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Joining Together to
Create a Bold Vision for
Next Generation
Family Engagement
Engaging Families to
Transform Education
Prepared by
Global Family Research Project
October 2018
A REPORT FOR
Chris Barron
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This research consistently
conrms that family
engagement is one of the
most powerful predictors
of children’s development,
educational attainment, and
success in school and life.
“
”
Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Education
Program seeks to bring together families, com-
munities, students, educators, policymakers, and
the public in support of an equitable and high-quality
educational system. We need all of these perspectives at
the table if we are to create and advocate for the kinds
of student-centered learning experiences that will allow
all students to master academic content aligned with
the standards; gain future-ready knowledge, skills, and
dispositions; and succeed in postsecondary learning and
careers. We seek to empower these stakeholders to drive
change and demand more equitable policies and practic-
es that prepare all students to be active participants in a
robust democracy and dynamic global economy.
We believe that investing in parents and families is an
indispensable part of this process. Through its grantmak-
ing, the Corporation has supported nonprot organiza-
tions that work with parents in meaningful and empow-
ering ways: listening to their needs and beliefs, informing
and supporting their decision-making, building their
capacities to help their children and their schools thrive,
and enabling them to advocate and organize to improve
student outcomes and educational systems.
Years of practice and research into learning have es-
tablished an unquestionable insight: when parents are
engaged in their children’s education, students succeed.
In the 1970s for instance, a long-term study of childhood
interventions conrmed that a focus on a child’s holistic
developmental pathway, combined with family engage-
ment eorts, can create lasting positive eects. Research
has also taught us that children learn anywhere, anytime,
and not just in school—and with this understanding
comes the realization that the families play a central role
in supporting learning and building learning pathways.
Children are awake for about 6,000 hours a year, and
only about 1,000 of those hours are spent in school. If
we are to tackle the achievement gap and the inequities
that contribute to it, we must pay attention not only to
schools, but also to the places where children spend the
rest of those 5,000 hours.1 Studies by the Global Family
Research Project and other organizations conrm that
the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income
students is largely tied to an “opportunity gap”—dier-
ences in families’ ability to access learning and enrich-
ment experiences both in and out of school.
Family and community engagement is complex and
nuanced. While existing research points to promising
and eective strategies, questions remain. We need to
discover the best methods for enabling families, educa-
tors, and community practitioners and leaders to join
forces, and to be cognizant of the kinds of commitments
and support necessary to foster mutual trust and shared
responsibility. We need to nd ways to address the fact
that culture and everyday community activities not only
fundamentally shape family, school, and community
engagement practices, but also are at their very heart. We
need to learn more about how to integrate family engage-
ment in the design of schools, policies, and practices. It is
no longer enough for family engagement to be placed at
the margins of our approach to children’s development.
A critical mass of research and practice shows that we
should be looking for ways to place it at the center of our
thinking.
In the past two years, we have seen growing momentum
among funders, policymakers, and local and national
organizations to support family engagement eorts.
Carnegie Corporation of New York is part of this move-
ment. In order to inform our grantmaking and begin a
national conversation about an old truth gaining renewed
interest, we commissioned Dr. Heather Weiss, codirector
of the Global Family Research Project, to write a Carnegie
challenge paper on family and community engagement.
This paper highlights the fact that while family and
community engagement is one of the strongest predictors
of children’s learning, overall development, and well-be-
ing—and of their educational and life success—it has not
been central to conversations about educational improve-
ment, equity, and reinvention eorts. Nor has it gotten
the investment it warrants from public policymakers,
grantmakers, and others. We hope this challenge paper
will function as a call to action, stimulating an inclusive
and growing national movement to place families at the
center of our collective goal to ensure the well-being and
success of our children.
Ambika Kapur
Program Officer, Education, National Program
LaVerne Srinivasan
Vice President, National Program and Program Director, Education
1 H. Weiss, M. Elena Lopez and Margaret Caspe, Carnegie Challenge Paper: Joining Together to Create a Bold Vision for Next Generation Family Engagement, Global Family Research Project, 2018.
1
Table of Contents
3 Starting with Families
5 What Does It Take to Meet This Challenge?
5 Looking Back and Around to Move Ahead
10 What Does Family Engagement Look Like in Action?
12 Meeting the Challenge Through Changing Mindsets and Cocreation
17 Maximizing Impact: Five High-Leverage Areas
24 Conclusion: Joining Together to Build the Bold Vision
26 Authors
27 Endnotes
2
3
Starting with Families
Using their night-shift “lunch” breaks and week-
ends, over 500 Los Angeles janitors with young
children ages 3–8 participated in parent en-
gagement workshops led by parent leaders. These work-
shops—an adaptation of the Abriendo Puertas/Opening
Doors family engagement model and organized under
the auspices of the UCLA Labor Center’s Parent Worker
Project—were designed and implemented with parents.
They had the goal of empowering families to be their
children’s rst teachers, to act as leaders and advo-
cates, and to see themselves as the creators of learning
pathways for their children across home, school, and
community. Among other activities, families drew and
shared maps of free resources at museums, libraries,
the UCLA campus, parks, landmarks, and other sites in
their community, and went on eld trips to these sites,
exposing themselves to new places and activities, and
expanding their families’ learning opportunities as a
result.
This project began with a survey of the janitor members
of the SEIU–United Service Workers West—mostly new
immigrants and parents and grandparents—regarding
their expectations for their children and priority areas
for union work. When asked about their ideas for union
projects, the janitors identied a good education as
their priority—even over other important issues such as
health and immigration reform. Families wanted their
children to complete high school and get a further de-
gree, but their children were attending under-resourced
schools, where only 12 percent of students were meeting
high school equivalency requirements, dropout rates
reached 50 percent, and only 4 percent of students went
on to enroll in higher education. Through the union’s
eorts, and with parents’ active participation, parents
have gone on to become workshop leaders and organiz-
ers, further developing the parent engagement program
and expanding it citywide. Despite their long work
hours—as many as 60–80 in a week—and low wages,
these families are determined to build a better life for
their own children and other children.1
The families in this opening case study and many oth-
ers around the country are acting on what 50 years of
research tell us about the powerful roles families play
not simply in what children learn, but also how they
learn—especially when it comes to building equitable
learning pathways for their children from birth through
high school and beyond. This research consistently con-
rms that family engagement is one of the most pow-
erful predictors of children’s development, educational
attainment, and success in school and life. It underscores
the clear benets, both for children and communities, of
prioritizing and investing in eorts to empower families
to support their children’s learning as a key strategy in
achieving greater educational equity and social justice—
goals that are now more urgent than ever.
As the Los Angeles story illustrates, family and communi-
ty engagement is a shared responsibility. It asks families
to prioritize learning, and communities (in this case
the union) to foster the conditions that enable families
to do just that. Here, as in many other places that have
achieved robust family engagement, a trusted community
partner listened to and worked with families to cocre-
ate strategies that enabled families to be informed and
involved in their children’s learning in meaningful ways.
Family engagement is arguably a public good: a public
benet results when every family can play a robust role
in ensuring that their own children and other children
get the 21st-century knowledge and skills they need to
prepare for the workforce, for civic and community life,
and for lifelong learning.
4
There is now a growing recognition of the value of
family and community when it comes to school reform
eorts, working towards educational equity, and closing
achievement gaps. Carnegie Corporation of New York
is providing philanthropic leadership in this eort to
establish a broad, diverse, and inclusive national con-
versation about how family and community engagement
can be a key strategy for building excellent and equitable
education systems. This Carnegie challenge paper is part
of that endeavor, and we oer it with the hope that it will
spur others to bring their ideas and perspectives into the
growing discussion and contribute to shared eorts to
expand interest and support for family and community
engagement.
Heightened attention to family engagement is occurring
at a time when the eld is particularly vibrant, with inno-
vations emerging from a variety of disciplines: from neu-
roscience to behavioral economics to strategic and digital
communication. The infusion of fresh perspectives,
questions, and investments from foundations, social en-
trepreneurs, social venture funds, employers, and labor
unions, as well as from the nonprot and public sectors,
is strengthening this work tremendously, not least be-
cause it is prompting useful reection and debate about
what the vision and goals for next generation family and
community engagement should be and how to expand its
power and impact.
We dene next generation family engagement as mov-
ing from where we are now—a scattered, marginal, and
unaligned set of programs and policies—to more strate-
gic and systemic approaches to family and community
engagement in and out of school and from birth through
young adulthood.
We believe that the eld is ready to move to the next level
and to take on a big, next generation challenge, one with
great potential payo.
How do we work with families and
communities to cocreate the next
generation of family and community
engagement, providing equitable
learning pathways—both in school and
out of school and from birth to young
adulthood—that will enable all children
to be successful in the 21st century?
5
What Does It Take to Meet
This Challenge?
Meeting this challenge requires ensuring that all
families and communities—not just econom-
ically advantaged ones—have what it takes
to build equitable learning pathways for their children,
including high-quality schools and out-of-school learn-
ing opportunities. Achieving this requires a major shift
in thinking—a shift from devaluing and doing to and for
families to one of valuing and cocreating with them. The
latter approach foregrounds asking questions, listening,
empowering, sharing perspectives and information, part-
nering, codesigning, implementing, and assessing new
approaches and solutions, and supporting parent leader-
ship and advocacy for educational equity and change.
This challenge paper starts with a brief overview of what
we have learned over the past 50 years of family engage-
ment research, practice, and policy, and a look at how
this work has guided the challenge we have laid out. We
go on to suggest key design principles and processes for
building next generation family and community engage-
ment. We then describe what the idea of cocreation looks
like in practice, and the multiple roles families can and
do play in building equitable learning pathways for their
own children and other children. This analysis is followed
by a discussion of how families, schools, and community
organizations are making the shift to cocreating family
and community engagement, the innovations that result
from this move, and the strategies being used to move
away from one-o programs to more continuous engage-
ment all along children’s learning pathways, both in and
out of school.
We next suggest ve “high leverage” areas to consid-
er in building family engagement strategies—areas
that research and practice demonstrate are potentially
transformative in individual and structural ways. These
include: attendance, data pathways, academic and social
development, digital media, and transitions. We conclude
with suggestions for ve areas of investment in next gen-
eration family and community engagement: community
initiatives, capacity building and professional develop-
ment, data pathways, public policy change, and public
communication and engagement strategies. Throughout
the following pages, we invite the reader to oer addi-
tional areas, objectives, and ideas in order to deepen and
advance the conversation.
At the outset, it is crucial to recognize that poverty, racial
discrimination, and immigration policies make it in-
creasingly dicult for families and communities to build
equitable learning pathways for their children. Without
addressing these systemic problems and the inherent
biases and stereotypes associated with them, it will be
impossible to realize the fullest potential for all children
and families, no matter how robust family and communi-
ty engagement eorts become. Fair immigration, livable
wages, health care, universal childcare, and paid family
leave are all necessary policy reforms and crucial pre-
conditions for enabling all families to engage with their
children’s learning.
Looking Back and Around to
Move Ahead
When we speak of family and community en-
gagement today, we build on over half a cen-
tury of developmental research, programs,
practices, and policies designed to equalize educational
opportunity that emerged during the War on Poverty.
In this era, the framework or paradigm for understand-
ing children’s development broadened—shifting from
studying children in labs to looking at their development
6
over time within an expanded ecology of home, school,
and community. Widening the lens in this way allowed
for three crucial insights when it comes to giving children
the chance to learn to the best of their ability and get the
skills that they need to succeed:
(1) from birth on, children learn anywhere, anytime;
(2) families play multiple, pivotal roles all along chil-
dren’s developmental pathway, from infancy to adult-
hood, and;
(3) communities and public policy are important players
when it comes to enabling all families to create strong
and equitable learning opportunities and pathways.
Since these observations were made, a steady stream
of research has conrmed them, and many parent
and community groups, schools, researchers, and others
have successfully built, evaluated, and improved pro-
grams and initiatives that oer families the tools and
support they need to nurture their children’s learning
and development.
A brief history of family and community
engagement
Looking at how developmental psychologists, educators,
and policymakers used this new ecological understanding
of children’s development to create a strong research,
policy, and practice base is instructive for two reasons.
First, it oers specic insights and principles that could
inform the design of next generation family and com-
munity engagement today. Second, it yields a powerful
lesson about how meaningful change can take place. By
taking a broader view, these stakeholders realized that
good schools were a necessary but not sucient part
of equalizing opportunity and creating pathways out of
poverty for children. Rather, it was essential to begin ear-
lier—with early childhood programs incorporating strong
family and community engagement—and to continue this
engagement through high school.
As inuential advisors to public policymakers in the
1960s intent on increasing educational opportunity,
reducing poverty, and increasing social mobility for
children, this group largely built the policy infrastructure
for the kinds of family and community engagement that
we have now. They were instrumental in designing Head
Start, with its emphasis on the whole child in context; in
supporting families as children’s rst teachers, as adult
learners, and as leaders in program governance; and in
establishing strong connections to the community so that
low-income families could access necessary social and
economic support.
They also played a major role in the landmark 1965
Elementary and Secondary Education Act, reauthorized
as today’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), succeed-
ing in writing into the bill an enduring mandate and
earmarked funding for family engagement. They urged
research, development, and evaluation work focused on
early childhood home visitation, leading to the creation
of the 2012 Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home
Visiting Act, which set aside federal funds so that states
could establish home visitation programs for low-income
and immigrant families. In addition to establishing a
solid knowledge base and sophisticated program models,
these historical eorts put money on the table for family
and community engagement that endures to this day.
Some part of this funding could potentially be used to
build next generation family and community engagement
pathways from early childhood forward.
In the years that followed, researchers continually tested
a key proposition: that high-quality early childhood ed-
ucation combined with strong family engagement would
generate immediate and long-term benets for children
by reinforcing and supporting families’ continuing and
crucial role in their children’s developmental pathways.
They developed clinical trials to test this proposition, and
over the years pushed for longitudinal evaluations to see
7
if there were enduring eects. A combination of private
philanthropy and federal government nancing played an
important part in underwriting this work.
Three key interventions emerged from these eorts: the
Perry Preschool Project, the Abecedarian Project, and the
still extant and inuential Chicago Child-Parent Cen-
ters (CPC). Each included high-quality early childhood
services, frequent home visits, and other family engage-
ment activities, and each fostered family engagement
from preschool through the rst few years of elementary
school. Research conrmed that the guiding proposition
was correct—that high-quality early education combined
with strong family engagement would generate short and
long-term benets for children—and since then there
has emerged strong longitudinal research to arm that
the experimental groups had greater immediate and
enduring gains than did the control groups. Many other
evaluations of major early childhood home-visit models,
at the time and in the years since, have demonstrated the
benets of family engagement strategies alone as well as
in combination with high-quality early childhood educa-
tion, including Early Head Start.2
Such work in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s inspired a growing
interest in family and community engagement and cata-
lyzed a “virtuous circle” in local communities, states, and
national arenas alike: human and nancial investment,
innovation and use of research to inform it, evaluation,
and continuous learning for improvement. Today, we
continue to reap the benets of the investments in that
work, as families, schools, and communities around the
country develop and improve programs and initiatives
that empower families to support their children’s learn-
ing, and as educational researchers track the country’s
progress on increasing opportunity and decreasing
achievement gaps. Indeed, national data show that
the gaps in early learning readiness between children
from upper- and lower-income homes are decreasing,
and these shrinking disparities are due in large part to
children being exposed to more books and reading in
the home, having greater access to educational games on
computers, and engaging more with parents both inside
and outside of the home.3
Recent groundbreaking longitudinal studies reveal the
benets of these early investments and the importance
of continuing robust and multifaceted family and com-
munity engagement during the transition to school and
through the elementary years. The investigations provide
strong evidence for educational leaders’ calls to build
continuous family and community engagement into any
and all school improvement and reform eorts.4 These
studies, including a long-term follow-up of the Child-Par-
ent Centers (CPC) noted above, examined data on the
performance of schools serving low-income elementary
school students in Chicago and found that integrating
sustained family and community engagement was a key
contributor to the schools’ substantial improvement in
literacy and math achievement.5
Importantly, these studies are among the rst to look
at family engagement not alone, but in relation to its inte-
gration and interaction with other core aspects of school
quality, including school leadership, professional devel-
opment, learning climate, and curriculum. The CPC study
demonstrates that when family engagement pathways
are forged in early childhood and continue through high
school, participating children have higher graduation
rates and college attainment than those who do not take
part—and the mechanism responsible for these long-term
impacts is parents’ sustained and consistent engagement.
A longitudinal evaluation of the aforementioned Perry
Preschool, which incorporated a once-a-week home visit
to families as part of its programming, established that
students in the program group outperformed students
in the control group when it came to the highest level of
school completed, and those students were also more
8
likely to be employed at age 40. This statistic represents
the economic equivalent of a 3 percent return to society.
A renewed focus on racial and economic
inequities
Using a wider lens to look at consequential dierenc-
es in learning opportunity, economists are also able to
identify disparities in spending on out-of-school learning
for children between more and less advantaged fami-
lies, disparities that are increasing and contributing to
achievement gaps. Their work makes clear that if we are
really going to decrease educational inequities and ensure
all children succeed, especially those living in poverty,
we have to pay attention to the whole learning ecology,
not just to schools alone. Children are awake for about
6,000 hours a year. They spend only about 1,000 of these
hours in school—spending the remaining 5,000 hours at
home and in the community, at after-school and summer
programs, and in lessons, sports, and other enrichment
activities. (Figure 1.)
By sixth grade, economically advantaged children have
spent 6,000 more hours learning out of school than their
counterparts born into poverty, according to ExpandED.
(Figure 2.) Income plays an important role in accounting
for this dierence. A recent analysis indicates that as
of 2005–06, low-income
families spent about $1,400
on these extracurricular
learning activities, while
higher-income families com-
mitted about $9,300.6 As
income inequality increases,
so will such spending gaps.
The reasons have little to do
with families’ priorities: the
account of the Los Ange-
les families with which we
opened this paper and many other examples make clear
that lower-income families are acutely aware of the im-
portance of out-of-school learning and of using advocacy
and other means to ensure their children have access
to such resources. In 2018, parent leaders from PAVE
(Parents Amplifying Voices in Education) in Washington,
D.C., have likewise identied lack of access to out-of-
school time opportunities as the biggest missing link in
their children’s education and developed an organizing
strategy to increase funding for such opportunities in un-
der-resourced areas and reduce barriers to participation.
Their activism resulted in an increase in funding for out-
of-school time opportunities in the proposed scal year
2019 budget by $10.56 million—and over $20.25 million
in total investments.7 As we will note many times in this
report, parents, along with the network of organizations
and services involved in out-of-school time opportunities
for children, are actively addressing these disparities,
identifying creative and eective solutions, and nding
the means to engage lower-income families and their
children. The result is an emerging web of “anywhere,
anytime” learning for children and families, one that
actively reinforces and supports families’ roles in closing
opportunity gaps by creating robust learning pathways
for their children.
Figure 1: Ecology of Learning as conceptualized by the STEM Learning Ecosystems Initiative.
SOURCE: TIES Teaching Institute for Excellence in STEM
9
At the outset of this short run through the history of
family and community engagement, we suggested that
in addition to oering specic insights to consider when
codesigning the next generation of family and community
engagement, this history oers a larger insight into how
to achieve such goals. People saw enormous inequality
and addressed it by setting up a policy base for action
and conducting research and evaluation to inform it. The
investments in this eort led to a proliferation of com-
munity-based innovation and yielded a substantial body
of research and practice knowledge—one that will create
a strong platform as we work to develop next genera-
tion family and community engagement for the future.
We would like to lay out what we think are some of the
important lessons and design principles that resulted
from this foundational work, and ask readers to consid-
er, critique, and build their own set of lessons to inform
future endeavors.
PARENTS
AFTER-SCHOOL & EXTRA-CURRICULARS
SUMMER LEARNING
FIELD TRIPS
6,000 HOURS DIFFERENCE BY THE 6TH GRADE.
That’s how much more time Jack’s family
members are likely to have spent reading to
him, compared to Mike’s.
PRESCHOOL
That’s the dierence between having and
not having Pre-K education, which kids like
Mike access at significantly lower levels.
Kids like Mike lose more ground in grade
school. They’re significantly less likely to be
able to enroll in enriching activities.
Children like Jack are eight times more likely
than Mike to enjoy camp or another summer
learning opportunity.
That’s how much more time Jack has likely
spent than Mike visiting zoos, museums or
other such places during summers.
Learning time is a resource that is unequally distributed,
and disadvantaged students suer the consequences.
While middle class children learn to read, create,
persist and problem-solve at home and through
after-school and summer experiences, parents stressed
by poverty are far less likely to be able to ensure those
opportunities for their children.
THE
HOUR LEARNING GAP
By the time they reach 6th
grade, middle class kids have
likely spent 6,000 more
hours learning than kids born
into poverty.
SOURCES: Hoerth and Sandberg (2000) / Bureau of Labor Statistics (2012) / Barnett and Nores (2012) /
Barnett, et al. (2012) / Wimer, et al. (2002); Afterschool Alliance (2013) / Gutiérrez , K. D., et al. (2010) /
Wimer, et al. (2006) / McLaughlin & Pitcock (2009) / Meyer, D., et al. (2004) / Institute of Museum and
Library Services (2008) / Balfanz, R. (2009) / PBS Frontline, (2012)
Jack’s family
has the means
to help him
explore all
kinds of
learning
opportunities.
Mike was born
into poverty,
with fewer
chances at
every turn
to discover
and grow.
3,060
HOURS
1,080
HOURS
245
HOURS
1,395
HOURS
220
HOURS
www.expandedschools.org
Figure 2: The 6,000 Hour Learning Gap by ExpandED Schools
10
What Does Family Engagement
Look Like in Action?
As is clear from this overview, there is strong
research to support and expand public policies
that take up the challenge of developing and
funding the next generation of family and community
engagement. But what does a process that foregrounds
asking questions, listening, empowering, sharing per-
spectives and information, partnering, codesigning,
implementing, and assessing new approaches and solu-
tions, and supporting family leadership and advocacy for
educational equity and change look like in practice?
While there are many examples to choose from17, the
case of Zavala Elementary School in Central East Austin,
Texas, deftly illustrates the many roles that families and
communities play in building more equitable pathways
for their own children and other children.18 The roles
depicted in Figure 3, evident in the Zavala example, are
drawn from developmental research and evaluations of
interventions, as well as from the substantial body of
practice knowledge about eective family and community
engagement. Figure 3 is a living illustration, as readers
and emerging research and practice may suggest addi-
tional important roles.
In the early 1990s, the Texas Industrial Areas Founda-
tion (Texas IAF), an organization committed to helping
predominantly Hispanic and black families living in
poverty gain power to improve their lives, turned the
school around. Zavala went from being a school with high
teacher turnover to one experiencing low teacher change,
from a rank of 33rd out of 63 schools in the district for
student attendance to rst place, and from a pass rate on
state-mandated reading and mathematics tests that was
half the district average to one that exceeded the citywide
Principles of Research and Practice
for Building Family and Community
Engagement
1. Families matter when it comes to children’s devel-
opment and learning, from birth into and through-
out adolescence.8
2. Family engagement is a shared responsibility
among families, schools, and communities, and
is an essential ingredient—along with leader-
ship, coherent instructional systems, professional
learning efforts, and student-centered learning
climates—in any effort to ensure the success of
low-income children.9
3. Family engagement pathways must begin early,
persist across time, and transform according to
age and context.10
4. Family engagement takes place across a variety of
settings, including homes, schools, and community
spaces, as well as libraries, after-school programs,
and museums.11
5. Family engagement builds on families’ strengths
and culture and creates equity.12
6. Family engagement interventions, when part of
a larger, comprehensive initiative, can make a
difference for children and families.13
7. Family engagement recognizes that families
play multiple roles in students’ development and
learning.14
8. Family engagement is most effective when it brings
families, educators, and communities together to
cocreate strategies that achieve mutually agreed
upon outcomes for children, families, schools, and
communities.15
9. Family engagement requires shifts in the mindsets
of families, teachers, and others who work with
children, changes in organizations’ policies, and
broader public understanding of the importance
of family engagement and what it entails in their
community.16
11
average. From start to nish, parent leadership and advo-
cacy played a key role in this success. How did they do it?
Ask and Listen: The process began with the organiz-
ers identifying parent leaders and asking about parent
concerns. Out of these conversations, they identied
three critical areas of concern: inadequate health care,
neighborhood crime and security, and lack of after-school
activities and jobs for teenagers to counter gangs. The
organizers also met with the local school’s principal and
teachers, and as a consequence were made aware of prob-
lems with sta morale and low student achievement.
Empower: With support from parents, Texas IAF
entered a formal partnership with the school to work on
school improvement, including creating opportunities for
parents to participate in school governance. The parents
rst called for the creation of a student health clinic.
Teachers supported them in this eort, participating in a
neighborhood walk to gather support, attending hearings
before the school board, and holding the mayor account-
able to deliver on the promise.
Share Perspectives and Information: Building on
the trust and relationships established between parents
and teachers through this collaboration and bolstered by
the principal’s leadership and commitment to change,
Texas IAF held a workshop intended to share informa-
tion with parents about student achievement. To the
dismay of many, parents discovered that while their
students were getting As and Bs on their report cards,
they were only in the bottom quartile on state tests,
which meant they would be disqualied from competitive
middle schools and high school magnet programs. Armed
with this alarming new information, parents dug in and
demanded change.
Figure 3: The multiple roles families play in building learning pathways.
12
Partner, Codesign, Implement, Assess, and
Improve: In response to parents’ demands and clear
support, the principal and teachers raised their expecta-
tions for the students, worked on improving instructional
practices, introduced new language arts and mathematics
curricula proven to improve the performance of children
with economic disadvantages, and eventually reported on
progress.
Lead and Advocate: With support from the school,
parents successfully advocated for a health clinic and,
later, an after-school program with 30 dierent course
oerings, as well as a special science program that at-
tracted many community resources and put students on
the path to the junior high magnet science program. At
the parents’ request, teachers also identied ways par-
ents could support student learning at home, including
fostering a growth mindset; identifying and building on
children’s interests and strengths; monitoring homework,
attendance, and performance; and holding high expecta-
tions for achievement, school success, and postsecondary
education and work.
Meeting the Challenge
Through Changing Mindsets
and Cocreation
Meeting the challenge laid out in this paper re-
quires a commitment to ensuring that all fam-
ilies and communities, not just economically
advantaged ones, can build equitable learning pathways
for their children—pathways that include high-quality
schools as well as out-of-school learning opportunities.
This demands a major shift in mindset, from one of
devaluing and doing to and for families to one of valuing
and cocreating with them: asking questions, listening,
empowering, sharing perspectives and information, part-
nering, codesigning, implementing, and assessing new
approaches and solutions, and supporting parent lead-
ership and advocacy for educational equity and change.
It means building on family strengths and working with
families to cocreate and dive deeper into their beliefs,
norms, and practices. It means setting policies for schools
and other organizations that combat racial and economic
inequalities, and creating opportunities for teachers to
hone their understanding of how inequality manifests
itself in children’s and families’ lives. It means rejecting
old scripts about families and seeking a true understand-
ing of how families experience their children’s learning
and growth and the conditions that enhance or inhibit
those aspirations.
Cocreating family-school relationships
When relationships with educators are characterized by
mutual respect, trust, open communication, and inclu-
sion in decision-making, families are more likely to feel
condent about their roles as advocates and become
more engaged in their children’s learning. Positive rela-
tionships between educators and families even benet
children’s health, social and emotional well-being, and
cognitive skills.19 Yet these relationships do not hap-
pen overnight, nor do they exist in a vacuum. They are
fundamentally shaped by and built upon a community’s
culture—its beliefs, goals, social norms, practices, every-
day routines, languages, and economic resources.20
We begin with a focus on the relationships between
families and teachers because this is the essential con-
nection between families and schools. Yet there is often a
mismatch between the expectations, beliefs, and prac-
tices held by teachers and families, which can result in
the false belief that ethnically diverse and low-income
families are less engaged and invested than middle-class
white families when it comes to taking responsibility for
13
their children’s learning and establishing school-home
partnerships. A robust body of literature debunks this
myth, and as that research and the stories in this paper
suggest, there are a range of tacit and often unrecognized
ways that families are engaged in children’s learning. The
most eective family engagement initiatives build upon
and transform families’ strengths—their funds of knowl-
edge—in ways that connect families and schools mean-
ingfully to enrich student learning.21 This approach does
not attempt to replicate and transmit school values and
activities to the home; rather, it reframes relationships by
creating programs, initiatives, and strategies with instead
of for families.22
Changing this narrative requires two interrelated ap-
proaches. First, it requires understanding the context
in which families live. Poverty inuences family invest-
ments in their children’s learning.23 Many families living
in poverty reside in neighborhoods where safety issues,
social isolation, noise, and the presence of lead paint are
not conducive to learning. Neither do poor families have
the discretionary income to buy books and educational
toys or to expose their children to enrichment activities in
the after-school hours. Jobs performed by poor families
often involve long hours and little exibility, making
it dicult for them to participate in school activities.
Immigrant families often face the additional challenges
of limited English prociency and dierences in cultural
expectations regarding families’ roles in both school and
out-of-school learning. Schools and community groups
must recognize these constraints and create conditions
and opportunities for families to build learning pathways
for their children, regardless of socioeconomic status or
linguistic or cultural background.
Second, changing this narrative requires developing em-
pathy—putting oneself in another’s place and imagining
what that person feels and experiences. This is another
way to move from family engagement practices that
educators think families need and want to ones based
on what families desire and value. As in the Los Angeles
janitors’ story at the beginning of the paper, this requires
schools and community institutions to take the initiative
to listen to families, support what they want to learn
and do, empower them to make informed decisions and
actions, and develop their capacity for community leader-
ship. The institutions can also encourage open dialogues
about race and ethnicity among students, families, and
educators with the help of skilled facilitators. Bringing
these issues to the table can clarify misconceptions and
pave the way for cocreated and from-the-ground-up fam-
ily, school, and community partnerships.24
A number of cutting-edge initiatives are working to make
these shifts in mindset possible at a systemic level. For
example, Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors is a compre-
hensive training program developed by and for Latino
parents with children ages birth to 5 years. Parent input
shapes all aspects of the Abriendo Puertas curriculum,
which engages parents in lessons that reect the culture
of the families who take part, including the importance
of reading and understanding how language develops.
Participation in Abriendo Puertas increases educational
activities at home, parents’ approaches to reading with
their children, and library use.25 These shifts begin in the
home, move into schools as children age, and eventually
lead to advocacy at the community level—parents who
have participated in Abriendo Puertas have gone on to
take part in campaigns to increase early childhood fund-
ing, promote immigrant policies, and improve the public
school curriculum.26
Another example of codesign comes from Dr. Marta Civil
at the University of Arizona, who builds the capacity of
teachers to partner with families by changing the con-
texts in which teachers come to know, understand, and
interact with families. In her work, preservice and in-ser-
vice teachers of mathematics learn to understand that
14
mathematics is cultural, that families have mathematical
strengths, and that math learning is most powerful when
families, students, and teachers are co-learners. Teachers
conduct home visits to discover mathematical strengths
within the community and then integrate those strengths
into classroom curriculum and parent meetings. Parents
participate in teacher-hosted math “tertulias” and get-to-
gethers, where groups of families and teachers talk about
math.
Teacher home visits are proving to be a valuable tool for
addressing teachers’ implicit biases, especially about
students of color and those from low-income households.
The Parent Teacher Home Visit program was co-created
by parents, teachers, and community groups in Sacra-
mento, California, in 1988. Parents from a low-income
neighborhood used community organizing principles
to build trust and accountability between parents and
teachers and disrupt a cycle of blaming each other for
low student achievement by putting in place a home
visit system. They worked with teachers and community
groups to rene the idea, and today the program oper-
ates in more than 20 states. In this model, educators
are trained to focus on what is positive—families’ and
educators’ shared aspirations for their students—and to
dispel inherent biases about families as a “problem” that
needs to be xed. The model has been shown to support
shifts in mindset that improve home-school partnerships.
Families learned that their relationships with educators
need not be negative or uncomfortable, and many educa-
tors came to recognize their mistaken assumptions and
develop an understanding of and empathy for students
and their families.27
Building the skills and capacities for collaboration that
families, teachers, and organizations need in order to
cocreate family and community engagement is a priori-
ty. Deriving from coursework and professional learning
opportunities, several methods that foster empathy and
changes in perspective are being used in and across dif-
ferent learning contexts:
• Using family engagement cases in the training of
preservice and graduate teachers is an eective tool for
creating dialogue around teachers’ implicit biases and
assumptions about families, especially when paired
with a tool like an empathy map.28 Deepening the
mutual understanding between people involved with
children’s learning is not simply a matter of concern
for parents and teachers, however: community groups
and city organizations like the Family Policy Council in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, have eectively used family
engagement cases for the collective training of every-
one working with families—family outreach workers,
teachers, health providers, public housing sta, police,
and more—using cases created from dilemmas in their
own work.29
• Human-centered design thinking is an eective tool for
building strong relationships between families and ed-
ucators.30 Design thinking provides an opportunity for
educators to listen and learn from families and cocreate
action steps to address parents’ concerns. For example,
in a design-thinking exercise in San Diego, families felt
empowered when they spoke in their own languages—
Somali, Karen, Vietnamese, etc. School personnel had
to listen to translations of the families’ discussion, a
reversal of the more common practice whereby fami-
lies have to listen to school personnel talk to them via
translators. Families shared their stories, and educators
were not allowed to speak but asked only to listen. Both
families and educators felt that this experience estab-
lished trust. For educators, it also gave them a better
understanding of students and their families.31
• At the Cleveland Public Library, librarians participate
in the Community Action Poverty Simulation oered
by the Ohio Association of Foodbanks. The simulation
15
focuses on the experiences of individuals moving from
one public agency to another, trying to gain access to
resources. After the role play, librarians discuss how to
ensure that the library not become another unfriend-
ly bureaucracy but rather an institution that bolsters
people and communities. In this way, librarians learn to
build nonjudgmental relationships so that families are
drawn to the library.32
Changing organizational narratives
In order for families to share responsibility and play all
the key roles in children’s learning and development, it is
necessary to change not only individual but also organi-
zational approaches and underlying attitudes. Schools
and other organizations working with families to support
children’s success must shift from devaluing families to
valuing and creating the organizational conditions that
enable their engagement. This happens when organiza-
tions build relational trust—ties and bonds among all
community stakeholders. In schools, relational trust is
built upon a fundamental belief that family engagement
is a shared responsibility among families, schools, and
communities.33 From this perspective, as emphasized in
both the National Head Start Parent, Family, and Com-
munity Engagement Framework and the U.S. Depart-
ment of Education’s Dual Capacity-Building Framework
for Family-School Partnerships, family engagement is
not about families supporting school goals and priori-
ties. Rather, it is about creating a mutual responsibility
for supporting students’ academic success. It requires
codesigning coherent instructional systems, investing
in the development of strong parent-community-school
ties, fostering student-centered learning, and building
strong leadership. A critical component of this process is
building professional capacity for family engagement and
helping teachers overcome their own implicit biases.
A recent Harvard Business Review article oers some
insight into how organizations might achieve the goal of
creating a culture of shared responsibility. It focuses on a
dierent, but analogous, situation: how some companies
are transforming their organizations in order to retain
talented women in the workforce.34 Building on research
that shows that dierences in workplace behavior are
not due to inherent gender traits, some companies are
moving from trying to “x” women—encouraging them to
act more like their male counterparts—to examining and
changing their own organizational structures, practices,
and patterns of interaction to support their success. They
are looking more deeply at how preconceptions, assump-
tions, myths, beliefs, and policies create gender dierenc-
es in behavior, and are taking a new, four-step approach
to changing organizational cultures. With the goal of
creating a more supportive workplace and maximizing
the chance of women’s success in the workplace, these
companies are beginning to: (1) question the dominant
narrative; (2) generate plausible alternative explanations;
(3) change the context, including behaviors, expectations,
and opportunities, and assess results; and (4) promote
continual learning and improvement, recognizing that
stereotypes hurt their goal of retaining talent.
Changing narratives and mindsets around family and
community engagement is likewise necessary, and sever-
al important and interrelated national eorts to do so are
underway. The National Association for Family, School,
and Community Engagement (NAFSCE) is developing
a communication campaign to shift public attention
to the power and potential of family engagement and
build a countrywide movement to support it. NAFSCE is
developing and testing approaches that replace current
thinking with more productive messages about what
family engagement entails and how it works in communi-
ties. Learning Heroes, a nonprot organization dedicated
to equipping parents to support their children’s learning,
has done a series of illuminating surveys and studies of
how parents perceive schools, understand their children’s
academic performance, and think about their own educa-
16
tional priorities and roles in their children’s education.35
The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading has put together
a growing coalition of national parent-facing organiza-
tions—the Changing the Narrative Coalition—to interrupt
negative perceptions of low-income parents and parents
of color, and build public understanding of their essential
role in achieving positive outcomes for their children.36
Transforming mindsets through
new research agendas
Changing attitudes also means taking research in new
directions. The kind of research that informs our view
of family engagement is multidisciplinary, complex, and
nuanced, and, as with all elds, evolves as contemporary
methods and practices reveal new ideas and approaches.
There is still more work to do, however, to clarify and
make robust the existing evidence base around family
engagement.37 In our view, there are three important
directions for future development to consider.
First and foremost, we need to rethink and reimagine
what counts as evidence. Although randomized control
trials are often considered the gold star in evaluation,
when it comes to family engagement, research is often
more complicated than simply isolating eects and prac-
tices. Family engagement is a dynamic process existing
across time and space. It requires that we not simply
“stack” interventions on top of one another or evaluate
tiny clusters of a larger system to nd a perfect fami-
ly-school-community engagement panacea. Instead, it
challenges us to expand our understanding of the kinds
of research that will help families, schools, and communi-
ties cocreate services, strategies, and initiatives, deter-
mine whether they work in a local context, and decide
what needs to be tweaked, changed, and scaled. Network
Improvement Communities are one promising avenue.
In this approach, families, researchers, community, and
school educators join together to specify a problem that
needs to be solved, understand the system that produces
the current outcomes, gather data about the problem,
measure progress, and create improvements. This type
of work is quick and collaborative, much in the spirit
of design thinking, and has the potential to aid families
and communities in nding fair and meaningful xes for
immediate problems.38
Second, we see tremendous value in mixed-method
approaches to studying family-school-community part-
nerships. From this methodological perspective, both
qualitative methods (for example, ethnographies, inter-
views, and focus groups) and quantitative methods (such
as surveys, polls, and questionnaires) are used so that
a community’s culture and values help to contextualize
and interpret ndings.39 For instance, in a mixed-meth-
od study exploring family engagement practices among
low-income Latino families of preschool children, re-
searchers worked with those families to construct focus
groups. This allowed the researchers to recognize cultur-
ally specic domains of family engagement. They were
then able to apply this empirical data into a survey of
families’ engagement practices across the home, school,
and community. Their work suggests that cultural and
linguistic minorities in the U.S. may have a unique rela-
tionship to their children’s schooling, and that culturally
contextualized measurement can capture nuances in
parent engagement. This has important implications for
designing family-school connections.40
Finally, given the importance of family engagement over
time and across contexts, there is a pressing need for
more longitudinal studies that capture parents’ eorts to
build pathways for their children’s learning. There is also
a need for instruments that describe and detect family
engagement practices at more than just one point in time
in one location. Innovative techniques like pulse sur-
veys—short surveys, repeated at regular intervals, usually
through digital devices—and social networking model-
ing—investigating social structures through networks and
graphs—oer some promise in this regard.
17
Maximizing Impact:
Five High-Leverage Areas
We recommend ve promising high-leverage
areas that might be considered core building
blocks for next generation family engage-
ment strategies, and propose that families, schools, com-
munities, and others use them as a lens to look at what
exists now and what could exist in the future when it
comes to empowering families to support their children’s
learning. By “high leverage,” we mean practices that
create a cascade of broader eects, have the most impact
on family engagement and student outcomes, and can
be built upon, with additional levers added as a strategy
evolves.
The areas we suggest are: attendance, data sharing,
academic and social development, digital media, and
transitions. We also explore connections across schools
and other community organizations to boost the com-
bined power of levers and create more equitable access
to anywhere, anytime learning opportunities in and out
of school. These high-leverage areas hold the promise
of creating continuity in family engagement across time
and settings, and are areas where families, schools, and
communities can join together in concrete ways to build
family engagement to promote children’s success.
We have chosen these areas because robust research
demonstrates their importance in children’s develop-
ment. There are also a number of strong examples of
community-based family and community engagement
initiatives built around each of them, with clear demon-
strations of the ways such engagement has supported
children’s learning, development, and school and life suc-
cess. When families are engaged around these high-lever-
age areas, they are more eective at building learning
pathways and keeping their kids on track. We suggest
that there are synergies across these areas, and that
“braiding” them together creates more equitable learning
pathways for all children, particularly those living with
economic and other disadvantages. (Figure 4.)
Figure 4: Building and Braiding High-Leverage Strands of
Family Engagement for Successful Learning Pathways
18
Attendance
Chronic absenteeism is a widespread problem, and
addressing it is a national priority: one out of seven
students, many of them living in poverty, missed three
or more weeks of school in 2013–14, jeopardizing their
chances of success in school and of graduation.41 The re-
search is clear: attention to attendance is key all along the
learning pathway and is particularly important in early
childhood and pre-K, because children who are chron-
ically absent in the early school years continue in this
pattern. They are thus more likely to miss early learning
milestones (such as reading at grade level by third grade),
fall behind in class, and eventually drop out of school.
Given that attendance and chronic absence are now a
top national and state education priority, there is a huge
opportunity to cocreate and test not only targeted eorts,
but also broader family and community engagement
eorts, which have been shown to improve attendance as
one of a number of learning-related outcomes. The Ele-
mentary and Secondary Education Act and its subsequent
reauthorizations hold states accountable for academic
performance and high school graduation rates. Thirty-six
states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have
chosen “addressing chronic absenteeism” as a benchmark
for measuring their schools’ quality and accountability.42
Families can play a crucial role in combatting absentee-
ism, rst by making clear that they expect their children
to attend school and then by monitoring to make sure
this expectation is met. We are just beginning to under-
stand the range of ways in which family and community
engagement can improve attendance, and the benets for
children and for schools that follow from it. Evaluations
of targeted eorts to engage families around attendance—
providing them with the means to address the issue from
early childhood through high school—show that investing
in family engagement is a high-leverage way to decrease
absenteeism substantially.
As mentioned above, there is evidence that attendance
improves as a result of both family engagement eorts
targeted at ending chronic absenteeism, as well as of
those not explicitly designed to do so. The latter include
whole-school reform eorts like that of Zavala Elemen-
tary School, as well as parent-teacher home visits, which
establish relationships and trust early on; there may well
be others. It is worth noting that the study examining
what distinguished high- from low-performing Chica-
go public schools showed that the high performers had
more family and community engagement. This increased
regular attendance, which in turn enabled improved
instruction and led ultimately to better literacy and math
outcomes in sixth grade.43
This focus on attendance often leads to work in another
of our high-leverage areas: data sharing with families—
providing families with accessible, understandable, and
actionable information about their children’s progress
and performance. Behavioral economists and others have
been conducting a range of experiments testing innova-
tive uses of digital media, in particular communication
via regular text messages to alert families when there are
problems with attendance. These experiments from early
childhood through high school, which involve frequent
“nudges” to families via text messages, are contributing
not only to improved attendance but also to other family
engagement practices that are key in children’s learning
and school success.44 One recent experiment sent parents
automated text messages that alerted them when their
teenagers missed classes or assignments and were getting
low grades. The results were promising: the texts sparked
more informed conversations between parents and their
students, and prompted improved class attendance,
reduced course failures, improved in-class exam scores,
and increased parental contact with schools.45
19
Eorts so far suggest that combining data delivered by
text message with other, on-the-ground eorts, and then
following up with more text messages that suggest ways
of improving students’ performance may be fruitful. The
texts from the “air” prompted “ground” eects: better
informed, more expansive, and regular conversations
between parents and children about the importance of
school, school performance, and ways to improve. As not-
ed in our research summary, as of now some of the most
consistent and positive relationships between family
engagement and student outcomes result from the things
families do that are directly connected to children’s aca-
demic achievement and learning, including setting high
expectations, communicating with children about school,
and encouraging and supporting their eorts. The results
of a recent experiment testing a peer-to-peer support
model for improving attendance in Head Start programs
suggests that eorts to build and use parents’ social con-
nections and social capital may also hold promise.46
Data Sharing
As the attendance “nudges” demonstrate, making data
about students’ performance available to parents from
early childhood on and then helping them take action on
these data are powerful ways to help families build their
children’s educational pathways.47 Billions of dollars are
now spent in the education sector compiling and shar-
ing high-quality data for an array of purposes, including
school accountability and quality improvement, school
choice, improvement of instructional practices, and
advocacy. At the same time, The Data Quality Campaign
notes on its website that families are often not getting
enough value from the student data that schools collect.48
Data are the bedrock on which families can build their
children’s learning pathways, but it is only useful if that
information is accessible, understandable, and action-
able. There has been little investment in the latter issue
to date, making it both a big problem and a high-leverage
opportunity for attention and innovation.
EdNavigator, an employer-supported organization, has
helped many low-income families in New Orleans and
Boston navigate the school system and keep their chil-
dren on track. Its navigators make sure that parents
understand the meaning and implications of data they
receive and know the actions they can take to ensure
their children’s success. They also work to ensure schools
play their part in this process, a responsibility that, in
EdNavigator’s view, many are not meeting: schools rarely
provide clear and complete performance information,
often fail to follow up when problems are identied and
parents ask for help with them, or oer little by way of
in- and out-of-school supports to help high-performing
students continue to succeed. Even gathering these data
has been a challenge for EdNavigator and families alike.
To counter these issues, EdNavigator successfully advo-
cated for a Parent Bill of Rights in Louisiana. This policy
provides parents with electronic access to school records
and data such as attendance, academics, discipline, and
Individualized Education Plans.
As EdNavigator recently noted in a reection on what
they are learning about sharing data, economically
advantaged families start mapping out their children’s
long-term education pathways through high school and
into college very early on, and there should be support
for lower-income families to do the same.49 While there
is a long way to go to make data accessible, understand-
able, and actionable for families and students, there are
a number of examples of organizations that are eec-
tively sharing data with low-income families from early
childhood forward that provide important models and
lessons for achieving this goal. Head Start and other early
childhood programs, for example, aord families the
opportunity to have important conversations about their
20
hopes, goals, and expectations for their children and how
to achieve them, and provide opportunities for mutual
sharing of information about how children are doing and
what parents can do to support them.
The Academic Parent-Teacher Teams (APTT) model
uses both individual and classroom student data in
family-teacher conferences to encourage deeper parent
engagement in student learning.50 In group and indi-
vidual meetings, parents and teachers discuss ways that
learning at home and elsewhere can accelerate prog-
ress. The model provides the scaolding that the Zavala
Elementary School parents demanded, a scaolding
that is necessary if families are to come to a nuanced
understanding of what all the complex performance
measures—grades, test scores, and rankings—mean, and
how they might impact children’s likelihood to stay on
the path to graduation and college. The evaluation of
the APTT model showed increases in parents’ sense of
eectiveness and desire to be involved in their children’s
education, more positive teacher perceptions of families’
willingness to support the school’s learning goals and
assist in achieving them, and improved reading outcomes
for children.51
New Visions for Public Schools in New York City also has
many years of experience working with families to help
them keep their children on track during the transition
to high school and then on to graduation and college.52 It,
too, has learned that educators must be well versed in ex-
plaining not simply what data point or progress snapshot
is important (such as attendance or graduation rate), but
also why it is relevant and how parents can take action
on the data. And as with the APTT model, New Visions
is reframing success not just as immediate performance,
but more broadly in terms of what is necessary to achieve
the student’s longer-term goals, such as selection for a
middle school science magnet program or a successful
transition from high school to college.
New Visions also provides students and parents with
information about after-school and summer learning
opportunities. In addition, there are promising eorts
underway to share data across schools and after-school
programs. A data sharing agreement between Metro
Nashville Public Schools and the city’s after-school pro-
gram, Nashville After Zone Alliance (NAZA), for exam-
ple, gave NAZA access to real-time data on attendance,
behavior, and performance that it can then use to tailor
activities around individual student needs (improvement
in reading, for example).53
Academic and Social Development
The trend towards a more equitable learning ecology is
gaining ground in several key areas, including literacy
and reading, math, and STEM subjects. With the growing
recognition that learning takes place anywhere, any-
time, not just in schools, family engagement strategies
that focus on these content areas enable families to play
crucial and multiple roles in their children’s education
(such as teacher, co-learner, or coach). They also allow us
to recognize the ways in which other learning sites, such
as libraries, after-school programs, and museums, can be
eective partners, collaborators, and support networks
when it comes to ensuring children’s learning progress.
For instance, evidence shows that when families read
together at home and have everyday conversations,
younger children enjoy stronger language and emergent
literacy skills, and older students are more able to use
text to learn new ideas, integrate information, and form
critical opinions.54 Family engagement might be partic-
ularly critical for dual- and English language learners as
they attempt to maintain their native language while also
learning English, a competency linked to more advanced
executive-control and perspective-taking skills.55 When it
comes to STEM subjects, families can increase children’s
21
competencies by creating STEM-rich home environ-
ments, encouraging their children to think of themselves
as STEM learners and consider careers in STEM elds,
and supporting STEM interactions with their children in
and out of school.56
Beyond subject-specic support, families also oer
important social and emotional learning opportuni-
ties. When families talk with their children about their
feelings, relationships, and friendships, and emphasize
eort over performance, children and youth are more
likely to problem solve in emotionally charged situations,
develop a growth mindset, and learn perseverance. These
skills are important predictors for how students will do
in school, and they allow children to avoid risky behav-
iors. Over the long term, they lead to higher educational
attainment and the capacity to stay with a job.57
Among the many roles that families play in support-
ing children’s mastery of content areas like STEM and
literacy is orchestrating the spaces where their students’
learning is best served. When families enroll their chil-
dren in after-school programs, children have a safe space
in which to enrich their cognitive and social and emotion-
al skills. After-school participation is related to academ-
ic improvement, especially in math, and with closing
achievement gaps in the elementary years.58
A number of initiatives and collaborations have been
successful in enabling parents who might feel anxious
about targeted subjects (perhaps because they learned
this material dierently) to adopt these roles, while at
the same time deepening parent-student relationships.
Interestingly, in nearly all of these examples, libraries
have become a powerful hub for linking community agen-
cies and organizations.
Projects like the national Campaign for Grade-Level
Reading and the Neighborhood Literacy Initiative in New
York raise awareness among families about the impor-
tance of reading by creating rich networks of organiza-
tions and information about and access to promising
practices that families can use. STEM Ecosystems seeks
to create a rich array of STEM learning opportunities
across a variety of community settings, including science
centers, museums, and after-school programs. Similarly,
Remake Learning in Pittsburgh is a network of 300 orga-
nizations, including schools, museums, higher education
partners, professional development agencies, workforce
initiatives, and others, that is developing a collabora-
tive vision, goal, and metrics for improving STEM and
STEAM learning opportunities, especially in underserved
communities, all while bringing parents to the forefront.
And the Chicago Pre-College Science and Engineering
Program (ChiS&E) provides highly engaging, age-
appropriate hands-on science and engineering activities
for K–8 students in Chicago Public Schools and their
parents. The program develops students and parents as
co-learners to build STEM careers, and helps families
advocate for high-quality STEM teaching.
Digital Media
Digital media and technology oer unprecedented
opportunities for children and families to literally learn
anywhere, anytime, on their tablets, smartphones, com-
puters, and other tools, as well as for families and chil-
dren to stay connected in ways never experienced before.
Families can play an active role by helping children and
youth develop safe and healthy digital media habits. For
example, in the youngest years, when parents use digital
media alongside their children (joint media engagement),
the educational value of the experience is enhanced.59
Among older youth, families support their youth in devel-
oping technological uency, learning how to use technol-
22
ogy safely, assessing whether information is factual and
relevant, producing new content, making social connec-
tions, and working collaboratively with others to solve
problems and develop innovations.60
A variety of programs have emerged to support families
as they navigate learning in the new digital society and
to build more equitable opportunities within the digital
world. For example, the Finding Our Way Around proj-
ect, developed by researchers from Education Develop-
ment Center (EDC) and SRI International, and the public
television station WGBH, consists of a set of digital
(iPad) and hands-on activities for preschoolers, teachers,
and parents that focus on cultivating children’s spatial
vocabulary and navigational skills. An assessment of the
project found that preschoolers absorbed more spatial
knowledge when they did these activities with their
parents. Encouraging this type of learning experience
necessitates that digital and hands-on activities should be
enjoyable for both parents and preschoolers.61
As they become hubs of digital access and learning,
public libraries play a “bridging” role between parents
and children in the use of digital media. At the Marathon
County Public Library in Wisconsin, members of the teen
advisory council shared with their librarian that parents
did not have a good understanding of their kids’ online
activity. This honest conversation opened an opportunity
for the library to develop a parent-focused presentation
on cybersecurity. Parents learned about the dierent
facets of cyberbullying and the ways their teens’ online
engagement might dier from their own. For example,
teens are more likely to use platforms such as Instagram
and Snapchat than ones like Facebook and Twitter. The
parents left the library with a new understanding of teen
online use.62
Among immigrant Latino families, digital media and
technology might also take on other important functions.
They are often used to access resources for improving
English language skills. Older children, at the request of
their parents who may not be uent English speakers,
might be asked to use online tools to search and nd in-
formation related to health and immigration and become
exposed to information they ordinarily would not explore
on their own. While youth learn by supporting family
needs, these requests can become stressful when youth
encounter complex information that is dicult to trans-
late.63 This role points to the need for stronger shared
responsibility, with schools and communities expanding
educational and social supports for immigrant families in
order to ease the path of their children.
Digital media are also important in parents’ educational
decisions. As discussed earlier, text messaging has gained
widespread use in alerting parents to student attendance
and performance. These nudges change parent percep-
tions about their child and increase monitoring. Results
from various studies generally tend to be positive and
show improvements in student attendance, grades, and
retention as well as parent-school communication.64
Transitions
It is particularly important to focus on family and com-
munity engagement during transition points—starting
kindergarten, entering third grade, moving into middle
and high school, and going to college. These are the mo-
ments when families need more information and tools to
support and guide their children. As children get older,
their worlds broaden, too, so that family and community
engagement in transitions to after-school, clubs, and oth-
er learning contexts becomes increasingly important.
23
Strong relationships are especially crucial during tran-
sition points. We know that family engagement tends to
drop o as children go through the school system, which
poses a problem—continuity is necessary to support stu-
dent learning throughout the school years, even beyond
graduation. Transition activities focused on reaching
underserved students and families can play an important
role in reengaging families at crucial moments in their
children’s education (entry into kindergarten, middle
school, high school, the workforce or college, etc.). When
schools and community institutions work together to
provide information and peer support during moments
of transition, family engagement becomes a regular and
continuous part of children’s learning pathways.
When students are part of a quality transition process in
the early years, they have improved academic achieve-
ment, more positive social and emotional competencies,
fewer problem behaviors, and more rapidly developing
skills.65 And while it is often assumed that family engage-
ment wanes after the transition is complete, it is actually
the case that it persists and even increases.66 In the later
years, youth start high school in higher-level math classes
when parents and middle school and high school educa-
tors are in contact with each other, and they enter col-
leges more suited to their academic talents when families
are engaged in the selection process.67
Paying attention to transition is also important because
it is during these periods that systemic population-level
socioeconomic and demographic disparities in education-
al achievement become amplied.68 This has important
implications for policy and intervention, as it suggests
that acting to reduce transitional diculties is one way
to reduce inequalities. Research shows that children and
families with increased social and economic risk benet
the most from district and school policies that promote
quality transitions.69
A number of examples highlight the importance of giving
parents and youth a voice to advocate for their needs
when it comes to designing eective transition practic-
es. For example, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, parents
asked the Department of Human Services to provide
guidance in choosing after-school programs for young
children entering kindergarten.70 Through focus groups
with parents and conversations with the school district
and other agencies, the department developed an infor-
mative brochure that addresses parents’ questions about
choosing an after-school program. At the opposite end
of the developmental spectrum, the Cambridge Youth
Council provided the opportunity and structure for teens
to add their voices to the discussion around how students
and families could best navigate transitions together,
such as through mentorship programs and open houses.71
Braiding high-leverage areas has a
cumulative eect on outcomes
These ve high-leverage areas form strands that are
braided with each other. The combined action of several
of these strands produces a whole that is greater than
the sum of its parts. These synergistic actions are likely
to happen when families believe that they have a role to
play in their children’s education, trust that they can be
eective advocates for their children, and are invited by
educators to be partners in their children’s academic and
social development.
To illustrate the concept of braiding, we use several
strands of research that have demonstrated the benets
of family engagement. Family engagement in academic
content (literacy, math, and STEM) is one of the stron-
gest predictors of children’s school readiness and school
performance. It is supported when families can share
their own observations with teachers and have access to
data that are meaningful in terms of their student’s atten-
dance, progress, and needs. These dual-data sources lead
24
to parent-teacher conversations about the actions that
families, teachers, and students can take to ensure that
students attain their attendance and learning goals. In
those conversations, teachers can also share information
about the many out-of-school opportunities available for
family engagement and co-learning around STEM.
We believe that the ve high-leverage areas we’ve iden-
tied are fertile ground for networked improvement
communities to nd innovative approaches to family
engagement. They also have great potential for bringing
together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to
create new pathways for families and students.
What other high-leverage areas for
family engagement have you identied
in your work? How might you braid
together some of your existing initiatives
to maximize their impact?
Conclusion: Joining Together
to Build the Bold Vision
We have looked at the strong evidence about
the value and potential of family and com-
munity engagement, described some of the
eld’s many innovations, and highlighted progress on key
leverage points. Now we ask readers to engage.
As the conversation about strategies to build family and
community engagement and ways to position it as a key
and eective building block for achieving educational eq-
uity grows, we step back to the paper’s guiding challenge
and question: How do we cocreate the next generation
of family and community engagement with families and
communities to provide equitable learning pathways—
both in school and out of school and from birth to young
adulthood—that will enable all children to be successful
in the 21st century? What does it take to meet this chal-
lenge?
What do you think is necessary to build the bold vision
of family and community engagement on local, state,
and national policy agendas and attain adequate and
sustainable resources for and commitment to it? Beyond
sustained public, private, and philanthropic leadership
and broad-based advocacy to get and keep it on the policy
agendas, what else will it take? And how do we come
together to do the work?
We oer ve suggested areas to stimulate further think-
ing and discussion and to address the crucial what-else
question. We believe these ve areas are important in
building the vision and moving ahead: (1) local family
and community engagement initiatives, (2) capacity
building and professional development, (3) creating data
pathways, (4) public policy change, and (5) public com-
25
munication and engagement strategies. We believe that
together, these ve areas can move the eld ahead.
First, we believe local communities are where the most
exciting developments are emerging, and that the eld
has learned and will learn a great deal from them about
how to cocreate next generation engagement. Local com-
munities are labs for innovation, provide cases and sites
for capacity building and professional development, and,
when linked together, can accelerate change. As a case
in point, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s national grant
competition for local funding received over a thousand
applications, drew a great deal of attention to family and
community engagement, and created an important set of
leading-edge cases about ways to empower families.72
One of the most frequent comments we hear from edu-
cators is, “I never received any pre- or in-service training
for family and community engagement.” Indeed, the lack
of such training has been holding educators and the eld
back for decades. It is time to invest in strategies to build
innovative pre- and in-service training and organization-
al capacity building for educators and others involved in
family and community engagement. The strategy must
support the transition to anywhere, anytime learning
pathways, cocreation, and the shifts in mindsets on which
next generation engagement is based.
We have described some of the challenges and innova-
tions taking shape around data sharing to support family
engagement. So much of building learning pathways for
children and keeping them on track depends not just on
having access to data, but on being able to understand it
and act upon it. Billions of dollars are being invested in
gathering data, but very little is going towards helping
families, the most important learning path builder, to use
the data. We also suggest it is time to consider assessing
and rating schools on their family engagement practic-
es, including data sharing, so these factors can be taken
into account by families making decisions around school
choice, and to keep schools accountable to families and
their communities.
In addition, when it comes to family and community
engagement, attention by policymakers—and the federal,
state, and local funding that goes along with such atten-
tion—has been scarce for many years. The U.S. Depart-
ment of Education, for example, has few sta members
dedicated to the issue. Attention to policy is essential for
building sustainable family and community engagement
initiatives. Bringing the eld together at the national,
state, and local levels to discuss legislative priorities,
ways to build policymaker interest in and commitment
to family and community engagement, and strategies to
garner more resources and attention are high priorities.
Last, investing in public communication strategies to
generate interest in and excitement about family and
community engagement are key in engendering public
will and policy change.
We welcome and encourage readers
to suggest additional areas for
investment to build the public
commitment to family and community
engagement, and to strengthen the
eld’s capacity to codesign next
generation approaches. Send your ideas
to info@globalfrp.org.
26
Authors
Heather B. Weiss, EdD, is the Founder and Director
of the Global Family Research Project. Dr. Weiss writes,
speaks, and advises on programs and policies for children
and families and serves on the advisory boards of many
public and private organizations. Her recent publications
focus on reframing research and evaluation to support
continuous improvement and democratic decision-
making, examining the case for complementary learn-
ing from a research and policy perspective, and assess-
ing new ways of providing and evaluating professional
development. Dr. Weiss is a consultant and advisor to
numerous foundations on strategic grantmaking and
evaluation. She formerly was the executive director of the
Harvard Family Research Project and a senior research
director and lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School
of Education. In these capacities, she envisioned and
worked toward a transformative role in family and com-
munity engagement in education reform, early childhood
education, and after-school programs. Dr. Weiss received
her doctorate in education and social policy from the
Harvard Graduate School of Education and was a post-
doctoral research fellow at the Yale Bush Center in Child
Development and Social Policy.
M. Elena Lopez, PhD, is Codirector of the Global Fam-
ily Research Project. Her applied research focuses on the
relationships among families, schools, and communities
as they relate to children’s learning and development. She
has used her research and numerous publications to in-
form major policy and program initiatives, including the
Oce of Head Start’s National Center on Parent, Family,
and Community Engagement, United Way Worldwide’s
Family Engagement for High School Success, and a part-
nership with the Public Library Association for Libraries
for the 21st Century: It’s a Family Thing. Her professional
experiences include evaluating public and philanthropic
initiatives to promote children’s well being, managing
education and health grants for a philanthropic foun-
dation, and serving on national advisory and governing
boards. She also held the position of associate director at
the Harvard Family Research Project. She received her
doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard University
and is proud to have two wonderful adult children who
are in the education eld.
Margaret Caspe, PhD, is Director of Research and
Professional Learning at the Global Family Research
Project. Her research focuses on how families, early
childhood programs, schools, and communities sup-
port children’s learning. As part of the GFRP team, she
coleads the Libraries for the 21st Century: It’s a Family
Thing project and develops materials to prepare educa-
tors for family engagement. She is coeditor of Promising
Practices for Engaging Families in STEM Learning
and author of a variety of reports and articles, including
Engaging Families in the Child Assessment Process and
Ideabook: Libraries for Families. She received her PhD
in applied psychology from The Steinhardt School of Cul-
ture, Education, and Human Development at New York
University, and she holds an Ed.M. from the Harvard
Graduate School of Education. She was formerly a senior
research associate at the Harvard Family Research Proj-
ect. Dr. Caspe is based in New Jersey, where she and her
three daughters count going to the library among their
favorite family activities.
Global Family Research Project (GFRP) is an
independent, entrepreneurial nonprot organization that
supports eective engagement practices and policies so
that all children nd success in and out of school. GFRP
creates a worldwide exchange of ideas that furthers the
understanding and implementation of anywhere, anytime
learning for all. With more than 30 years of leadership,
GFRP provides a research base and proven expertise for
capacity building in schools, community-based organiza-
tions, philanthropic entities, and other related ventures.
GFRP is known for its established track record in den-
ing and advancing the elds of family, school, and com-
munity engagement. Heather B. Weiss is the founder and
director, M. Elena Lopez is the codirector, and Margaret
Caspe is the director of research and professional learn-
ing of GFRP.
27
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18 Dennis Shirley, “Patience and Politics,” Shelterforce: The Voice of Community
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19 N.D. Forry, S. Moodie, et al., “Family-Provider Relationships: A Multidisci-
plinary Review of High Quality Practices and Associations with Family, Child,
and Provider Outcomes,” Issue Brief OPRE 2011-26a, (Washington, DC: Office
of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families,
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011).
20 Barbara Rogoff, The cultural nature of human development (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Cynthia Garcia-Coll, “Continuity and
Change in Child Development,” Child Development 86, no. 1 (2015), pp. 1–6.
21 N. González et al., Funds of Knowledge, op. cit.
22 Christine M. McWayne, Jayanthi Mistry, Kimberly Brenneman, Betty Zan
and Daryl Greenfield, “Supporting Family Engagement in Science, Technology,
and Engineering (STE) Curriculum Among Low-income Immigrant Families with
Preschool Children,” in Promising Practices for Engaging Families in STEM
Learning (Charlotte, NC: IAP, 2018), pp. 81–98.
23 E. Dearing and S. Tang, “The promise of parent-school partnerships for
narrowing the poverty achievement gap,” in Heather B. Weiss et al., Preparing
educators to engage families: Case studies using an ecological systems frame-
work (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014), pp. 100–104.
24 An example is the organization Teaching for Change, which aims to “[pro-
vide] teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn
to read, write and change the world.”
25 K.A. Moore, S. Caal, et al., “Child Trends’ evaluation of the Abriendo Puertas
Program: Executive summary and discussion brief,” report from Child Trends,
(June 2014).
26 Abriendo Puertas, “10 Year report: 10 years of impact,” Report from Abrien-
do Puertas, Los Angeles (February 1, 2018).
27 Katherine McKnight, et al., “Mindset Shifts and Parent Teacher Home Visits,”
a report prepared for Parent Teacher Home Visits, October 2018.
28 Harvard Family Research Project, “Blended learning: preparing and support-
ing educators to engage families,” FINE Newsletter 7, no. 3 (2015); Heather
B. Weiss et al., Preparing educators to engage families: Case studies using an
ecological systems framework (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014).
29 Harvard Family Research Project, “Create Your Own Case Toolkit Building
Your Family Engagement Skills and Knowledge” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Family Research Project, 2015).
30 “Human-Centered Design: An Innovative Tool for Professional Learning in Fam-
ily Engagement,” blog post, Global Family Research Project, August 15, 2018.
31 A. Rowland, Design thinking: Catalyzing family engagement to support
student learning (Cambridge MA: Harvard Family Research Project, 2016).
32 Heather B. Weiss, et al., Ideabook: Libraries for Families (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Family Research Project, 2016), p. 17.
33 A.S. Bryk, P.B. Sebring, et al., Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons
from Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
34 Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely, “What Most People Get Wrong About
Men and Women,” Harvard Business Review (May-June 2018), pp. 114–121.
35 “Developing Life Skills in Children: A Road Map for Communicating with
Parents,” a report from Learning Heroes (March 2018); and “Parents 2017:
Unleashing Their Power and Potential,” a report from Learning Heroes in collab-
oration with Univision Communications (August 2017).
36 “Changing the Narrative About Parents: Themes and Recommendations from
a Consultative Conversation Among Field Leaders: Executive Summary,” a
report from Campaign for Grade Level Reading (February 2018).
37 Evidence from developmental research clearly highlights the positive impact
that families have on children’s lives. Although some reviews and meta-analyses
have shown significant relationships between parental involvement programs
and interventions and academic achievement and social-emotional outcomes
for both younger and older students, many other studies suggest that there is
limited quality evidence or empirical support to make this claim. These concerns
arise in the context of an evaluation knowledge base that is limited because
many programs cannot afford the costs of experimental evaluations, and when
they can, there are practical constraints around recruitment, retention, and small
sample sizes. The evaluations available from meta-analyses are also typically
short-term interventions of small, focused, short duration programs assessed
with weak measures that fail to capture the intricacy of local context, staff, and
funding across time and various domains. To move forward, it is important
not only to have experimental studies and evidence, but a whole range of
approaches which support evaluation’s learning and continuous improvement
goals and look at family engagement not just as a short program, but as evolv-
ing and embedded within systems that meet the needs of families, schools, and
communities.
38 A. S. Bryk et al., Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better
at Getting Better (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing, 2015).
39 M. Small, Unanticipated gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Erin McNamara Hor-
vat, Elliot B. Weininger, and Annette Lareau, “From Social Ties to Social Capi-
tal: Class Differences in the Relations Between Schools and Parent Networks,”
American Education Research Journal 40, no. 2 (2003), pp. 319–51.
29
40 C.M. McWayne, G. Melzi, et al., “Defining family engagement among Latino
Head Start parents: A mixed-methods measurement development study,” Early
Childhood Research Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2013), 593–607.
41 U.S. Department of Education, “Chronic Absenteeism in the Nation’s Schools:
An unprecedented look at a hidden educational crisis,” June 7, 2016; A.S.
Bryk, P. B. Sebring, et al., Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons from
Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Lauren Bauer, Patrick
Liu, et al., “Reducing Chronic Absenteeism under the Every Student Succeeds
Act,” strategy paper for the Hamilton Project, Brookings Institute (April 2018);
P. Bergman and E. Chan, “Leveraging technology to engage parents at scale:
Evidence from a randomized controlled trial” (CESifo Working Paper Series No.
6493, 2017); C. Robinson, M. Lee, et al., “Reducing student absenteeism in the
early grades by targeting parental beliefs” (HKS Working Paper No. RWP17-
011, March 7, 2017).
42 A.S. Bryk, P.B. Sebring, et al., Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons
from Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Lauren Bauer et
al., “Reducing Chronic Absenteeism under the Every Student Succeeds Act,”
Strategy paper for the Hamilton Project, Brookings Institute, (April 2018),
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/reducing_chron-
ic_absenteeism_under_the_every_student_succeeds_act2.pdf.
43 A.S. Bryk, P.B. Sebring, et al., Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons
from Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
44 Robinson, Lee, et al., “Reducing Student Absenteeism in the Early Grades by
Targeting Parental Beliefs,” op. cit.
45 M.A. Kraft and T. Rodgers, “The underutilized potential of teacher-to-parent
communication: Evidence from a field experiment,” Faculty Working Paper
Series (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Kennedy School, 2014).
46 Teresa Eckrich Sommer et al., “Promoting Parents’ Social Capital to Increase
Children’s Attendance in Head Start: Evidence from an Experimental Interven-
tion, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness 10, no. 4, https://doi.org
/10.1080/19345747.2016.1258099.
47 Harvard Family Research Project, “Tips for administrators, teachers and fami-
lies: How to share data effectively,” FINE Newsletter 5, no. 2 (2013).
48 The Data Quality Campaign is “the nation’s foremost organization advocating
for effective data policy and use,” per its website.
49 Timothy Daly, “A Generation of High-Performing, Low-Income Students is
Getting Lost in the Crowd: Some reasons Why-and What Can Be Done,” The
74 Million, April 16, 2018, https://www.the74million.org/article/opinion-
a-generation-of-high-performing-low-income-students-is-getting-lost-in-the-crowd-
some-reasons-why-and-what-can-be-done/
50 WestEd, What is APTT? (2017) and WestEd, Academic parent-teacher teams
(APTT) (2018).
51 Aysha L. Foster, Academic Parent Teacher Teams (APTT): How Did the New
Parent-Involvement Model Impact Student Achievement in HISD? (Houston, Tex-
as: Houston Independent School District, 2015), https://www.houstonisd.org
/cms/lib2/TX01001591/Centricity/domain/8269/pe_districtprograms
/2015_APTT_%20Report.pdf.
52 Susan Fairchild, Brad Gunton, et al., “Student Progress to Graduation in New
York City High Schools. Part I: Core Components,” (New York: New Visions For
Public Schools, 2011).
53 Meghan Bogardus Cortez and Juliet Van Wagenen, “City-School Data Shar-
ing Improves Student Outcomes,” EdTech Magazine (March 13, 2017).
54 Margaret Caspe and M.Elena Lopez, “Seven Research-Based Ways That
Families Promote Early Literacy,” (Boston, MA: Global Family Research Project,
2017).
55 Raluca Barac et al., “The Cognitive Development of Young Dual Language
Learners: A Critical Review,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 29 (2014),
pp. 699–714.
56 Margaret Caspe, Taniesha Woods, and Joy Lorenzo Kennedy, Promising
Practices for Engaging Families in STEM Learning (Charlotte, N.C., Information
Age Publishing, 2018); M. Ing, “Can parents influence children’s mathematics
achievement and persistence in STEM careers?” Journal of Career Development,
41 (2014), pp. 87–103.
57 Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine
Books, 2006).
58 K. M. Pierce, A. Auger, and D. L. Vandell, “Narrowing the Achievement Gap:
Consistency and Intensity of Structured Activities During Elementary School,”
Unpublished paper presented at the Society for Research in Child Development
Biennial Meeting (2013).
59 Elisabeth Gee, Lori Takeuchi, and Ellen Wartella, Children and families in the
digital age, (New York: Routelege, 2017).
60 Brigid Barron et al., “Parents as Learning Partners in the Development of
Technological Fluency,” International Journal of Learning and Media 1 (2009),
pp. 55–77.
61 Heather Sherwood and Ashley Lewis Presser, “Finding Their Way: Family
Engagement with Digital Math Activities Helps Children Develop Spatial Skills,”
Global Family Research Project, November 9, 2017.
62 Global Family Research Project, “Bridging the Divide between Teens and
Parents on Cybersecurity,” Medium, February 28, 2018.
63 J.C. Yip, C. Gonzalez, and V. Katz, “Children of immigrants’ experience in
online information brokering,” in Elizabeth Gee, Lori M. Takeuchi and Ellen
Wartella (eds.), Children and families in the digital age: Learning together in a
media saturated culture (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 137–152.
64 M.T. Damgaard and H.S. Nielsen, “Nudging in Education,” Economics of Ed-
ucation Review 64 (June 2018), pp. 313–342; Peter Bergman and Eric Chan,
Leveraging Technology to Engage Parents at Scale: Evidence from a Random-
ized Controlled Trial (CESifo Working Paper Series No. 6493, May 30, 2017).
65 Douglas R. Powell, Seung-Hee Son, Nancy File, and John Mark Froiland,
“Changes in Parent Involvement Across the Transition from Public School Prekin-
dergarten to First Grade and Children’s Academic Outcomes,” The Elementary
School Journal 113, no. 2 (December 2012): 276–300.
66 Powell et al., “Changes in parent involvement,” op. cit.
67 C. R. Cooper, Bridging multiple worlds: Cultures, identities, and pathways
to college, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); R. Crosnoe, “Family–
school connections and the transition of low-income youths and English lan-
guage learners from middle school to high school,” Developmental Psychology,
45, no. 4 (2009), pp. 1061–1076.
68 Smith and O’Day, “Quality and Equality in American Education,” op. cit.;
Robert Crosne and Arya Ansari, “Family Socioeconomic Status, Immigration,
and Children’s Transitions into School,” Family Relations 65, no. 1 (February
2016), pp. 73–84; Carola Suárez-Orozco, Mona M. Abo-Zena, and Amy K.
Marks (eds.), Transitions: The Development of Children of Immigrants (New
York, NY: NYU Press, 2015)
69 Amy B. Schulting, Patrick S. Malone, and Kenneth A. Dodge, “The Effect of
School-Based Kindergarten Transition Policies and Practices on Child Academic
Outcomes,” Developmental Psychology 41, no. 6, http://psycnet.apa.org
/doi/10.1037/0012-1649.41.6.860; Carey E. Cooper et al., “Poverty, Race,
and Parental Involvement During the Transition to Elementary School,” Journal of
Family Issues 31, no. 7, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0192513X09351515.
70 “After-School Programs: A guide for parents of future kindergarteners or
grade 1 children,” brochure produced by Department of Human Services
Programs, Cambridge, MA, n.d.
71 Heather Weiss and Linda Jacobson, “Youth Taking Leading Roles: Defining
and Improving Family Engagement,” Global Family Research Project, August 1,
2017.
72 “W.K. Kellogg Foundation announces recipients of $13.7 million investment
to empower parents as leaders and key decision makers in education,” press
release from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, April 17, 2014.
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Carnegie Corporation of New York was established by Andrew Carnegie
in 1911 to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge
and understanding. In keeping with this mandate, the Corporation’s
agenda focuses on the issues that he considered of paramount impor-
tance: international peace, the advancement of education and knowl-
edge, and the strength of our democracy.
