A community group in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood has turned hundreds of hesitant parents into capable classroom helpers, role models, and leaders by tapping into strengths many don’t realize they have, the Seattle Times reports.
The Logan Square Neighborhood Association, in cooperation with teachers and staff at 14 Illinois schools, has built the Logan Square parent-mentor program to be a national model over the past 18 years. In all, the association has recruited about 1,800 parents to spend two hours a day, five days a week for a semester or more, in their children’s schools. And their work gave rise to similar programs in about 50 other Illinois schools, though the association doesn’t directly run those programs.
A substantial body of research supports the idea that even with initial hesitation on the part of parents to participate, persistence brings its own rewards. Anne T Henderson and Karen L Mapp looked at 50 of those studies in 2002 and concluded most of them showed a positive correlation between parent involvement and student gains in reading and math, although most of the studies they looked at had very small sample sizes:
Ideas in the program evaluations (such as parent workshops, interactive homework, and teacher outreach to families) and case studies (engaging families of diverse backgrounds in improving student achievement) may be adapted to [many] schools. Even though the bulk of these studies focus on low-income students, the ideas about partnership and participation are important in all settings and for all students.
The University of Chicago also released a 2010 study about the effect of parent involvement, collecting seven years of data from more than 200 schools and concluding that “strong parent involvement was one of five best predictors of whether reading and math scores would rise significantly.”
But there’s a lot more to turning students (and their families) into lifelong learners than math and reading scores.
Students “are quite moved and inspired by having their parents being involved in the school,” the paper quoted Soo Hong, an assistant professor at Wellesley College who wrote a book about the program, as saying. “Sometimes it’s accountability, too. … Students know if they start messing up in the classroom … sure, maybe it’s not their mother who’s there, but it’s their aunt’s neighbor or somebody they know.”
Parents can be tough to train, but it’ll happen
The Seattle Times also quoted Dr Ann Ishimaru for the article. Her research at the University of Wisconsin focuses, in part, on the role districts and community-based organizations play in developing the leadership and capacity of low-income, immigrant, and other non-dominant parents and community members as they collaborate with educators to promote systemic change and student success.
She’s the one who noted that attempts by teachers can often end up in a “toxic cycle” in which teachers organize an outreach event, find out that none of the parents show up, and conclude that parents just aren’t interested. That’s how great ideas die.
In Logan Square, however, those initial bumps have long been overcome. The woman who serves as sort of a trainer for new parent-mentors at a few schools didn’t engage until the fourth time she was asked to serve as a parent-mentor, she confessed. Monica Soto-Espinoza, who came to the US as a teenager with limited English skills, is now 35 and fluent in English. When she was first asked to participate as a parent-mentor, she honestly didn’t think she could offer her child’s school anything. Now she trains others to be parent-mentors.
Training lasts about a week and features a lot of talking and support among parents, with a little academic training thrown in. Once the district completes the necessary background checks, parents are paired up with teachers. As much as possible, parents are placed in a classroom that suits them, but never with their own child’s teacher: If they have limited English skills, they’re often placed in dual-language classes; if they have a limited formal education, they might pair up with a kindergarten teacher, and so on.
Parents also get instructions in being professional, keeping student information confidential, and other necessary details of the work. If they complete 100 hours in the classroom, they receive a stipend of $500, but that’s not what really motivates them. Their partnership with their children’s schools is probably a much bigger motivating factor. For its part, the school agrees to make sure parent-mentors are working with students, not serving as administrative assistants for the teachers and running copies off or cutting out construction paper shapes.
Teachers need assistants; parents need to know their child’s school
We have held, since our 2011 interview with Annice Brave, Illinois’s Teacher of the Year in that year and a national finalist, that a great way to help teachers would be to put a teacher’s assistant in every classroom. Unfortunately, that goal gets crushed by budgets that just have no room for people to fill those roles. Parent-school partnerships like the Logan Square Neighborhood Association don’t become productive overnight, and the huge amount of work required upfront prevents many start-up programs from blossoming. But there’s no time like the present.
As a side note, the coverage in the Seattle Times, based in Washington State, of a Chicago-based parent-school partnership was part of the “Education Lab” project, a yearlong Seattle Times project in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network. Reporting shines a light on promising responses to problems that have long bedeviled our public school system. The project is funded by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the John S and James L Knight Foundation.