Family Engagement

The Parents as Teachers National Center’s BabyFace project, an i3 Validation grantee, will be featured in a Rural Schools Innovations Webinar series hosted by the Rural School and Community Trust on June 13, 2012. The i3 project is using the home-based services of the successful Family and Child Education (FACE) program in 22 Bureau of Indian Education schools to serve high-needs American Indian families and children ages prenatal to three years. The goal is to narrow the achievement gap between American Indian and non-American Indian children at kindergarten and to improve student achievement in reading and math through third grade. For news and information on the Department of Education’s rural education outreach and resources, click here.

How can federally funded grant programs continue to implement time-tested strategies when federal funding ends? That was the central question at the recent 2011 national conference of the Parental Information and Resource Centers (PIRCs). In May 2011, the PIRCs learned that their program would not be funded beyond this fall. The Parental Options and Information (POI) Office in the Office of Innovation and Improvement quickly geared up to bring the PIRC leaders together to learn strategies for sustainability and for sharing data and their successes.

Like other areas of education innovation, there are no silver bullets when it comes to pressing questions of how best to engage parents and families, particularly in high-need schools, in order to raise student achievement. But there are informative studies as well as researchers and practitioners on the front lines of family engagement who possess insights that can point the way. With the prospect of doubling the amount of Title I funds set aside for parental and family engagement, promising policies and practices that can be pursued and brought to scale in this area of education reform are more important than ever before.

Dr. Karen Mapp, lecturer on education and director of the Education Policy and Management Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has joined the Office of Parental Options and Information (POI) as a consultant to explore a number of pressing issues of both policy and practice – ones that will inform and improve not only POI's work, but also the broader policy framework of parental and family engagement as it applies to Title I and other nationwide federal school improvement efforts.