A Playbook for Effectively Engaging Families and Schools

With Corporation support, the Brookings Institution offers strategies and tools to strengthen parent-teacher collaboration

By Carnegie Corporation of New York February 8, 2022

Family & Community Engagement

What would happen if families and schools were empowered to work well together? With Carnegie Corporation of New York support, the Brookings Institution has published a playbook to help families and schools collaborate more effectively. The materials support education system leaders and school heads in understanding the why, what, and how of working jointly with families to improve student success.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents and teachers have had to work more closely together. Parents and educators agree on the importance of stronger family-school partnerships, as captured in a recent Corporation-supported survey. Karen L. Mapp and Eyal Bergman, in a report commissioned by the Corporation, explore the dynamics and barriers that stand in the way of effective family-school partnerships, outlining how, due to the pandemic, family engagement is finally being recognized as a core strategic component of any intentional effort to provide equitable and excellent educational opportunities for all children. Even with this acknowledgment, federal, state, and local education entities and stakeholders struggle with how to create and sustain effective family engagement strategies and initiatives.

Parents – whom Brookings defines as any family members or guardians who are the primary caregivers – have shown increased expectations of deeper engagement with schools. Across Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, this points to an increasing demand from families for new approaches to working with schools. There is a growing recognition among education leaders that their outdated approaches to engagement have been getting in the way of connecting with hard-to-reach families. For example, when the government of Himachal Pradesh, a state of approximately 7 million people in India, pivoted from solely asking parents to come to schools for meetings to communicating via text messages, WhatsApp groups, and Facebook posts – engagement levels rose from 20 percent to 80 percent in just two months.

In working toward successfully fostering family-school engagement, Brookings outlines the following four goals and provides tools to:

Improve student attendance and graduation rates
Improve the learning and development of students
Redefine the purpose of school for students
Redefine the purpose of school for society

To respond effectively to the evolving nature of family-school engagement, educators and leaders must understand the following barriers:

Schools and education personnel lack family engagement competencies and related training and support.
Families, especially from the most marginalized communities, feel uncertain and unwelcome in working with schools.
Family-school engagement receives limited attention, research, and funding.

While these barriers present differently across communities, these factors were prioritized across groups:

The importance of trust: Relational trust is generated when interactions are characterized by respectful exchanges, when people are willing to go above and beyond what their role dictates, and when people do what they say will do. And it can be a powerful driver of outcomes. In one study, trust between teachers, principals, parents, and students accounted for 78 percent of the variance in achievement on standardized reading and math assessments (Tschannen-Moran, 2014). Two variables made strong independent contributions to this variance: teachers’ trust in students and parents, and students’ trust in their teachers.
The importance of the teacher-parent relationship: Ongoing communication is essential to these relationships. For example, teachers can advise parents on how best to reinforce skills learned in schools. When parents are unsure of how to support their children’s homework, their involvement can be counterproductive to academic success.

Brookings provides a typology, or “map,” for understanding the breadth of the four goals and highlights findings from a review of over 500 strategies. A strategy database features more than 60 strategies from around the world, and tools for aligning beliefs and starting conversations provide an in-depth look at the third goal of family-school engagement: redefining the purpose of school for students and providing tools to help families and schools reach a shared understanding of what a good quality education can look like.

Read the full playbook here Collaborating to Transform and Improve Education Systems: A Playbook for Family-School Engagement.

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