Strategy 1: Parents as Partners
Adapted from “Notes From the Field: If You Want Great Schools, First Work With Parents to Create Actionable Demand,” The 74, May 2017. Individual roles and organizations have changed since the release of this publication.
Some schools actively seek to build a partnership with parents, and nonprofit organizations like the Flamboyan Foundation help forge collaboration between parents and educators.
“Too many people think power in education is a zero-sum game,” cautions Kristin Ehrgood, president and founder of Flamboyan. “Teachers have power. Parents have power. We help them work on the same team so that this power is additive and focused on serving children. Every family wants to guide their child’s educational path; to do that, they must have authentic relationships of equal power with their child’s teacher. At Flamboyan, we work with educators and school systems to build effective partnerships with families by asking educators to examine their beliefs and actions toward families.”
Organizations like Flamboyan help willing schools create this partnership. In other communities where schools do not seek out parents as partners, nonprofits work to inform and organize parents so they understand the power they can exercise independently outside of school to help educate their children, and to equip them with the knowledge and tools to do it.
Some may say that parents empowered as educators aren’t really “power that drives systems change” because their engagement improves the education of individual children and does not take on any fundamental structural issues within the system. I would offer two points in response.
First, research shows that parent engagement in the education of their children is associated with a positive impact on learning. A 2015 Johns Hopkins evaluation of Flamboyan found that its work to create parent/school partnerships was associated with lower truancy and better reading outcomes.
Second, a journey of empowerment has to start somewhere. For many parents, realizing they have the power to contribute to the education of their children is in itself a mighty thing. And for some, exercising their power for their individual children helps them realize that this is only the start of what they can do. It also helps them identify whether there are larger structural challenges in their school or school system – and whether they have the power to address them.