To Help the Kids, Parents Go Back to School

“How many of us have to deal with our sons sucking their teeth and saying, ‘Oh, my God’?” the teacher asks his students. A chorus of knowing laughs and mmm-hmms erupts from the audience of about 30 mostly middle-aged Philadelphia parents attending a class called Helping African-American and Latino Males Succeed in School. Years after they finished their own formal schooling, these mothers and fathers are here to pick up some pointers on that most intangible of tasks: how to be a better parent.

The class is one of nearly 30 such courses offered by the Philadelphia school district, which, alongside districts in cities like Boston and Miami, recently established a Parent University. These ongoing series of free workshops are designed to get parents more involved in their children’s education.

And no, we’re not talking about involvement in the sense of occasional PTA meetings and bake sales, says Philadelphia superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who established Parent University earlier this year as part of her plan to overhaul the city’s school system. “If you want students to actually do better, then you need to ground that change in the fabric of a community–and that means getting parents engaged,” she says.

Parent academies are geared particularly for urban communities full of moms and dads who for various reasons aren’t actively involved in their kids’ schooling. Many are single mothers with second jobs that leave them little time to help with schoolwork. Some are immigrants who don’t understand much English. Some parents may not be good at math or may be uncomfortable with homework. And there are many parents who are just not well informed about the way schools work. “The policies, the procedures, what state test scores mean,” says Karen Mapp, lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “It’s not that [parents] don’t care. They just don’t know.”

Although the current wave of education reformers maintain that high-quality teachers and schools can help overcome negative environmental factors, parent-academy supporters say family engagement is essential. They don’t have much in the way of definitive data; most districts do not link student and teacher data, let alone information about whose parents enrolled in classes like Helping Children Prepare for Tests or 9th Grade Transition to High School.

But Mapp, who has conducted research on the topic for 16 years, says there is a “pretty positive relationship between families being engaged in their children’s education and positive effects on students.”

Participants in these parent programs are naturally self-selecting: if you attend a workshop on how to assist with improving your child’s note-taking skills, it is because you are genuinely interested in helping your child be a better note taker. But how do you reach the parents who may need these types of classes the most? Simple, says Karren Dunkley, deputy of the Philadelphia school district’s Office of Parent, Family and Community Services. You have to go right to where they are. “Public housing, community centers, libraries, faith-based organizations–we go directly to those places and groups and reach out to parents to tell them about Parent University,” says Dunkley. “We’ve even gone directly into homeless shelters to try to get men involved in our classes.”

In Miami-Dade County, hospitals give parents of every newborn a congratulatory packet that includes, among other things, a letter from the county’s Parent Academy. “Keep in mind that you are, and will always be, your child’s first and most important teacher,” the letter reads. “Miami-Dade County Public Schools has many resources and opportunities for you to make the most of that awesome responsibility.” (You have to admit, it’s a pretty ingenious interpretation of that old advertising maxim “Get ’em while they’re young.”)

Once students enroll in the district, Miami-Dade’s Parent Academy gets the word out about upcoming events via taped messages sent by an automated calling system.

The program, established in 2005 by then superintendent Rudy Crew, offers more than 100 workshops and costs about $1 million a year to run. It is entirely privately funded, with grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and other nonprofits as well as donations from companies like Juicy Juice and Target. But its structure and appeal–to date, more than 120,000 parents have participated–have served as a model for both Philadelphia’s and Boston’s new district-funded ventures.

Crew, who now teaches at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, took the reins in Miami after serving as chancellor of the New York City school system, where he became aware of the need to educate parents, lest they check out completely. “So many parents, particularly in urban [centers], are not without the capacity to dream big about their kids,” says Crew. “What they don’t know is how to connect the dots to see that dream become a reality.”