Interview with Barbara Jackson, who has served as principal of the William Monroe Trotter Elementary School in the Roxbury section of Boston for the past 13 years and who is a strong supporter of parental choice and educational equity. The interview reveals some of her strategies for trying to empower parents. (BJV)

Summarizes "First Lessons," the author's 1986 report on elementary schooling. Acknowledges society's complexity, the nation's ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, parents' importance, and changing family structure. Examines curriculum content and quality, principal and teacher effectiveness, and school policy issues, including the need for rigorous…

It is in small schools' interest to educate parents in behavioral management skills. Concepts taught should include positive reinforcement by shaping, charting, contingency contracting, reinforcing incompatible behavior, and time-out. Parents will need help in becoming more structured in parent/child interactions, aware of reinforcement habits,…

Describes inadequate home literacy experiences of three children, noting that the home expects the school to educate the child and the school expects certain prerequisites of the home, but neither is aware of the other's expectations. Exhorts schools and teachers to communicate better the parents' role in early literacy education. (HTH)

Describes the efforts of a Maryland high school to strengthen its position in the community by means of public service radio messages, a "positive family contact" system that emphasizes positive reinforcement of student achievements, and a weekly newspaper column that acknowledges the contributions of "students, staff members and…

Noting that a partnership between early childhood programs and the families they serve is essential, this guide encourages early childhood administrators to make available a variety of parent involvement options in their program from which parents can make choices that meet their needs. The guide's introduction offers questions to consider while…

Asserting that community foundations have a crucial part to play in supporting the role of fathers in families through research use and support, public policy influence, and program development, this publication is an outgrowth of a fatherhood institute in which representatives from 24 community foundations examined promising ideas for promoting…

The AEL Measure of Academic Supportiveness and Climate (AEL MASC) was developed as part of the MAACK Pilot Schools project currently underway at AEL. MAACK stands for Maximizing Achievement for African American Children in Kanawha. The AEL MASC was designed to determine students' perceptions about themselves as students and about their school…

This instructional video is designed for schools, teachers, and community groups as a tool for encouraging refugee and immigrant parents to communicate with their children's school. The video focuses on the willingness of school personnel to meet with parents to discuss their child's education needs. The video includes sample conversations between…

Career and work constitute a major portion of most people's lives; families have an impact on people's careers; and their culture determines a great deal about how they approach family and work. The family counseling, career, and multicultural literature has given little attention to these dynamics. This text provides a multifaceted framework for…

This digest discusses the problems that service providers and family members from different cultural backgrounds may encounter when planning for students with disabilities. It begins by identifying the following assumptions that underlie a clinical perspective of disability: disability is a physical phenomenon, disability is an individual…

In these times of shrinking budgets, scarce economic resources, intensifying criticism of the results of public schools, and increased demands on schools to provide more than traditional education, educational partnerships can serve as major resources to schools. The objectives of this sourcebook are to provide examples of the multitude of…

This monograph presents findings from ethnographic research about parents' work and children's welfare in the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Job Initiative. The Initiative was designed to improve the futures of poor, inner city people who were disadvantaged in their previous work efforts because of inadequate education, immigrant/refugee status,…

This Toolkit is meant to be a resource for teachers, parents, and administrators involved with two-way immersion (TWI) programs, particularly those at the elementary level. Two-way immersion is a form of dual language instruction that brings together students from two native language groups for language, literacy, and academic content instruction…

This paper describes the first year evaluation of a community-wide, parent/family involvement program initiated in a midsized, Southeast community and school district. The program consists of three major components: (1) Community-Wide Efforts, (2) School-Home Communication, and (3) Home Involvement. Formative and summative evaluation data were…