Executive summary

Next steps for federal, state, and local policy

Intermediary organizations—such as associations of education professionals and volunteer non-profit organizations—play an important role in translating policy into practical tools and tailoring technical assistance to meet the different needs of districts and schools. These intermediaries help districts and schools plan outcome-oriented family engagement strategies. Through documentation and evaluation, they compile best practices that can be shared broadly for adaptation and replication. Intermediary organizations also convene a wide range of practitioners, researchers, and policymakers, and help build networks. Information sharing among these entities builds their respective capacities to strengthen family engagement practice and better serve families.

Unlike other fields in which innovation might be a technology or product, innovations in education tend to take the form of creative uses and sharing of resources and opportunities to create new practices (see Textbox 3, below). Productive innovations can be co-developed by researchers, practitioners, and social entrepreneurs who can bring them to scale.²² In this model of research and development, or R&D, innovators develop prototypes, and then test and refine them as part of a continuous improvement process. In addition, there is a federal role in helping to create communities of practice, sharing the lessons from ongoing innovations to support state and local efforts to create systemic approaches to FSCE. Communities of practice—groups of people that come together to share expertise on a common endeavor—can generate new models of FSCE, spread promising practices, and develop stakeholders’ professional skills for high quality family engagement.²³ Federal departments can encourage the formation of communities of practice, especially across agency programs that seek to strengthen family engagement, and help organize and support them as part of capacity-building activities. Lastly, there is a federal role in facilitating the use of information about effective initiatives through mechanisms such as the What Works Clearinghouse, technical assistance providers, webinars, grantee meetings, and so forth.

Textbox 3

Project EAGLE Community Programs of the University of Kansas Medical Center provide families with children aged 0–4 with answers to their two most important questions: Is my child developing normally?, and What can I do to help him become more school ready? Routine child screening and parent engagement to promote healthy child development is a key tenet of all early childhood programs run by Project EAGLE. These programs include Early Head Start (serving pregnant women and children aged 0–4) and Healthy Families (a program for Spanish-speaking pregnant women and families with children). All families who come into contact with Project EAGLE receive rapid feedback on child assessments and specific guidance about how they can support their child’s development. For example, when a child is identified as having a language delay, Project staff impart to families tips about reading to their child. Project EAGLE uses a Response to Intervention (RTI) approach to early identification and support of children with learning and behavior needs. Research shows that in other programs, RTI has been effective for identifying children at risk of developing learning disabilities and for providing specialized interventions, either to ameliorate or to prevent the occurrence of learning disabilities.ⁱ

The first tier could include a common set of standards and leading indicators for family engagement identified by the federal government that would provide guidance on research-based family engagement strategies. Second, state and local educational agencies would work with families, schools, and communities to develop or expand indicators against which they can benchmark their progress and identify areas where additional support and training are needed. An additional tier of accountability would reside at the school and community level where staff performance assessments would include family engagement indicators. With input from families, these indicators will measure how families’ capacities for supporting their children’s learning are being increased and how their involvement in school improvement dialogue is actively supported.²⁵ As evidenced below in Textbox 4, teachers and parents in the Creighton School District use student data to become mutually accountable for children’s learning progress in order to leverage the capacity of both families and educators to raise student achievement.