Often, parents of elementary-age kids seem eager to volunteer at the school and participate in their children's education, but as kids get older, parental engagement levels tend to dramatically decrease. What can educators do to more effectively engage parents and involve them in the education of their high school–age children?
High school seems to be the turning point for many parents when it comes to their involvement with their children's education. Many distance themselves from their children's education, while others become overly involved, questioning every class choice, grade, and extracurricular activity or battling with teachers about perceived injustices toward their children.
So how can high school educators more effectively engage parents to create healthy relationships and make parents allies and education partners?
First, it helps to understand where parents are coming from, says behavioral therapist Kirk Martin. Uninvolved and overinvolved parents can represent two ends of the same spectrum, says Martin, who points to parents' anxiety as a reason for their sometimes perplexing behavior. Martin notes that some parents check out when they feel overwhelmed. Plus, their teens may be pushing them away and they don't know how to help or what type of involvement is appropriate. This can cause parents to withdraw from activities such as volunteering at the school.
At the other end of the spectrum are overinvolved parents. Many overinvolved parents worry that their kids who have struggled in school will not achieve the same levels of success as their peers, says Martin.
"Overinvolved parents are suffering from enormous anxiety," says Martin. "As they compare [their child] to other students, they begin to worry about the future, envisioning the kid still living in the basement at the age of 29."
Making an effort to understand parents' perspectives and anxieties will help educators create healthier and more productive relationships with parents.
For their 1994 book A New Generation of Evidence: The Family Is Critical to Student Achievement, researchers Anne Henderson and Nancy Berla reviewed and analyzed dozens of studies to understand the benefits of parental involvement. The researchers concluded that when parents participate in the education process, their children tend to have higher grades, better attendance, higher test scores, and higher self-esteem and require fewer disciplinary interventions. At the high school level, when so many parents tend to back off, the researchers found that involvement is even more important, significantly reducing dropout rates.
There are also benefits for teachers and schools. For example, schools with a high level of parent involvement receive greater community support and an improved reputation, and teachers enjoy higher morale, greater professional respect, and increased job satisfaction.
Parental involvement is necessary and important; however, well-meaning parents can sometimes be a little too involved.
The term "helicopter parent" was coined by clinical psychologist Madeline Levine, who wrote in her bookThe Price of Privilege, "Parents who persistently fall on the side of intervening for their child, as opposed to supporting their child's attempts to problem solve, interfere with the most important task of childhood and adolescence: the development of a sense of self."
Clearly, it's worth the effort to create balanced, healthy, and productive relationships with parents. Working together, parents, teachers, and administrators can assist young people in becoming their own advocates by teaching them to make sound decisions and to achieve their own academic success.
Build Alliances
John Nori, director of program development at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, dislikes the term "helicopter parent." "Parents are the best advocates for their kids and are involved to their own comfort level. However, there is a balance to be struck between the child's independence and the parent's involvement," says Nori.
When he was principal of Magruder High School in Montgomery County, Md., Nori found it helpful to involve parents in niche groups organized around student activities and clubs. Magruder also had a parent advisory council with neighborhood representatives. These approaches funnel parent interest and energy into the school rather than into their own child's academic performance, he says.
Westshore High School in Melbourne, Fla., boasts one of the highest PTA membership rates in the country and enjoys an extremely high level of parent involvement. Why? Because it's required, explains principal Rick Fleming.
Westshore is a magnet school serving grades 7 through 12. Students compete through a lottery process for one of its 950 places after completing an application and meeting certain standards. Once admitted, students and parents must sign a contract that outlines a number of requirements, including 20 hours of volunteer involvement by parents each academic year. As a result, the school gets extra help and kids become accustomed to having their parents around during the day, Fleming says.
Phoenix High School in Phoenix, Ore., encourages three-way partnerships between students, parents, and teachers. Assistant principal Shawna Blanchette says the school began an advisory program six years ago. Each student has an advisor, ensuring that state graduation requirements are met and documented and that every child is connected to an adult at the school. Each advisor has fewer than 20 advisees. Then, administrators hit on the idea of having students lead annual conferences with their parents and advisors to review their progress through the graduation requirements. "We empowered students by putting them in charge of communicating their goals and plans," says Blanchette.
Students are provided with a script and a number of forms that guide them in conducting the conversation. In this conference, students discuss their academic and personal goals, transcripts and the credits needed for graduation, recent report cards, awards and accomplishments, and their post–high school plans, among other topics. This exercise allows young people to work as equal partners with adults in charting their academic careers.
Communication Is the Key
Communication is the key to successful relationships between parents and educators. Schunn Turner, principal of Martin Luther King High School in Nashville, Tenn., engages in frequent communication with parents. Turner sends them a regular e-mail called the "Weekly Agenda for Parents." "It provides them with lots of information and helps parents stay involved, even if they're not participating themselves," he says.
Informing parents about major deadlines goes a long way toward alleviating parent anxiety, Sherie Jenkins has found. Jenkins is a science teacher who serves as the senior project coordinator at Westshore High School. Seniors are required to conduct a yearlong, nonacademic project that demonstrates their ability to stretch and work outside their comfort zone. At the beginning of the year, parents sign a contract attesting that they understand and support their child's topic. They are then invited in to see the projects at key milestones and to view the finished products at the end of the year.
"We steer parents to the appropriate level of guidance by copying them on student e-mail reminders about the project. Keeping them in the loop seems to help," Jenkins says.
Although technology has revolutionized the ways schools can communicate with parents—from websites to automated outgoing telephone recordings—old-school methods can often prove just as effective.
Carolyn Gecan, a history and geography teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., visited parents in homes when planning for summer student trips to Europe. "It's a very old-fashioned approach, but home visits are really undervalued," she says. "These informal get-togethers led to positive interactions, and it benefits students to know that we are conversing about them."
That same kind of targeted outreach also helped Nori collect the information he needed from parents. When he was at Magruder High, Nori instituted weekly meetings for Hispanic parents. He held them on Saturday mornings in someone's home and provided a translator. "[Parents] know their children better than we do. We need to hear from parents about their kids' needs, to help us make better decisions," he explains.
Provide Parents with Direction
The key to managing parental involvement is putting students front and center. This will often involve directing parents to discuss their concerns with their children first.
When a parent calls Glazer, the first question he asks is whether the student has discussed the situation with the teacher.
At the first PTA meeting of the year, Fleming guides parents through a 90-minute agenda that includes a direct request for trust and partnership. "I encourage parents to let kids handle their academic lives, and possibly to fail. I emphasize that kids must make and learn from their mistakes so they don't repeat them and say outright that overinvolvement doesn't allow children to grow."
Directing parents' anxiety into positive energy and effort for the school is an effective way to engage them. "Look for opportunities to involve parents, whether it's providing office help, stuffing envelopes, or whatever," Turner says. Blanchette notes that parents have stepped up in response to budget cuts in Phoenix, helping out with the student newspaper, yearbook, and other activities.
When all else fails, be direct. "I had a parent who was visiting daily, without an appointment, and being very antagonizing," says Turner. "I had a conversation with him about the fact that his daughter was preparing for college. Was he going to accompany her there? Now, he truly lets her advocate for herself."