How Schools Can Practice Family Engagement to Dismantle Longstanding Educational Inequities

A Corporation-commissioned report by Karen L. Mapp and Eyal Bergman outlines a new vision for family engagement that cultivates effective partnerships between families and educators

By Carnegie Corporation of New York June 23, 2021

Family & Community Engagement

What Is Family Engagement?

Family engagement involves building strong, trusting partnerships between home and school to help families support their children’s learning and development.

Why Is It Important?

When schools shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic, the imagined boundary that existed between home and school was finally broken. Parents suddenly had a front row seat to their children’s learning, gaining new visibility into their education. Family engagement is not new, but the pandemic brought its importance front and center. Research shows that parent involvement at home has more than double the impact on student test scores than parents’ education level or socioeconomic status. Family engagement is also a critical factor for equity in education, which demands our attention to help eliminate systemic racism. Carnegie Corporation of New York funds programs that bridge the gap between home and school, because we want all families to have access to the information they need to support their children’s learning and to be able to act as effective advocates for change.

FAMILY ENGAGEMENT IN ACTION

Learn more about how five grantee partners of Carnegie Corporation of New York are innovating and leading effective family-school partnerships.

What Needs to Change?

COVID-19 and systemic racism are forcing a recalibration of family-school partnerships. The authors issue a call to action to address the often-ignored and unspoken dynamics that prevent the cultivation of effective partnerships between families and educators, specifically:

Schools must reject deficit-based views of families. Most family engagement initiatives are designed with a deficit-based lens, particularly those aimed at nondominant families defined as “those impacted by systemic oppression, such as marginalization based on race, class, language, or immigration status.” Even well-intentioned efforts often define families by what they don’t have or don’t do. The new normal must be built on antiracist and social justice principles. Families from all backgrounds must be seen, celebrated, and embraced by educators as equal partners and recognized as experts on their children and communities.

The new normal requires a codesign model of partnership. Educators and families should work together to define their shared challenges and then design and implement an improved educational experience for children. Schools that take a codesign approach understand that families’ wisdom must be brought to bear on any problem the school encounters.

Family engagement must be seen as a core element of effective and equitable educational practice. Seeing engagement as a core practice means embracing the family-school partnership as an indispensable component of student success and school improvement. Gone is the notion that family engagement is an add-on — a bothersome, time-consuming activity done after the important business of teaching and learning. Instead, family engagement is considered a pillar of effective teaching and school improvement and requires significant attention and investment from schools and systems.

How Can We Achieve the Change That Is Needed?

With the infusion of nearly $200 billion in three federal stimulus bills passed by Congress in 2020 and 2021, schools and systems have a historic opportunity to invest in high-priority areas. To advance a new vision for family engagement, the authors provide the following recommendations:

Make time during the workday for family engagement. States and districts need to provide protected time for educators to partner with families.
Invest in professional learning (and unlearning) to shift mindsets about families. Deeper partnerships start from an asset-based view of families, so school and system staff need professional learning experiences designed to counteract the prevailing deficit-based view. This involves unlearning — becoming aware of an existing mental model and beginning to shift toward a new one.
Invest in ongoing guidance to incorporate new mindsets into existing routines and practices. Professional learning experiences can lead to real change if they are complemented by ongoing support and coaching from content experts.
Create senior-level positions dedicated to family and community engagement. States and systems should invest in staff to elevate family engagement and integrate it into their strategic plans. Many school districts have created cabinet-level positions reporting directly to the superintendent or CEO.
Focus family engagement efforts on staff development. Most family engagement work in America is family-facing, with staff planning and executing family events or support initiatives. That approach is not wrong, but it is incomplete because it fails to build systemic, integrated family engagement practices. It also emphasizes assimilation, positioning educators as the providers of information and families as the receivers.
Integrate family engagement into equity agendas. Schools and systems will continue to struggle to enact equity efforts if their staff are disconnected from the communities they serve. Equity agendas should emphasize building trust and deepening relationships with families of different races and ethnicities in order to pave the way for educators to recognize how racialized power imbalances between home and school influence their work.
Develop authentic family engagement policies and metrics. Leaders who truly want to elevate family engagement will apply the same tools they use to advance their other priorities. That means creating policies that support a liberatory vision for family engagement and articulating specific, measurable expectations for the system’s improvement over time.
Community engagement should be on the agendas of school boards and cabinets. This work will never be systemic unless senior leaders embrace it. Boards and cabinets should model the internal capacity-building efforts they want to see in others and publicly share what they have learned.
Policymakers should ensure that family engagement coursework is required for all preservice teachers and included in teacher evaluation rubrics. As of September 2020, only 17 states require aspiring teachers to learn about effective family and community engagement practices in their credentialing programs, and less than 50 percent require aspiring administrators to do so. This should be a requirement in all 50 states.

Learn more about how a new vision for family and community engagement can dismantle longstanding educational inequities. Family engagement is equity work at its core.

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