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Promoting Equity through Family Engagement
April 6, 2022
Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light.
-Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), Artist
-Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), Artist
The Brookings Institution has recently released “Collaborating to Transform and Improve Education Systems: A playbook for family-school engagement” by Rebecca Winthrop, Adam Barton, Mahsa Ershadi, and Lauren Ziegler. According to Brookings, “By providing evidence-based strategies from around the world and other hands-on tools that school leaders and partners can adopt and use in their local contexts, it aims to help leapfrog education inequality so that all young people can have a 21st-century education.”
The authors state, “From Argentina to India to the United States, leaders realized that hard-to-reach families were not opposed to engaging with schools; it was just that the schools’ approaches to engagement were getting in the way. For example, when the government of Himachal Pradesh, a state of almost 7 million people in India, pivoted from asking parents to come to schools for meetings to finding multiple ways for schools to come to parents—through text messages, WhatsApp groups, and Facebook posts—engagement levels jumped from 20 percent to 80 percent in two months (Brookings Institution, 2021)."
As one of the speakers in the Ed.Flicks video, “Engaging Parents in Brave Conversations,” Valora Washington adds her thoughts on effective family engagement, “Believe me, neither you nor I will ever be able to speak all the languages that our children speak, nor will we be able to know all the details and idiosyncrasies of all the cultures we're going to interact with. And, we don't necessarily have to speak every language or know everything, but we can engage our families with an open heart and an open mind to support and be real partners with us in what we're trying to do as early childhood educators. Let's strengthen family engagement.”
A regular contributor to Exchange magazine, Valora Washington will be the Visionary Leadership Awardee and Leadership Colloquium Speaker at the upcoming Leadership Connections National Virtual Conference, April 27-29.
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Comments (2)
Displaying All 2 CommentsUnited States
Francis, thank you for your comment on this ExchangeEveryDay. Good points, there's a lot to think about here!
- Brittany at Exchange Press
University of Phoenix/ Red Rocks Community College
Denver, Colorado, United States
Where we do a very poor job working with parents is in the area of special education. For some reason many early childhood programs do not engage and support their families with children who have - or might have - specific special education needs. And then the local public school invariably forces these families to move from their local program to a school-based program for children with special needs. As a field we have to take this issue on directly. I suggest we explore ways to make early childhood programs such as Head Start and religious programs administrative districts that can get federal special education funding directly from the federal government, instead of having to go through the local school district. I continually read that ECE needs to be more inclusive of these children, but this will not happen until we get direct access to federal financial support!
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