FAMILIES

Parental engagement: An often-forgotten strategy to increasing school success

Family engagement in education continues to be underutilized as a strategy to increase academic performance of children and the success of their schools. At Inversant, we seek to narrow the educational achievement gaps by harvesting parental aspirations and turning them into effective engagement and investment in education. We do this by empowering parents and caregivers with the information and resources they need to be partners with their children in their path to higher education. Recently, I had a very interesting conversation with John Connolly, cofounder of 1647, a Boston-based non-profit organization that also utilizes family engagement as a strategy to support student learning and success in school.

To hear more about 1647’s parental engagement strategies and their success, listen to our full conversation HERE.

Here are some of John Connolly’s quotes from our conversation:

• “We are there to build a relationship with the family, so that teachers and families are brought into partnership, an equal partnership, where they are going to work together to ensure student success in school.” 
• “We note that when we do home visits at schools, the one thing we know will happen for certain is parent-teacher conference attendance will shoot up in the following months, because you begin a relationship with that family.” 
• “One of the things that that our data indicates that if you can get a teacher to try one visit, at a very high rate those teachers will find it worthwhile, rewarding, and then be much more inclined to do more visits.” 
• “the answers that we seek around how to make schools work and how to break cycles of poverty lies,.. [ do not] lie in telling families or schools what to do, it lies in actually building relationships with families and respecting what they want.”