by staff familiar with their cultural norms

Like dropping out, however, parent engagement is not a single event but a process that evolves over time.  Kathleen Hoover-Dempsey and her colleagues[6] have identified three factors in determining parent involvement. The first is whether parents believe they should play an active role in their children’s education and have a positive sense of self efficacy for helping their children learn.  The second is whether the school welcomes and invites their involvement.  The third is whether parents’ life context (socioeconomic situation, knowledge, skills, time and skills) supports involvement.

While parent engagement is essential for all children, it does not always happen. Parent engagement is generally highest among middle class parents who feel they should be actively involved and are much more likely to believe they can make a difference especially since most were themselves successful in school. By contrast, lower-income parents, especially from communities of color, may be reluctant to be involved because they feel alienated by barriers of poverty, language, cultural differences and racism. Parents who are themselves dropouts may feel especially estranged because of their own negative experiences in school. Engaging all families is possible, however, when schools deliberately undertake strategies that demonstrate they respect and value all children and their parents, especially those who have been most marginalized.  It often requires helping teachers, who may come from a different class, ethnic and linguistic background, to develop personal and trusting relationships with parents across differences and build upon the practices of the home to support learning in the classroom.  

To be most effective, activities which bridge the gap between parents and educators should happen when children first enter preschool or kindergarten, since it helps lay the foundation for later parent involvement by helping parents gain the confidence and the skills to continue to be involved. Engaging parents in high school is much more difficult if parents felt alienated and patronized by educators when their children were younger. On the other hand, even when parents were effectively engaged in elementary school, support for parent involvement frequently falls off dramatically as children get older. Too often, middle and especially high school teachers, for example, only contact parents to discuss disciplinary problems rather than meet regularly with parents to ensure their child is thriving and learning in school. Among the dropouts surveyed for The Silent Epidemic, nearly two-thirds indicated that their parents only became heavily involved in their education once it was clear they were on the verge of dropping out. 

C. What  Can Parents Do Specifically To Prevent Their Children From Dropping Out?  Proposing the Three As: Attendance, Achievement and Attainment.

While parent engagement, broadly defined, has tremendous value in terms of supporting the well-being of an entire school community, for the purposes of preventing school dropout, we propose specifically focusing engagement on three key concepts:

1. Attendance Every Day : Ensure children go to school regularly
2. Achievement Every Year :  Monitor and help children make satisfactory progress each year
3. Attainment Over Time : Set high expectations for children and plan for attaining their long-term goals

These three priorities were identified because each one is clearly critical to student success throughout a child’s academic career. Each one is heavily influenced by the actions and thinking of parents as well as educators, community-based providers and students themselves. 

Our hope is that the priorities of Attendance, Achievement and Attainment offer a complementary focus easily integrated into an overall approach (for example, through Grad Nation) for advancing dropout prevention.  We also recognize that, in some cases, localities may find they need to tailor or adapt this framework of the 3As to their own local realities and existing communications with parents. 

We have created the following charts to stimulate your thinking about how a focus on the 3As could be implemented. We start with a chart highlighting issues to consider as students reach key transition points (entry to school, transition to middle school and transition to high school.) These transition times are important since they are key points when  parents and their students can easily be thrown off track and also may be times when parents are more open to advice. In addition, we offer a chart providing promising examples for how schools and community-based organizations could help parents support the 3As, as well as offering ideas for what parents could do on their own.

D.   What does it mean to engage parents in developing solutions to school drop-out?

An underlying premise of this toolkit is that a community will develop a more effective plan for preventing school drop out if the process draws upon the knowledge and  perspectives of parents, especially from the families with the most at-risk student populations.  Parents are invaluable sources of information about possible causes of drop-out as well as what types of strategies are likely to help families overcome barriers to ensuring student attend school every day, achieve every year and attain their life goals over time.  While national information can offer information about likely issues and solutions, gathering insights from parents from your own community is essential to grounding your efforts in local realities.  As you use this toolkit and the suggested activities to reach out to parents, we offer the following suggestions:

1. Build upon relationships of trust and understanding.
   Many parents are unlikely to participate in a process unless they have been invited to participate by someone they know and trust. Given that such relationships are not built immediately, consider working through and with community agencies which have already well-established working relationships with parents.
2. Beware of professional domination.
   Too often, our conversations about how to educate students are dominated by professionals and do not create openings for parents to offer their insights. Key strategies for avoiding professional domination include making sure that parent voices are present starting from the beginning of a process, offering opportunities for parents to discuss issues among themselves and then report out to professionals, and avoiding “tokenism” where a single parent is expected to be able to represent the views of all parents.
3. Use thoughtful meeting facilitation to address unequal power dynamics. 
   Skilled meeting facilitation can be an effective tool for engaging and promoting the active participation of parents, especially those less accustomed to public speaking.   Such tools include, for example:

• Using introductory exercises which encourage every participant (parents and professionals) to share insights that are relevant to the discussion and help participants gain a deeper sense of how they might benefit from each other’s contributions (e.g.  What do you think helps parents become engaged in their child’s education? Or, what do you think is the biggest barrier to parents becoming engaged in their children’s education?).
• Creating opportunities for participants to interact in small and large groups.
• Providing participants with a minute or two to write down their ideas or briefly discuss their thinking with a partner. Such an approach encourages all participants to be more thoughtful before they speak up. It also can make participants more at ease sharing their opinions in a larger group because they have had a moment to gather their thoughts beforehand.  
• If parents speak languages other than English, care must also be taken to ensure accurate and on-going translation is occurring that shows all of the languages spoken are valued. (For example, make sure that parents’ responses in another language are translated back to English for everyone to hear rather than only having the comments of the primary speaker translated into the languages spoken by parents.)