Spanish-Speaking Parents: Are You Keeping Up with Your Kids?

By Guestblogger Rena Mathena

After reading these two recent articles, from the Denver Post and the Star-Ledger, I was wondering what connections could be made between the two.

The first discusses the Denver Public School System’s increasing percentage of gifted minority students participating in the “highly gifted and talented” programs. According to the article, schools are trying to include the 76% Latino and Black student population in their special programs regardless of their first language or how many free lunches they receive. This translates to mini-Affirmative Action technique to help those students who may not be scoring as high as white students to also benefit from the special program. Although the figures are increasing, the overall percentage of “gifted” students who are ethnic minorities is only 25%.

The second article from New Jersey’s Star-Ledger described the struggles of the large Hispanic population's struggle to have civil resources printed in Spanish. Spanish-speaking New Jersey residents are in need to bilingual bus schedules, instructions for registering their children for school, etc. If this information is provided in Spanish, the 900,000 people speaking Spanish in New Jersey would be able to take advantage of resources that were previously unknown to them and they would also be able to understand state regulations that were previously posted only in English.

Examining these two articles through a parent-student perspective is easy. If more resources are printed in English and Spanish - as the Hispanic community in New Jersey recommends - more Hispanic parents would be able to understand school notices and the options their children have of participating in special programs, such as gifted and talented programs. With increased parental involvement and support for their children’s participation, the percentage of Hispanic students in gifted and talented programs at schools would increase, giving more students a chance to learn at their greatest potential.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: the more parents are involved in their children’s schooling, the better opportunities students will have to learn at their best.

More on Teachers v. Parents

New Education Policy Research study on how to encourage parental involvement despite language barriers.

Hint: Find new ways to reach ELL parents.

New University of Missouri study on low-income students' access to high-quality teachers.

Hint: They don't have much.

Teachers v. Parents: Who is the Greater Influence?

In his weekly column for the WaPo, Jay Matthews argues that, contrary to popular belief, teachers have a greater influence on children's achievement than their parents:

Do unsupportive parents create pathetic schools or do pathetic schools create unsupportive parents? It is the most frustrating of chicken-and-egg questions. Many education experts will say it is a bit of both, but that's a cop-out. Most of our worst schools are full of low-income children in our biggest cities. No one has yet found a way to revive those schools in any significant way by training the students' parents to be more engaged with their children's educations. It is too hard to do and too unlikely to have much impact on the chaotic school district leadership.

What has worked, again and again, is the opposite: Bring an energetic and focused leader into the school, let that person recruit and train good teachers and find ways to get rid of those who resist making the necessary changes. Great teaching makes great schools, and once you have a good school, parents become engaged and active.

I don't disagree with him entirely, but I do believe Matthews gives too little credit to parents.

Matthews focuses mainly on parental engagement - for example, programs that teach parents how to help their children with their homework. This type of program is clearly important, but as Matthews said, it doesn't exactly create systemic change. Students benefit and parents benefit, but schools rarely transform because parents start checking homework assignments at night.

What does have the power to create systemic change - and what Matthews misses - is parental advocacy. This type of "parental involvement" is not taught by schools, primarily because of its political nature. After all, if schools teach parents to demand better, eventually, those parents will start demanding better of the schools themselves.

Yet advocacy is a necessary skill for parents, especially low-income, minority parents. Wealthy Anglo parents often have the education, social capital, and financial resources to be effective advocates for their children. Low-income parents, minority parents, immigrant parents - these are people who we should pour our resources into. These are the people to whom we must say, "This is America. Your child deserves an excellent education. Now, let's go fight for it."

If it is taught effectively, parental advocacy can change not just the lives of students and parents, but the entire school system as well. This is the next phase of parental involvement - moving from engagement to advocacy - and it has incredible potential.

Educational Robin Hood: Sneaking into Out-of-District Schools

Today's blog post is authored by an Hispanic CREO intern, Moira Nadal. For comments or questions, she can be reached at mnadal@brynmawr.edu.

An article in the New York Times reveals a crisis currently faced by many suburban school districts: students claiming false residence to sneak into out-of-district schools. It describes the experience of one school in New Jersey trying to deal with this problem and the drastic measures administrators have turned to in order to cope. To combat this major problem, for example, school districts are hiring investigators and retired policemen, creating anonymous hotlines and posting bounties for reports of out-of-district students that are proven to be true.

The lack of educational opportunities that creates this phenomenon is a problem for students across the US. Several sources in the article are quoted as saying that students’ sneaking in is a persistent problem in their districts. This is clearly a manifestation of parents' need to have more and better options for schooling their children. In several parents’ and community blogs across the nation, parents admit to sending their children to out-of-district schools and give many reasons why they choose to do so. For many parents in the Berkeley area, for example, the issue of convenience came up for working parents who want their child’s school to be closer to their place of work. In Georgia’s Henry County, many seem to believe that a search for better facilities is leading students to sneak in from neighboring counties.

Other forums mention students who want to switch to another school because of smaller classes, better teachers, and safer learning environments. These reasons for transferring are particularly relevant to Latino students, who are disproportionately enrolled in failing or persistently dangerous schools. For many low-income Hispanics, especially those who are denied school choice and lack the resources to pay for private school, transferring to an out-of-district school - or sneaking in - may be the only viable opportunity for a decent education.

There are still many parents who wish that their child’s school were more convenient, to their work or to a caregiver. There are parents frustrated by the lack of qualified teachers and learning materials, overcrowding, and violence; who wish for their children to be able to go to schools with more competitive sports teams or with specialized language classes. There are many reasons that students are sneaking illegally into other school districts - these reasons are the same why parents deserve to be given more power over their children’s school choices.

Wedneday Issue: Educating Parents to Make the Right School Choose

Earlier this week, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Arizona State University released a collaborative study entitled, "Who Chooses Schools, and Why?" Full text found here.

In the report, the authors examine how parents who exercise school choice evaluate their children's educational options and settle on the best school. They review the literature about parents who send their children to private school, as well as parents who participate in means-based voucher programs, who send their children to charter or magnet schools, and those who choose to homeschool their own children.

Here are some key findings (in italics) and my commentary:

The primary stated motivation in all types of choice is perceived academic quality; the primary influence in terms of documented behavior is peer composition in terms of race and class.... White parents tend to avoid schools with high minority concentrations, and minority parents tend to avoid schools with high percentages of low-income students.

Therefore, while parents are searching primarily for the best academic education for their children, demographic information heavily influences how they define "best academic education."

The school choice movement has long argued that school choice will desegregate schools. While it is true that in certain cities, private schools are more racially diverse than their public counterparts, this research indicates that not all parents who elect schools of choice are necessarily looking for racial (or class) diversity. Therefore, the question becomes: how do we help (White) parents get away from the assumption that a high minority population equals a worse education and how do we convince (minority) parents that schools with large low-income populations can offer a good education?

The primary way that parents learn about schools in through their social networks.... What social networks do is present constrained sets of schools. Of particular note here is that lower-income families tend to have more failing and less competitive schools in their choice sets.

Here is where school choice organizations can provide a real boon to parents. We have the resources to develop effective "word of mouth" strategies to reach out to low-income parents. So, what will they be? How can we ensure that parents are getting the right "word of mouth" information and thus, empowered to make good decisions about their children's schooling?

Recent research also shows that having instructional and academic information about schools, which many choice programs provide (i.e. booklets on choice programs) is not necessarily sufficient to get families to choose schools of high academic quality. Demographic information about schools appears to be a key factor parents consider in a variety of choice settings...

And here, friends, is one of the paradoxes of school choice. Universal school choice means that parents have the power to choose whatever schools they want, and that choice can be based on whatever information they want, even if it goes against the ideals of the school choice movement (like desegregating schools, for example). So how do we strike a balance between giving parents what they want (and deserve) and ensuring that choice really CAN improve and diversify our school system? It's an interesting question and something that, surely, choice advocates should have on their minds.

Parents and the Education Game

I've been reading a bit on parental involvement lately, but I promise that I will not even mention the phrase "helicopter parent."

Firstly, of particular interest to the Latino community, are the ideas of Edwin C. Darden, Appleseed's director of education policy, who writes on how to teach low-income parents to "work the system" to guarantee their children's best education. Noting that many low-income parents do not understand how the educational system operates and do not believe that they can influence it in any way, Darden cites the need for legislation like NCLB, which, he claims, "has the potential to address these problems [see above] and spark greater parental involvement throughout the United States." He also recognizes that, "The grand battles over testing, adequate yearly progress, and reconstruction of failing schools threaten to swamp efforts to strengthen compliance with NCLB's parental involvement provisions."

Obviously, Darden is right that parents are not effectively engaged in their children's education. But are the mandates of NCLB really all that helpful? Here's what NCLB gives parents: a few letters home, saying, "Your child's school did not make AYP, therefore, you may enroll him/her in free tutoring classes." Is that engaging parents, truly educating them and empowering them to make decisions about their children's education?

I much prefer some of the other ideas that Darden includes, such as Montgomery (MD) County's Parent Academy, which offers more than 35 free workshops for parents. These workshops are not mandated by NCLB - but they seem to be a much more effective way to get parent's involved in their children's education and not just act as spectators.

Secondly, a thank you to the blog Historical/Present for directing me to the report Deciding on Postsecondary Education, from the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative. Some key points critical to the Latino community:

- Focus groups with first generation students revealed that it is not unlikely for academically under-prepared and/or first generation students to delay the college search process for a few years following their high school graduation.

- Research by Zimbroff (quoted in the study), revealed that youth in cultures that emphasize community values and discourage "standing out" are less likely to leave home and tend to prefer local institutions over prestigious or geographically distant colleges.

- Focus group research indicated that Hispanic first generation college students were encouraged to stay close to home for college, since they would "need the support of their families."

Some other interesting findings in the study - I suggest you check it out.