Getting it Right: Inner-city Parents, School Involvement and Student Academic Achievement
- ISBN-10
- 1124707603
- ISBN-13
- 9781124707600
- Series
- Getting It Right
- Pages
- 186
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2011
- Author
- Fredricka Brown
Description
Parent involvement is a topic of interest to school administrators; research and their own experience indicate that parent participation at the school site can have a significant influence on student achievement. Recent efforts to increase parent involvement through school-based and federally-funded programs have focused on helping schools and parents learn and routinize meaningful school and home roles for parents to play. Despite several attempts to develop means to increase parental involvement, administrators of Southern California inner-city schools continue to be faced with the problem of how to develop programs and strategies that will promote the kinds of productive parental involvement activities that can lead to increased student achievement for the specific student body in these schools. The majority of programs that have been implemented have been offered in general sessions with no particular grade-level focus. In response to the critical need for parent involvement, the Grade Level Parent Workshops program was created at a Southern California Elementary School. This program, in its fifth year of operation at the time of this study, allowed for parents to learn grade level skills of their own children in a series of grade-specific workshops. Because the majority of students at the site came from Spanish-speaking households, Spanish-speaking parents were given the opportunity to receive this information from bilingual teachers. Using Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Theory Model, this study explored the formation, practice, and impact of the program on parent and teacher participants and its influence on the individual practice and behavior of students, teachers, and parents and their relationship to one another. Data were gathered during a series of three focus group meetings with Latino and African-American parents and school site teachers and from six individual interviews with selected focus group participants. Data revealed that the Grade Level Parent Workshops created a welcoming environment for parents to come to the school and consult with their children's teachers, encouraged parent-teacher collaboration, provided needed assistance for parent-supported homework help, discredited stereotypes about inner-city parents not being interested in their children's academic success, and led teachers to redesign some of their in-class teaching and homework assignment practices.
