Abstract
Efforts are building to translate traditionally strong family relationships among Latinos into stronger performance at school.
It is 6 p.m. on a crisp winter night, and 30 parents are seated at long folding tables covered in bright blocks of blue and yellow construction paper inside the cafeteria at Lorenzo De Zavala Elementary School in West Dallas, Texas. Soft Christmas music plays on the sound system as the group waits for the ceremony to begin. Hurried parents rush through side doors and apologize for being late. Has it started, they ask? Many carry containers of food — homemade tamales, tortillas, and rice. They place their covered dishes and crockpots on tables pressed against the back wall of the cafeteria and quickly take their seats with the other parents.
The atmosphere is eager and tense as parents — some in suits and church dresses, others in work clothes — tap their feet, look at the clock, and speak softly to each other in Spanish while a singer croons about a holly jolly Christmas in English.
Ten minutes later, the graduation ceremony begins with a train of children walking in a disjointed single-file line past their now smiling parents to the center of the cafeteria. They are excited, fighting over who gets to sit where, and waving at their parents seated nearby. The children were asked to gather in a separate room away from their parents. This night is about mom and dad, but also about the children. Soon the little ones begin cheering and clapping as their parents step forward to receive certificates of completion.
Tonight's graduation ceremony is one of dozens hosted by The Concilio, a Dallas-based nonprofit focused on helping Hispanic parents improve the education and health of their families. Tonight is about recognizing parents who completed a nine-week course focused on ways they can better navigate the school system and be more actively involved in their child's education.
For parent graduate Mary Ann Martinez, the program has helped her become a better mother. “I'm here because of my daughter, Lauren,” she tells the audience. Like so many Hispanic parents, she wants to see her child succeed in school, but Martinez, a Mexican-American born in the United States who speaks better English than Spanish and attended public schools in America, admits she was not involved in her daughter's education except to argue with teachers. That has changed thanks to the program. “It has really taught me and my daughter to have a better relationship,” she said.
Martinez and Hispanic parents like her are a key part of efforts to close the achievement gap and this program, like so many others around the nation, is aimed and getting Hispanic parents more involved with their child's school and ultimately more invested in their child's education.
“Parent involvement is the key to improving school culture,” said De Zavala principal Lisa Mira-montes. When The Concilio approached her about partnering with the school, she readily agreed. Many parents at the school were not attending activities, and some would not come inside. Since the parent program began, test scores are improving, parent-teacher relationships are better, and previously uninvolved parents, including Martinez, are now volunteering and joining the PTA.
Challenges for schools, parents
As American schools adjust to the influx of Hispanic students, many from economically disadvantaged homes, schools and outside groups are increasingly faced with teaching not just the student but the parent as well because, as research shows, how well a child performs in school is based in large part on family and outside influence. Hispanic parents tend to feel most comfortable in small, group-based, bilingual programs.
The new engagement model has forced school administrators and leaders to become more proactive in reaching out to parents, yet school programs are often designed to address middle-class Hispanic parents, not low-income parents or those with little education. As a result, Hispanic parents, especially non-English-speaking parents, feel alienated and don't participate.
“We had a segment of our parents who were intimidated to go on to campuses because of language differences,” said Sam Buchmeyer, a spokesman for the Grand Prairie Independent School District, a suburban Dallas school district with a large, predominantly poor Hispanic population.
But translating a flyer from English to Spanish is not enough. “Family engagement is more than just addressing the language issue. It goes far beyond that,” Buchmeyer said. The district's parent involvement center offers classes on nutrition, computers, Zumba, and English as a second language. It also offers dual-language programs for students, has campus-based parent liaisons, and has social workers on staff to handle immigration issues.
So far, Grand Prairie's outreach efforts have paid off. Science scores for 3rd-grade Hispanic students in the district increased from 47% proficient in 2007 to 77% in 2010, and math scores went from 65% to 81% in the same period. From 2009 to 2010, Hispanic students outperformed their regional and state counterparts in every tested area including math and writing. The district said proactive, parent engagement is a major reason for the changes.
For recent immigrants, the idea of participating in their child's school can be a new concept. In Mexico, where most Hispanic parents in Texas originate, the educational success of a child is left to the school, and, because many parents are uneducated, they don't feel they can be involved with their children's education. In the U.S., that often means Hispanic parents don't enforce homework or study time at home, feel apprehensive about helping with schoolwork they don't understand, and don't know to ask about tutoring at their child's school (Schneider, Martinez, & Owens, 2006).
“We're talking about parents who don't even realize their kids need to finish their homework and turn it in,” said Tara Dunn, The Concilio's education director. New immigrant parents don't know how to get involved with their child's school nor that they should be involved. They are a separate challenge from parents already familiar with the American school system. For second- and third-generation U.S.-born Hispanic parents there is often a lack of buy-in: What difference does it make if I get involved with my child's school?
Quality engagement
By all rights, Hispanic children should be performing better than test scores show. Strong parent-child relationships at home should equal student success, yet Hispanic students remain the least educated minority group in the country (Ryan & Siebens, 2012). The Hispanic family structure epitomizes the values normally associated with high academic performance. Hispanic families typically have clear boundaries and rules, and the sort of open communication that allows parents to inquire about school; they promote discussion about behavior and goals. Such families are engaged in activities that build emotional maturity in their children, and many parents have some contact with the school — all key factors necessary for student success (Jones & Velez, 1997). So why, then, are Hispanic students lagging?
The answer may be to focus on the quality of engagement at home and for schools to take better advantage of the sociocultural capital inherent in the Hispanic culture. Knowing your child has homework and goes to school and is passing and not in trouble often constitutes engagement in many Hispanic homes. Seeing that the homework is finished, offering to help, finding out from teachers how well their student is doing compared to others, assessing where their children can improve, and how they should be prepared for the future are not steps many Hispanic parents see as necessary for their child's educational success.
The argument for parent engagement
The Concilio, which has a 30-year history in Dallas and whose volunteers, coordinators, and staff are primarily bilingual, works with schools and outside groups to involve Hispanic parents in family-based education and health programs. Other courses cover how to handle adolescents, how to navigate life after high school, and how to help parents understand what it means to be college-ready. School-based outreach efforts, they have learned, are often ignored or simply misunderstood.
“If you have parents involved, children are going to do better and your schools are going to do better,” Dunn said. “You can't bypass the parents.” Their own data proves it. From 2002 to 2009, 90% of the students whose parents completed The Concilio's parent education program graduated from high school, and 78% of students completed at least one year of postsecondary education, according to a survey of 2,100 parents.
“The idea that Hispanic parents don't care about education is a myth,” Dunn said. “Parents do want to know how better to help their children.”
Indeed, in the 2009 National Survey of Latinos, some 89% of young people said they believed a college education was important to succeed in life, yet Hispanic students continue to have the highest dropout rates among minority groups in the country, as well as the lowest high school completion rates (Dockterman, 2011).
Districts work at it
Despite difficult challenges, some school districts are making strides. Irving Independent School District, another suburban Dallas school district, has created a new office for Student and Family Engagement to help with school-based parent outreach efforts. Over 70% of the district's students are Hispanic, over 60% are considered at-risk students, and over 80% of students live below the poverty line. Irving ISD teachers and administrators go through culture, language, and diversity training. The district also offers dual-language classes to students, and it has partnered with community sponsors, including corporate, civic, and nonprofit groups, to send home packages of books with students, including bilingual books. Its goal is to distribute 1 million books to students.
Adam Grinage, Irving ISD's director for student and family engagement, said the district is “on fire for family engagement” and notes that the parent outreach centers in its 37 schools are among its most effective initiatives. Open to all parents, but particularly geared toward Hispanic parents, the centers offer various programs and literacy classes that are often the gateway for new parents to become involved in their child's school. The district hosts parent academies, has created a Spanish language information TV program, partners with groups such as The Concilio, and offers specific programs targeted toward at-risk Hispanic teens.
Too often, parents don't know how to access information online, what to find or where to look to check if their child attended class or completed their work, Grinage said. “Often, parents don't know the language of the system. They are intimidated by it… they don't know what ‘curriculum’ means.”
The initiatives of Irving ISD and other such districts amount to a significant change in the traditional school-parent relationship. Instead of PTA fund-raisers to support the schools, now schools support the parents. “It means more when school-based personnel reach out to the family,” Grinage said.
In 2012, over 80% of Irving parents surveyed said they were satisfied with both the personal communication they received from their child's teacher and from school administrators — just a few points shy of the 90% approval rating the district wants.
Parents are very involved at Otis Brown Elementary School in Irving, where a group of mothers recently gathered in the parent center on campus. The brightly colored classroom is where Maria Mancillas, a parent liaison, conducts a weekly literacy class. Each week, parents are given a bilingual book with vocabulary words in English and Spanish to take home and read with their children. They read the story as a group and then discuss ways to better engage their children at home and questions to ask their children for increased comprehension.
Otis Brown Elementary strives to be a safe place, a happy place, for parents. Apple cutouts line one side of the wall next to a toddler kitchenette. When they visit school, mothers are encouraged to bring their nonschool-age children with them because childcare concerns often are an obstacle to parental involvement in school activities.
The day's lesson, Mancillas explains in Spanish, is to read from letters each mother was asked to write to her child as part of the previous week's homework assignment. Tissues are passed around the room as mothers read aloud from handwritten letters. “Me gusta tu imaginación (I love your imagination),” one mother said.
Part of the challenge with Hispanic parents, Mancillas explains later, is that parents do not know how to connect with their children as students or how to be involved in their life at school or at home. They also do not understand the importance of engagement and view engagement as simply asking if there is homework, visiting the school only when there is a problem and viewing themselves primarily as a disciplinarian, not their child's first teacher.
Mancillas recruits parents at the beginning of each semester with the same message, “Give me this opportunity to show you this is important for your school and your family.”
It took a while for Mancillas to recruit Laura Morales who was educated in the U.S. and is bilingual. Before entering the literacy program, the once shy and depressed mother of three was embarrassed to read to her children. Her own mother told her she was wasting her time volunteering at school. But Morales persisted and slowly came out of her shell. Now, “I can read to them without being embarrassed,” she said. A volunteer at the school, she also serves as PTA vice president. When either of her two children at Otis Brown see her in the hall at school, they scream, “That's my mom!” They are proud, she said. And their behavior and test scores also have improved since she became involved at the school.
Mancillas, a former kindergarten teacher in Mexico, said the literacy class helps breakdown barriers. And while some mothers struggled with words from the week's take-home book, Thelma La Hormiga (Thelma the Ant), they pushed forward. They know that soon their children will surpass them in knowledge, but the objective is to create a culture of involvement, accountability, and learning in the home, said Grinage. That means following up with homework assignments, turning off the TV, making sure their child is reading, asking follow-up questions, and becoming more involved with their child's school, not just being a curbside parent at pickup time.
“We need for parents to feel connected and engaged,” said Grinage.
The road ahead
Thirty years ago, experts said more rigorous schoolwork was the answer to improving test scores and decreasing dropout rates. In the transformational A Nation at Risk report, a blue-ribbon commission of experts, policy makers, educators, and administrators said educational institutions had “lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling” (Gardner et al., 1983). A lack of competent teachers, less rigorous coursework, poor completion rates in core courses such as Algebra I, and an overall acceptance of mediocre student performance were some of the main concerns the panel cited. The report, which focused primarily on teenage students, suggested that more emphasis on improving the content, expectation, time, and quality of teaching in the classroom would improve educational outcomes.
The report gave only a nod to outside factors such as parent educational achievement, community support, and the family's health and welfare, and it did not link parental involvement at school with student success.
While school districts have since embraced the engagement model, there is still an emphasis at the state and national levels on improved student test scores and student learning outcomes. Despite some successes, the dropout rate among Hispanic students remains high, students are still graduating unprepared for college, and there remains a large achievement gap between white, black, and Hispanic students.
“It's easy just to focus on the academics and not the (noncognitive side of learning),” Grinage said, “but the affective side has a strong effect on academic success.”
At Irving, the engagement process is a three-step approach. First, Irving asks parents to volunteer at school, then to join parent education classes, and finally to empower themselves by becoming leaders in their school. The district's goal is to increase participation in parent education programs by 10%.
Grinage attributes the district's success to having a proactive school board focused on parent and student engagement, which has allotted funds for outreach, placing parent outreach centers on campuses. He also said connecting with outside groups and community partners, and creating an environment of engagement in school and education at home have helped the effort. As a result, since 2003, the district has seen double-digit gains in all five testing areas across the board, and the district is ranked academically acceptable; no schools are ranked failing.
In its 2009 policy brief, the National Family, School, and Community Engagement Working Group, a leadership coalition of community stakeholders, said engagement is a shared responsibility with the parents, the school, and the community. It must be continued across a child's educational journey and carried out everywhere a child learns: at home, in the classroom, and in the community. Proactive school districts such as Grand Prairie and Irving offer access to parents and reach out to them. “Now is the time we need to make parent education programs mainstream,” said Dunn from The Concilio. “Hispanic parents are a resource, not a problem.”