We say “Bravo!” to schools in Danville, Ill., for making good use of a $6 million School Improvement Grant. We need more initiatives like this one, because communication between schools and communities has deteriorated of late, especially as reform efforts drive increasing levels of competition between students, between teachers, between schools, between states, and between nations.
Schools that receive SIG funds have to implement one of four intervention models: Turnaround, Restart, Transformation, or School Closure, as approved by the US Department of Education. Most of the money given to schools goes toward the reform strategy, and a smaller portion of funds goes toward district oversight, but it’s hard to think of a more effective strategy than what they’re doing in Danville.
In describing a model of engagement for effective education, I wrote about an equilateral triangle where each vertex was a group of people and each side was a mode of engagement:
[The idea is] that if members of the community (parents of sixth graders, for example) were given accurate, useful information about their sons’ and daughters’ life at school (let’s say, the state’s curriculum objectives in math), they would be better able to engage the other two points of the triangle. When creative, caring people put their minds together on the same task, there’s no limit to what solutions might arise.
In this example, parents would be able to work with their children on the types of problems they needed to learn. Those parents could also engage the school in more constructive dialog about how the school teaches that curriculum. Thus all three points, the components of quality education, are engaged.
I wrote that in 2001, after interviewing Dr Doug Brooks, professor of education at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. It was the interview that would give rise to this foundation’s model of good schools as an equilateral triangle.
Now comes Danville School District 118, which will use part of its School Improvement Grant from the federal government to launch a “Parent University” next month, the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette reports. From my perspective, this is one of the most powerful ways to engage parents ever developed. School officials in Danville expect about 400 and hope for more parents to show up at the first meeting on Jan 11 at Life Church.
“We can’t educate a child as fully as we’d like without parent involvement,” the paper quoted Ericka Uskali, the school’s transformation officer, as saying. “We have them with us for about eight hours a day, and parents have them the rest of that time.”
From the parents’ perspective, this is exactly the kind of thing they might hope for. “Most want to be involved, but they don’t always know how,” the News-Gazette quoted Amre Carey, who works with parents as Danville High School’s family involvement liaison, as saying.
“This is a chance to partner with parents, help build their skills and empower them,” Ms Uskali added. “And parents may come from different backgrounds and have kids of different ages. So it’s also their opportunity to come together and learn from each other.”
Imagine that. Schools working with parents instead of each group blaming the other. Imagine schools giving parents opportunities to learn from each other. Just imagine.
Now, the sessions won’t all be about sixth-grade math, but math will make it onto a few agendas for the monthly Parent University meetings. The first workshop will offer tips from Phyllis Hunter, a national literacy consultant and author, about encouraging kids to read. If parents have this knowledge in their heads, they become more likely to engage their sons and daughters in activities that will make their lives at school better and more productive.
And better schools, which is the real goal here to begin with, can expect more constructive dialog with parents and students—the other two points on our equilateral triangle—about how the school works, how the Common Core is being implemented, how people really feel about the tests coming up, etc., etc.
The key to the equilateral triangle model of quality education, again from my 2001 interview with Dr Brooks, is that each vertex in the triangle “grasps the concerns and challenges faced by the others—accurately, fairly, and with an attitude interested in helping.” This is predicted to happen in Danville, and I hope it goes well, which will allow other school districts to see an example of establishing strong ties to the community in the interest of student success. In any event, this kind of caring collaboration, where the schools care about what parents are going through, where parents learn from teachers what they deal with, and where students become involved in their education, beats a test score 10 times out of 10.
