Communicating Results: How Do We Measure the Effectiveness of School-Community-Family Collaborations?

• In Event: Bridging the Engagement Gap: Lessons for Equitable School-Community-Family Collaboration Within a Collective Impact Initiative

Abstract

Educational leaders seeking to create equitable learning environments are increasingly expected to partner with parents and families to form shared, systemic, equity-focused goals to ensure the success of students. Yet, while most educational leaders express a commitment to the work of meaningfully engaging parents and families, the field struggles with how to characterize and measure parent engagement work and its impact. The ability to measure and assess the extent to which parents and families collaborate with educators and schools is critical to sustaining support for the work, improving professional practice, and aligning efforts within and across systems, as is increasingly being called for in collective impact initiatives (Park, S., Hironaka, S., Carver, P., & Nordstrum, L., 2013).

This paper focuses on the identification of parent engagement indicators from the literature and proposes an examination of these indicators using the lens of equitable parent-school collaborations. The goals of this paper are to: a) identify key indicators of parent engagement from the existing literature; b) use a conceptual framework on equitable collaboration to analyze the measures that exist in the literature; and c) identify understudied domains of parent engagement and suggest potential outcomes to address gaps in the existing measures.

The results provide three preliminary findings. First, measures fall into three domains consisting of capacity, behaviors, and relationships for parent, educators, and the community. The majority of outcomes focus on parents, rather than on schools or the intersection between parents and schools, and many of these indicators align to more traditional approaches and expectations regarding parent involvement, such as helping with homework at home or attending parent-teacher conferences. Second, preliminary findings suggest limited alignment between existing measures and a conception of authentic equitable collaboration. Third, we argue that there is a need to identify and create measures that can help districts and other organizations improve their practice to create more equitable collaboration outcomes. Specifically, concepts within parent capacity such as advocacy and leadership skills, leadership development, personal empowerment, civic participation, and community-based engagement were very limited or missing entirely from our review. Additional outcomes for school capacity were also identified as opportunities for parent engagement in decision-making roles.

Authors

• Ismael Fajardo, University of Washington - Seattle

• Jessica E. Salvador