Thursday, November 25, 2010

Have we aligned 21st Century schooling goals with parent and community engagement?

While schools are striving to prepare our students for the 21st century, many are doing so without aligned parent and community engagement practices. What can we do to tackle this challenge?

A recent US Department of Education forum discussed this issue by looking at a range of related questions:

1. What does the future of family and community engagement look like?
2. How can federal, state, and local policies work together to create systemic family engagement?
3. How can student performance data be used to connect families and schools in a significant way?
4. What roles can families play in transforming low-performing schools?

Discussed at length were the policy levers that can be tapped to encourage and sustain meaningful partnerships with parents and communities to support student learning. These levers included: training and professional development for school staff; capacity building to help entities develop, implement, and evaluate initiatives; encouraging the blending of resources in creative ways; sharing best practices via learning communities; scaling effective practices; and using the federal government’s leadership role to develop a common family engagement framework and accountability system to ensure that state and local family engagement goals are being met.

See full blog post here:

http://www.ed.gov/blog/2010/11/national-policy-forum-for-family-school-and-community-engagement-event-recap/

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