Building trust, elevating voices, and sharing power in family partnership

Recognizing that school-family partnerships can have a powerful effect on student outcomes, many K-12 educators are moving their work with families from the periphery to the center of their school improvement efforts. So too have many federal, state, and district policy makers made this work a priority in recent years. However, this renewed attention to family partnerships has surfaced some thorny questions about the nature and purpose of such partnerships: What resources do local educators need in order to work effectively with families? What, exactly, are the goals of those partnerships? And perhaps most important, who gets to define those goals, and who decides how they ought to be pursued?

Traditionally, teachers and administrators have taken the lead. While they may gather input from families, keep them informed, and offer them a welcoming school environment, they tend to be the ones who decide how families should be involved in their children’s learning. However, while the most common forms of family engagement (such as encouraging parents to attend school events, serve as classroom volunteers, and participate on fund-raising committees) tend to line up well with middle-class child-rearing practices and family resources (Lareau, 2003), they can be less accessible to families who have recently arrived in the United States, or whose child-rearing practices differ from those of school leaders. Traditional forums for family leadership, such as the PTA and other committees, can feel unfamiliar, uninviting, and insensitive to families’ schedules, resource constraints, and practices (Delgado Gaitan, 2012).

As districts and schools refocus their approaches to family partnership, it is becoming clear that families must have real opportunities to help define this work. At a surface level, this can facilitate buy-in to schools’ goals and practices. At a deeper level, meaningful partnerships lead to better student outcomes while also permitting schools to become centers of democratic participation.