Parent Involvement Has Always Mattered. Will The COVID-19 Pandemic Finally Make This The New Normal In K-12 Education?

“We need to get in touch with 100% of our families, make sure they have everything they need for their children to learn and give families whatever supports they need or this is just not going to work.”

Many principals and school system leaders across the country have echoed some version of this statement in the rapid shift to distance learning forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. But why did it take a global health crisis to get to this point? There are so many crucial equity questions in distance learning, but the importance of parent involvement in academic outcomes have never been in question. Yet, there are still so many issues about how and to what extent parents of all racial demographics and income levels are meaningfully included in school decision-making or asked to support their children’s academic success.

There is a powerful case for making meaning parental engagement a critical piece of what K-12 education looks like during and after this pandemic. To make this case and share powerful, but practical strategies to help educators overcome the challenging, but necessary difficulties needed to close this gap, Alejandro Gac-Artigas, the Founder and CEO of Springboard Collaborative provided his insight and expert advice from his experience leading this work for over a decade.

1) The COVID-19 pandemic raises awareness of lots of inequities that existed before this global crisis. And schools have moved mountains to ensure that students are still receiving access to meals and to the devices and connectivity they need to engage in distance learning. But the challenges involved in meaningfully and equitably involving parents in the academic success of their children is a huge issue that is still not necessarily a priority for school systems. Should our schools be doing more to support families in their role as parent educators?

It’s not a question of ought so much as necessity. Whether or not schools should be doing more to support families as educators is a moot point. Here’s the reality: The only way to prevent COVID-19 from deepening inequality for an entire generation of children is to equip families to support learning at home. This is especially true in the pivotal early grades, in which children’s learning requires frequent adult facilitation. As a former first-grade teacher, I can’t imagine how to round up 25 six-year-olds on Zoom and somehow make that time instructionally meaningful. Amidst school closures on a massive scale, there’s no going around low-income parents. We must work with them and through them, otherwise the achievement gap will continue to grow with every passing day of school closures.

My Instagram feed is inundated with images of financially stable friends and colleagues navigating the homeschooling experience by reading books together, practicing musical instruments, and doing math while trying a new recipe. These parents engage their children in thoughtful conversation as banana bread bakes, awaiting its turn in the social media spotlight.

In my professional life, as CEO of literacy nonprofit, I see low-income families navigating a starkly different set of circumstances. And while distributing WiFi-enabled devices is laudable, academic disparities aren’t widening because privileged kids have access to superior screen time. They’re widening because of all the things their parents are doing off screen.

Over the last decade, college-educated parents have quadrupled their investment of time and money in their children, while parents without a college degree have only modestly increased their investment. Experts describe this as a “parenting gap” that leads to a vicious cycle of intergenerational wealth inequality. What matters most in a child’s life is their family. Not their school, and certainly not their technology. Connections matter more than connectivity.

Schools—if only by necessity—must support families in their role as educators. Parents’ love for their children is the single greatest—and most underutilized—natural resource in education.

2) We read a lot about what parents lack, especially parents of color who live in poverty. Parental involvement is important, but how is it fair to ask these parents to do more? Especially since these are the same groups who are more likely to have less formal education while being more likely to be essential workers or be more directly impacted by the pandemic economically and health-wise?

We do read a lot about what low-income parents lack. Let’s consider, for a moment, the assets they bring to the table:

Parents are the experts on their children. Whereas teachers change annually, parents accumulate a wealth of knowledge about their children as learners. Moreover, they are uniquely positioned to read with their kids in a one-on-one setting. There is no smaller classroom than a family’s living room, and there is no better way to personalize instruction than through a parent. After all, what could be more personal that a parent and child sharing a book at bedtime?

Teachers, on the other hand, are the experts on instruction. They know what their students need to make progress, yet the classroom setting makes it difficult to individually support every child. Parents and teachers thus have complementary skill sets and a common purpose: to help kids learn and be successful. This is the basis for a powerful, sustainable collaboration!

To be sure, families living in poverty face intractable barriers that make it difficult to engage in their children’s education. The solution, however, can’t be to write parents off. Parents are, after all, the single biggest predictor of their children’s life outcomes. Low-income families don’t need the education system’s pity; they need its support. No one benefits from pobrecito syndrome or the soft bigotry of low expectations. Why doesn’t our society see in a laid off single mom the very same love, commitment, and potential we so easily recognize in her wealthier counterpart?

It’s incumbent on our education system to create opportunities for family engagement that have greater value than there is difficulty taking advantage of them. Our experience at Springboard Collaborative has been that almost every family that perceives this value will go to lengths—some seemingly insurmountable—to support their children’s learning. Our weekly parent workshops average 91% attendance — and these are the families of over 10,000 struggling readers in 14 urban school districts. Families are invited on the basis of their children’s need for reading intervention. They have no obligation to attend workshops, and we don’t cut students whose families do not participate from either the program or the data set.

By offering low-income parents the skills required to support learning at home, we’re not asking of them anything that they don’t already want for themselves. Most of the families Springboard works with have learned the hard way just how important it is for their children to have a better educational experience than they did. Approximately one-third of the parents we serve can’t read the book their child is holding, because of either a literacy or language barrier. Nevertheless, these parents help their children make a 3-month reading gain in just 5 weeks. How? By engaging their kids in dialogue, asking questions before, during, and after reading. Yes, even nonliterate parents with only 15 minutes to spare can help their kids learn to read. An analysis of nearly 10 million students found that 15 minutes seems to be the “magic number” for substantial positive gains in reading achievement.

3) Improving parental capacity to support the academic success of their children sounds like a great idea in theory. But practically speaking, how is that supposed to work? It's hard enough for teachers of students of color in low-income areas to improve learning outcomes. How can schools help parents do something they themselves have such a hard time doing?

As much as American society wishes school improvement were a panacea, it simply isn’t enough. The data bears this out. Fourth-grade literacy rates in the U.S. haven’t budged in 25 years—and the achievement gap is widening—despite billions invested in classroom intervention.

Schools haven’t been able to move the needle independently, which is precisely why they must enlist families in the effort. Children don’t spend nearly enough time in school for teacher-led instruction to be a complete solution. Picture a child’s time as an orange. Their classroom experience—just 25% of waking hours—is a wedge from which the education field is fixated on squeezing more juice. Children spend 75% of their waking hours outside the classroom, yet our nation does shockingly little to capture educational value from this time in marginalized communities. In order to meaningfully improve learning outcomes, our education system must juice the rest of the orange by realizing the untapped teaching potential within families.

Parent-teacher collaboration is daunting, but it isn’t rocket science. At Springboard, we distilled our ‘secret sauce’ and open-sourced a methodology through which teachers and parents can join forces to help children reach learning goals in 5-10 weeks. We call this a Family-Educator Learning Accelerator (or FELA). In the beginning, teachers and parents build a relationship, set a goal, and make a game plan together. Over 5-10 weeks, teachers and parents convene weekly or biweekly to share skills and support each other’s efforts. On a daily basis, children work toward their goal by practicing with their teachers, practicing with their families, and practicing independently. 15 minutes well spent can go a long way. The cycle concludes by measuring progress and celebrating together; it is neither amorphous nor interminable. Small wins lead to big wins, helping schools to crystallize new habits between teachers and families.

This simple and approachable framework produces remarkable results. Students average a 4-month reading gain during each 5-10 week cycle, closing the gap to grade-level performance by more than half. Parents learn how to be effective home literacy coaches, unlocking a world of one-on-one instruction that would be cost-prohibitive in the classroom setting. For every hour that a teacher leads a family workshop, parents deliver 25 hours of tutoring at home. What’s more, families build habits that persist long after programming has ended. Not just the habit of reading, but also the habit of setting and achieving goals with their children. Of course, this has implications far beyond literacy.

4) These sound like great ideas and it is impressive that your organization has been able to pull off those outcomes. In the short-term, what advice would you give a school system looking to leverage parents as academic partners in addressing the expected learning gaps resulting from the inherent inequities of distance learning?

If there’s a silver lining in the way that the COVID-19 pandemic brought schools to a grinding halt, it’s that it has provided us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reset the relationships between schools and low-income families. My advice to any school system is to help as many teachers as possible to set and achieve goals with families this summer. Springboard’s Family-Educator Learning Accelerator framework is open-source and freely available. Though we focus on literacy, the methodology can be applied to any subject area.

This framework is the product of nearly a decade of trial and error. Districts can directly benefit from what Springboard has learned along the way:

• FELAs are 5-10-week cycles during which teachers and parents share a game plan to help children reach learning goals. This process measurably improves academic outcomes while strengthening family-educator relationships.
• Any shorter than five weeks isn’t long enough to build a habit; any longer than ten weeks, and you lose the immediacy and urgency required for teachers and parents to try something new together.
• Relationships are foundational. The key to getting 90%+ parent turnout at weekly workshops is building relationships between teachers and families through [virtual] home visits at the outset.
• Goal setting is the active ingredient in Springboard’s secret sauce. Goals makes the FELA purposeful and winnable.
• During the 5-10 weeks, parents and teachers must practice together at least four times. Workshops—virtual or in-person—are vehicles for skill-sharing, teamwork, and mutual accountability.
• Finally, the cycle concludes by measuring progress and celebrating. This crystallizes habits that persist over the long run.

If you’re a parent, check out Springboard Connect. It’s a free web-app that provides tips, resources, and reminders to support parents as reading coaches to their children. Families can set goals, practice strategies, and track progress.

If you’re a teacher, check out Springboard’s free FELA toolkit. It offers an overview of our family engagement methodology and provides templates to get you started. Springboard also teamed up with the American Federation of Teachers to offer free professional development.

If you’re a school or district leader, learn more about Springboard Learning Accelerator. You can think of it as the 'starter pack' for implementing our family engagement methodology—virtually and affordably—this summer and beyond.

5) Historically, we've thought about parental involvement as helping out with the school carnival or bake sale. In the big picture, what type of policy shifts need to happen to make a more sweeping, systemic, and sustainable change to the way we support parents as our children's most important educators?

Once schools eventually reopen their doors, let’s not just reach for the familiar classroom interventions that have failed to produce outcomes for decades. Between now and then, we have a singular—and fleeting—opportunity to demonstrate the power of parent engagement to help children learn. If we do this on a large enough scale, we can fundamentally change the education system for the better and for good.

We must tackle this at multiple altitudes. From a policy perspective, I applaud the HEROES Act for proposing $5.5B toward closing the digital divide; however, this doesn’t go far enough. The potential of technology will never be fulfilled if we don't simultaneously invest in realizing the teaching potential of their families. If every low-income student in America were supplied a WiFi-enabled tablet and we took every high-income household off the grid, the achievement gap wouldn’t magically shrink. Our school system must upskill families—and teachers—to support learning at home. Congress should allocate meaningful use grants accordingly.

At the state and district level, schools should leverage the summer ahead to help teachers collaborate with families in order to set and achieve learning goals. We’ve open-sourced Springboard’s playbook to make this simple, approachable, and effective in just five weeks. As a sector, let’s not scramble to create the digital clone of a system that didn’t work in the first place. Let’s set aside the conventional playbook and build new habits between teachers and families.

Winston Churchill famously said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing… after they have tried everything else.” It’s time for the education sector to finally take a systematic and outcomes-oriented approach to helping parents—and their children—succeed.