Back-to-School Efforts for Parents Earn Top Marks

At Wilson Elementary School in Costa Mesa, Spanish-speaking mental-health workers offer counseling to immigrant parents overwhelmed by cultural differences.

In the Sacramento Unified School District, teachers show up at students’ homes in the evenings to teach parents how to help with homework.

At Madison Elementary School in Redondo Beach, teachers serve dinner to families and then watch and offer tips as parents help their children with homework.

In the last few years, school officials around California, sometimes content to throw up their hands in dismay when parents didn’t show their faces at school, are going to ever-more creative--and expensive--lengths to get parents into the classroom.

“Schools are no longer saying, ‘Oh gee, we have back-to-school night and our parents don’t come. They must not care,’ ” said Kris Powell, who oversees parents programs for the Orange County Department of Education. “They are finding ways to get parents in there.”

Educators’ sudden interest in the home front has been fueled by a growing number of private grants, by a tidal wave of federal and state legislation encouraging districts to get parents involved and an expanding body of research that suggests that getting Mom and Dad into the classroom raises tests scores.

The push includes both carrots--such as extra funding and awards programs--and sticks. Schools that cannot show off a cadre of involved parents are no longer eligible for many grant programs, or for the National Blue Ribbon Awards.

Maria Escobar has found the program at Wilson Elementary “a godsend.” The Families and Schools Together Program is funded by a hodgepodge of private grants and state funds.

Escobar, who immigrated from Mexico 15 years ago, said she and her husband were struggling with the different mores of raising children in the United States.

Their 9-year-old son Bryan was spending too much time hanging out in the street and refusing to help out at home or do his fourth-grade homework. Intimidated by English-speaking school officials and not close to many of her neighbors, Escobar did not know where to turn for support.

Through the 10-week FAST program at Wilson this fall, Escobar said she and her husband learned to praise their son more and scold him less: “the American way,” she said.

“Now he is more disciplined himself,” she said. Furthermore, Escobar now knows 10 other Spanish-speaking mothers at Wilson she can turn to for support. Together, the women have begun volunteering to supervise during lunch at the school and feel comfortable talking to the principal and teachers.

Their newfound ease has rubbed off on their children, said program participant Maricela Vasquez. After completing the 10-week program, Vasquez and her husband make a point of working with children on homework every night.

“My children are happier with me because I am participating in their school,” Vasquez said.

A few miles away, Karla Wells, principal of Lambert Elementary School in Tustin, cited the school’s parents as a major reason for the school’s success. Lambert this year posted the highest gains of any school in Orange County on the state’s new Academic Performance Index.

When she arrived two years ago at the school, at which the majority of students are Latino, a handful of parents joined the PTA. This year, there are 150 members. Hundreds more parents participated in seminars at the beginning of the year in which they learned about the U.S. school system. And, with grants from the school and a private organization, parents have opened an off-campus center in a nearby apartment complex where children can go for help with homework.

It is successes at schools like Lambert that made officials pay attention to the link between involved parents and successful students, said Carol Dickson, a consultant on parent involvement at the state Dept. of Education.

Throughout much of the 1970s and ‘80s, administrators believed that socioeconomic levels were the single biggest factor in determining how well children do in school. But then educators began to look at schools in high-poverty areas that were succeeding: What was their secret? The finding: “There was one thing that trumps socioeconomic factors, and that was parental involvement,” Dickson said.

More studies were done, and by the early 1990s, many education experts were convinced that getting parents into schools was good campus medicine.

Bringing about such a sea change in school officials’ attitudes, however, did not happen overnight, especially among busy educators trained to believe it is teachers who know best about the education of their students. Furthermore, many traditional ways of getting parents involved in school, such as the PTA, did not work with immigrant parents, who were alienated by the formal rules.

The first force for change came in 1989, when the California State Board of Education adopted a policy calling for schools to get parents involved.

In 1992, a state task force laid out plans for how schools should get parents into the classroom.

Two years later, the federal government joined the game with the overhaul of the Title I program. From then on, schools receiving funds from the massive antipoverty funding program had to show they had involved parents.

In 1998, state legislators passed a parents’ bill of rights, giving parents the right to visit their children’s classrooms, talk to teachers and receive progress reports.

Also in 1998, Proposition 227 ended bilingual education. Along with that came an allocation of state money to teach English to adults. Many districts chose to use that money to start English classes for parents, thus bringing parents into the schools.

The Academic Performance Index also has sparked an outpouring of parent interest in schools. The index ranks schools according to how well students do on standardized tests and how much they improve year to year. These rankings are published in many newspapers and on the Internet.

“Schools have realized that they have to get parents to buy in,” said Robert Barbot, superintendent of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. Barbot has made getting parents involved in schools a priority of his administration.

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The API scores have given parents a concrete way to evaluate their children’s schools, he said, which has made them feel much more comfortable about asking principals and teachers for explanations of what is going on in the classroom.

In 1999, the state Legislature authorized $15 million for districts throughout the state to devise programs similar to one in the Sacramento Unified district. Four years ago, at the request of religious leaders, the Sacramento district began paying teachers extra to go to the homes of students at lower-achieving schools to help parents feel connected at school and understand how to help their children. In Orange County, the Newport-Mesa, Cypress and Buena Park districts have received such grants.

Legislators also set aside $5 million to train parents to be involved in school and to pay for such inducements as child care and pizza. Sixteen schools in Orange County and 146 in Los Angeles received grants.

Among them are Madison Elementary in Redondo Beach and Washington Elementary in Santa Ana.

Six years ago, Washington began one of the state’s first comprehensive parent-involvement programs, which has won several awards.

Every morning, instead of just dropping children off at school, parents at Washington Elementary are encouraged to come into their children’s classrooms for the first half-hour and read to them, said Principal Robert Anguiano.

In the evenings, the school hosts family literacy nights, in which parents come to school for workshops on poetry, opera, computer technology, and how to get children into college. Over the summer, the school began offering morning and evening English classes for parents. Teachers also assign homework to parents, asking them to read books to their children and write about the experience. Then the teachers write back to the parents.

“It’s had a tremendous effect on the school,” said Bertha Benavides, the school’s parent coordinator. “We have hardly any discipline problems at school. Just opening the doors to the parents has enabled them to be aware of what’s going [on] . . . and test scores have gone up.”