Published 10 times a year, each edition explores issues facing U.S. education today and strategies to better serve every student. This newsletter is published in print and on the IDRA website, in addition to this eLetter format. You can unsubscribe from this email newsletter by clicking on the link at the top of this page.

“The core of our dream must value young people – all young people. We cannot afford to value some schools and not others, some neighborhoods and not others, some ethnic or racial groups and not others, some families and not others." - Dr. María “Cuca” Robledo Montecel, IDRA President and CEO

by Laurie Posner, M.P.A.

Just as we rounded the corner into the 21st century, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam warned that our society might very well be falling apart. In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), Putnam drew on extensive data, including more than 500,000 interviews, to find that social ties among friends, family and democratic structures were breaking down, leaving us with far less social capital. Fewer people were taking part in the political process or taking up leadership in social and civic groups. We were still bowling, Putnam found – but not in leagues. We were bowling alone.

A World of New Information, but in a Read-Only Format. Bowling Alone suggested that television and computers were part of the problem, as the combination of late 20th century technologies tended to isolate and remove us from the public square. Television had reached near universal adoption in U.S. homes in the late 1990s. And this medium, from the late 1920s onward, had sharply distinguished broadcasters from viewers and relegated the latter to a generally passive role.

Expansive as it was, the early web typically followed suit. While Web 1.0 linked up large knowledge sets and brought the messages of broadcasters, webmasters and merchandisers to the public, it rarely caused publics to interact with webcasters or to one another. Whether mapping out human-machine contact (“user interfaces”) or ascribing new affiliations and identities (“usernames”), the early web would promote a designer-user relationship, much like the broadcaster-viewer binary that had preceded it.

Fortunately, not everyone was on board. As scholar Don Norman said: “I am on a crusade to get rid of the word ‘users.’ I would rather call them ‘people’” (2008). And, the web would dramatically evolve. Darcy DiNucci observed in “Fragmented Future” (1999), “The Web we know now…is only an embryo of the Web to come… [Web 2.0] will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.”

The Social Web. Web 2.0 – which came into focus around 1999 – signaled a move away from the static interface and toward more interaction and collaboration.  – Keep reading

by Frances M. Guzmán, M.Ed.

In the United States, schools have a long tradition of equating student success with family involvement. Just like motherhood and apple pie, family engagement in schools is the accepted mantra and expectation. Of course quality instruction and resources also have much to do with student success, but many accept the notion that family engagement is one very important aspect of student growth and ultimate success.

Research indicates positive contributions to students’ academic and social gains when active partnerships exist between home, school and community (Blank, et al., 2003; Caspe, et al., 2006/07; Henderson & Mapp, 2002; Kreider, et al., 2007; Weiss, et al., 2006). Since this is the general philosophy embraced by almost all publics concerned with education, federal, state and local entities have enacted specific policies, regulations and targeted monies for family engagement.

So while in theory no one argues with the philosophy of family involvement, the type of engagement has been a loosely defined arena. The last 40 years emphasized the accepted and traditional aspects of family involvement. These centered on providing parenting information, volunteering and fundraising activities, or what was referred to in the field as “random acts of parent involvement” (Gil Kressley, 2008). These implied that something had to happen to or be done to parents or that only lower level activities would be what families could do with schools. In this paradigm, families were not seen as partners but rather as assistants to the educational process.

More recently though, involvement of families has been determined to be more about active partnerships that drive school reform (Christenson & Reschly, 2009) and promote student achievement. Along these lines, IDRA has been ahead of the curve in its research and its 40 years of field experience with the development of a change model, the Quality Schools Action Framework™ (Robledo Montecel & Goodman, 2010). This model outlines how all stakeholders (families, schools, communities) can be involved in schools. – Keep reading

Register now for the next Annual IDRA La Semana del Niño Parent Institute™, which will take place in San Antonio on April 25, 2013.

See a video introduction to the IDRA OurSchool portal, designed to help you – educators and community members – find out how well your high school campus is preparing and graduating students, what factors may be weakening school holding power, and what you can do together to address them. [02:16 min]

by Aurelio M. Montemayor, M.Ed.

PTA Comunitarios are a new response to the challenges of effective family-school-community partnerships. Schools and parent organizations need successful family engagement processes that go beyond traditional family participation. The original official PTA Comunitario is in its fourth year of operation and is growing in membership, expectations and goals set and in taking on education issues. Themes of the meetings include examining the impact of the state accountability system and high-stakes tests, analyzing the state’s graduation requirements, and the re-introduction of a minimum diploma track that steers students away from college.

The new type of PTA functions in a grassroots community organization with meetings held in the native language of participants, in this case Spanish. Members are mostly poor, recent immigrants from unincorporated communities on the fringes of towns. Rotating leadership emerges from these families. Meetings are highly participatory with specific education-related training. Home visitors (promotoras) engage families and organize transportation networks to meetings and events.

The role of families in partnering with schools to create excellence for all children is growing though still not central in the research and literature of parent involvement in education. Institutional improvement through community-school partnerships needs much more evidence and proof in the field. Emerging research is highlighting family-school-community partnerships. In S. Hong’s A Cord of Three Strands: A New Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools, a strong partnership between a community organization and schools focuses on the power of an external organization providing support for family leadership and campus participation. Other references reinforcing the community-family-school relationships are Ferguson, et al., (2010); Henderson, A.T. (2011); Orr & Rogers (2011); Robledo Montecel & Goodman (2010); and Weiss, et al. (2010).

IDRA’s PTA Comunitario project has now been funded with a four-year grant by the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation (I3) program to further develop the process and rigorously document and evaluate the successful practice in expansion to 20 campuses in five school districts. – Keep reading

"The ruling by the Texas District Court, Judge John Dietz presiding, that the Texas school finance system as currently constructed violates the Texas Constitution affirms what communities and educators have known for years. Our state clearly is not providing the resources necessary to educate all children to the high levels that are needed in the 21st century." This excerpted statement by María “Cuca” Robledo Montecel, Ph.D., IDRA President and CEO, addresses the Texas District Court ruling on the Texas school finance system, February 4, 2013. The full statement and resources on school funding policy and IDRA’s Fair Funding Now! initiative are available online as well. 

Full statement

IDRA’s Fair Funding Now! initiative

In March of 2009, some 20 parents gathered to explore forming their own community-based official PTA unit. Most were fluent only in Spanish, and all were poor. All of the schools their children attended were either academically challenged or feeders to low-achieving secondary schools. Through a partnership between the community-based ARISE Centers and IDRA, the founding of the country’s first PTA Comuntario demonstrates IDRA’s Family Leadership in Education Mode in action. Today, IDRA is helping more communities in the Texas Rio Grande Valley start their own PTA Comuntarios to partner with their schools to ensure success of all students. (See “Families Engaging Each Other to Improve Schools” for details.)

Promotora Model for Family Leadership in Education

Family Leadership in the Field – Lasting Community Leadership in Education

Community Leaders Discuss How PTA Comunitarios Give Voice to Parents in their Children’s Education

Parent Institutes for Education