Joyce L. Epstein

School/Family/Community Partnerships: Caring for the Children We Share

When schools form partnerships with families and the community, the children benefit. These guidelines for building partnerships can make it happen.

The Concept and Measurement of the Quality of School Life

The Quality of School Life (QSL) is defined by three dimensions of student reactions: (1) satisfaction with school in general, (2) commitment to school work, and (3) attitudes toward teachers. A 27-item QSL scale is presented that shows reliability and validity across educational levels (elementary, middle and high school) based on 4,266 student survey responses. Concurrent and discriminative validity is demonstrated using measures of academic achievement, participation, personality, family background, and sociometric data from peers and teachers. Scaling techniques, factor analysis, and an extension of Sechrest’s test for incremental validity document the multi-dimensional design of the scale.

Parent Involvement: A Survey of Teacher Practices

The Elementary School Journal Volume 83, Number 2 ? 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 001 3-5984183/8302-0009

IMPROVING STUDENT BEHAVIOR AND SCHOOL DISCIPLINE WITH FAMILY AND COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

01o.00 Teachers approach their instructional tasks with a variety of perspectives and strategies that emphasize certain aspects of teaching and deemphasize others. For example, some teachers teach language skills using organized games, while other teachers teach the same skills by direct instruction. Teachers adopt different approaches to the same subject matter partly because their teaching situations differ. Their students may have different learning problems or their classrooms may have varied resources and facilities. Even in the

Attainable Goals? The Spirit and Letter of the No Child Left Behind Act on Parental Involvement

This study reports the results of efforts of school officials to implement family and community involvement activities to reduce the number of disciplinary actions and to ensure a school climate focused on learning. Using longitudinal data from elementary and secondary schools, analyses indicate that regardless of schools’prior rates of discipline, the more family and community involvement activities were implemented, the fewer students were disciplined by being sent to principals’offices or given detention or in-school suspension. Activities for two types of involvement, parenting and volunteering, were most predictive of reducing the percentages of students who were subject to discipline. Also, schools that improved the quality of their partnership programs reported fewer students in need of discipline. The results suggest that creating more connections and greater cooperation among the school, family, and community contexts may be one way for schools to improve student behavior and school discipline.

A Case Study of the Partnership Schools Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) Model

Now in its third full school year of implementation, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has been drawing praise and blame. It has been praised for its goals of increasing all students’ learning, requiring disaggregated data to monitor the progress of major subgroups of students, and having high-quality teachers in all schools. It has been criticized for overemphasizing the importance of standardized achievement tests, setting unrealistic time lines for clearly unreachable goals, and underfunding its requirements. Although most attention has been paid to the NCLB’s requirements for annual achievement tests and high-quality teachers, the law also includes important requirements for schools, districts, and states to organize programs of parental involvement and to communicate with parents and the public about students’ achievement and the quality of schools. In contrast to some other sections of the law, Section 1118--Parental Involvement--has improved over time by drawing from research in the sociology of education, other disciplines, and exemplary practice to specify structures and processes that are needed to develop programs to involve all families in their children’s education (Booth and Dunn 1996; Epstein 2001). This section is also in contrast to early legislation, which mandated a few parent representatives on school or district advisory councils but left most parents on their own to figure out how to become involved in their children’s education across the grades (Borman et al. 1996). In this essay, I offer my perspectives on the NCLB’s requirements for family involvement; provide a few examples from the field; suggest modifications that are needed in the law; and encourage sociologists of education to take new directions in research on school, family, and community partnerships.

Building Bridges of Home, School, and Community: The Importance of Design

This case study reports the feasibility of the Partnership Schools Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) model for school improvement in a Title I elementary school. Interviews were conducted and documents were collected for 3 years to study whether and how the school implemented key policy attributes—specificity, consistency, authority, power, and stability—that have explained the successful implementation of other CSR programs. The data also identified if and how the school implemented essential elements of teamwork, leadership, action plans, implemented activities, evaluation, and networking, which have explained improvements in programs of family and community involvement. With the implementation of the model, the case study school increased the number of families involved in students’ education at school and at home. Longitudinal achievement test scores showed that the CSR school improved the percentage of students attaining proficiency by state standards compared to schools that were matched, one each, for math, reading, and writing. The CSR school also closed its gap in test scores with the district as a whole, despite the fact that the district included several schools in more affluent neighborhoods with higher test scores in the base year. The study revealed a new factor for program development, transitioning, which extends the existing frameworks on program implementation by requiring plans and decisions about continuing a program or parts of it before the end of the CSR grant.

Middle Grades Research: Not Yet Mature, but No Longer a Child

Where do children learn and grow? At home. At school. In the community. It is simply a social fact that youngsters learn from their families, teachers, peers, relatives, part-time employers, and other adults in the community. Students develop in all three contexts simultaneously and continuously. Thus, the bridges of home, school, and community are inevitably interconnected. Students travel back and forth across these bridges for many years to learn who they are and where they are going. The success or failure of all bridges—real or symbolic—is in their design. Bridges that connect home, school, and community may be well or poorly designed. Therefore, it is important to learn about the most effective structures, processes, and practices that will produce good connections and positive results. The articles in this special issue contribute several cross-cutting conclusions that should strengthen the design of school, family, and community partnerships.

Links in a Professional Development Chain: Preservice and Inservice Education for Effective Programs of School, Family, and Community Partnerships

After years of neglect, middle level schools and their students are finally receiving serious and sustained attention from mainstream educational researchers from diverse disciplines and backgrounds. Consequently, the volume and quality of useful research are increasing. In this article, we summarize some of the major contributions of this new research to ongoing debates concerning grade span, school size, grouping, departmentalization, curriculum, instruction, advisory groups, interdisciplinary teaming, school-transition activities, extra-help programs, and student evaluation practices in the middle grades. This new research has given a clearer picture than ever before concerning the variation among middle level schools in practices and projected trends and has slowly begun to produce converging evidence concerning the likely consequences for students of different practices and program emphases.

Ready or not? Preparing future educators for school, family, and community partnerships

This paper summarizes lessons learned from studies of preservice education and inservice programs of family and community involvement. The research and interventions suggest that a chain of professional development events is needed to prepare educators to conduct and sustain effective programs of school, family, and community partnerships. This starts with college courses and continues with inservice education, ongoing technical assistance and support, and external networking. There are required links, missing and weak links, interconnected links, and ways to strengthen the professional development chain. The discussion yields a blueprint for a professional development system that should produce more and better programs of school, family, and community partnerships. This work was supported by grants from NICHD and the U. S. Department of Education (IES). The opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the positions of the funding agencies. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the European Research Network (ERNAPE) conference on Parents in Education, Gdansk, Poland, September 2003.