While there are plenty of people who decry the parents' right push, viewing it as manufactured and mean-spirited, Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane think it has been a healthy and overdue development. Yet while parents have rights, they also have a responsibility to send students to school ready to learn. Schools are ultimately reliant on…

Educators have long agreed that parents have a role to play in furthering their children's education, but they have not always agreed about what the nature of that role should be or about how schools can develop more productive relationships with parents. In this monthly column, Teresa Preston traces how that debate has played out in Kappan.…

Literature in the field of minority parent participation has focused on cultural differences and cultural mismatch as reasons for the difficulties that minority parents face in schools and has relied on a framework of cultural sensitivity in exploring the issues. Soyoung Lee proposes that the real issue underlying the dynamics between minority…

Immigrant parents are not all alike. They vary in language skills as well as their understanding of U.S. culture. All of this affects their ability, if not inclination, to become engaged in their children's education. Educators can assist families by understanding the stages of immigrant parent involvement, which identifies parents' needs, skills,…

Why should we respect the rights of parents to control the education of their children? The author probes this question through a thorough philosophical examination of the nature of the parent-child relationship. The labor of parenting, which is performed for the sake of the intimate relationships, the author says, creates a specific right: the…

Helicopter parents get a bad rap. Teachers and administrators should view them as a resource--not a nuisance. By encouraging open communication, teachers can begin to understand the motivations of these parents and find creative ways to connect them with opportunities to promote their students' academic success and the school's overall…

By all rights, Hispanic children should be performing better than test scores show. Strong parent-child relationships at home should equal student success, yet Hispanic students remain the least educated group in the country. The Hispanic family structure epitomizes the values normally associated with high academic performance. Hispanic families…

There has been a spike in negative comments about mathematics and standards since the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. Regardless of whether the comments are fueled by social media or traditional media, educators need to be armed with strategies for helping parents understand, navigate, and embrace the Common Core's mathematics…

Why school? The 48th Annual PDK Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools included questions about the purpose of schooling, standards, homework, school funding, and parents' relationships with their schools. The 2016 poll, which was conducted by Langer Research Associates, was based on a telephone poll of 1,221 adults during April…

Getting more low-income and parents of color involved to a greater degree in their child's education seems to require some out of the box thinking. That's because even today most schools base such attempts on theories from the 1980s and 1990s that pre-date sophisticated research on parental involvement and are most applicable to white middle class…

Mainstream education often misunderstands the ways that some rural black families display involvement in their children's lives. Teachers may tend to attribute children's academic struggles to what they perceived as a lack of care, concern, and involvement of the families. Such views could keep children from reaching and exceeding their potential,…

For parents living with children diagnosed with autism, advocating for their child presents a new reality in parenthood, often unexpected and with more questions than answers. Once they have passed the various stages of denial and sadness, questioned the experts, and finally accepted the reality of the challenges their child will face, it is time…

Teachers' objections to an emphasis on narrative, descriptive evaluation and a de-emphasis on grades cannot rest on uninformed claims about what parents want. Decades of research show that grades don't lead to deeper understandings, increased intellectual risk-taking, or better performance on complex tasks. Similarly, conversations based around…

KIPP Delta succeeds at its stated mission, probably because of its careful attention to culture building. What distinguishes this KIPP school is thoughtful work linking the daily processes of schooling to the goals of schooling, in this case success in college. Day to day tactics reflect broader themes: having a clear mission and hiring staff who…

Homelessness is a complex and layered phenomenon, but schools can be effective in reducing its educational consequences. Schools currently are not doing enough. The next step is to consider the services that are needed for students as they arrive on the school campus. Taking care of homeless children in school systems involves seven provisos:…