|
Parent Involvement Aspects of NCLB: Activities and Evidence* Oliver C. Moles, Jr. This paper reviews programs of the U.S. Department of Education that include roles for parents in K-12 schooling during the presidency of George W. Bush. Only those programs with the most national research and evaluation of their parent aspects will be discussed. They are Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Parental Information and Resource Centers (PIRCs), after-school enrichment programs, and special education. Several aspects of each program are reviewed: the legislation regarding parents, the nature and scope of the mandated parent involvement activities, program statistics, and any recent evaluations of parental aspects of each program. The main question posed is this: What do national research, statistics and evaluations of the parent aspects of these programs reveal about the programs and their effects on parents and children. The federal government has funded almost all of these studies. They involve samples of parents and students in many localities across the country. Regarding NCLB Title I, studies of parents focused on their options in failing schools to seek tutoring for their children or to transfer them to other schools. Despite much publicity of these options, only small percentages of parents chose them. Studies of other aspects of parent involvement in Title I that were in the law before NCLB such as parent input to parent involvement plans and school-parent compacts were ignored. The state-based PIRCs assist parents and parent educators from birth through high school. Statistics indicate that 2.6 million parents received services in 2006-07 including 1.5 million low-income parents. No national evaluation has been practical because these programs vary so much from state to state. However, each PIRC conducts a local evaluation, and almost half have proposed quasi-experimental or experimental studies of their programs and services. The 21st Century Community Learning Centers (after-school enrichment programs) are in about 10 percent of all elementary schools in the nation. A national longitudinal evaluation of middle school students in the program showed that their parents were more involved at the school, but another longitudinal evaluation of elementary school students with random assignment provided more ambiguous results about benefits to parents and students. Special education is not authorized under NCLB, but is included here because of its active research program. Four national longitudinal studies of disabled children and youth have been conducted in recent years including a nationally representative sample of students in special education who were ages _________________________________________________________________________________ * Presented at A Conversation on Education Reform: Standing at the Intersection of Science and Policy 6-12 in 1999. Data were collected via parent interviews, teacher and school surveys, transcripts, and direct assessment of the students. A wide range of questions was asked, and many replicate questions asked of the general youth population in other studies. Results are too numerous to summarize, but individual scholars can access the data and construct their own tables.
Federal resources to monitor and enforce NCLB Title I and other parent involvement provisions have been lacking. Having state and federal education offices responsible for supporting family engagement seems essential to building an infrastructure for this important work __________________________________________________________________________________ A book chapter by the author entitled Family Involvement in Federal Education Programs: The Bush Years is the basis of this talk. It may be found in Promising Practices to Support Family Engagement with Schools edited by Diana Hiatt-Michael and Catherine Hands. This book is in press from Information Age Publishing Inc, P.O. Box 79049, Charlotte, NC 82871. Phone 704-752-9125.
|
.png){kind=small}
