(Vol. 4, No. 1 - Spring 2000)

Partnerships:
Parents Need "Standards 101"

In the Long Beach public schools, standards-based reforms make the perennial problem of involving middle school parents in their children's learning even more important- and more difficult.

By Anne C. Lewis

Before parents can become partners with schools in raising student achievement, says Penny O'Toole, principal of Marshall Middle School, "parents must have a chance to know what we are trying to accomplish and what they can do to help their kids."

Principals and teachers are constantly challenged to find ways to make this happen in schools with great mixtures of languages, with both neighborhood and bused-in students, and with many levels of interest in school affairs among parents. In the Long Beach public schools, standards-based reforms make the perennial problem of involving middle school parents even more important - and more difficult.

"What we are communicating is change, not the status quo," says Chris Eftychiou, communications coordinator for the middle schools. "We can't rely just on parents' own school experiences. We have new messages to share with them."

Interviews with principals, teachers, and parents at several schools reveal that schools must use different approaches for different families. Parents of students in Marshall's AVID program, which helps students who are ready for more advanced work, easily fill the school library on their parent night. But it takes many phone calls to entice

parents to monthly meetings of the English Learners Advisory Committee. One Marshall strategy: "catching" parents of incoming sixth graders at an orientation that schedules them for half-day workshops, then enlists them for such projects as preparing hot chocolate in the morning to raise funds.

To help explain the district's standards approach to teaching, O'Toole has used parts of a video developed by the district and the Clark Foundation in meetings with parents. The school's report cards offer more than the regular listings of grades - they also stress the progress that students are making on mastering standards. Teachers also included a discussion of academic standards in their talks with parents at back-to-school night, and articles on standards appear regularly in the school newsletter. "If we say things often enough in small increments," O'Toole believes, "parents will begin to understand standards."

Still, she is cautious about declaring victory with her second-language parents, who turn out for parent meetings in large numbers, even though the school is far from many of their homes. O'Toole says she is constantly searching for ways to reduce the education jargon and explain the district's teaching reforms in ways that second-language parents "are not uncomfortable" and will stay involved.


Breaking through cultural isolation

Understanding how "culturally different" parents feel about schools that are not close to them - geographically or socially - is critical, says Maria De LaCruz, who has been involved in youth development at several middle schools and authored a report on The Children of Long Beach for the Earl and Lorraine Miller Foundation.

"Some of these parents have been through wars, are illiterate, and have no idea how schools are run," she says. "And so often parenting classes and other activities are intended for 'bad' parents, when the problem really is language and cultural isolation."

As for standards, De LaCruz says, "Parents don't know what standards are. Parents are working and don't get involved unless there is something that requires their attention."

One key is translating the complex ideas and language of standards-based reform so all parents have some understanding for what the district is trying to accomplish. "Parents need to see standards connected to the big picture of what students are learning," says Juli Kendall, an instructional leader at Hill Middle School who helped develop the district's second-language learning standards two years ago.

"A teacher may have students playing with ping pong balls to learn Newton's Laws. But it's easy for a child to lose the 'why' of what they are doing on the ride from school to home, and parents wonder what in the world they are doing at that school. What we tell parents about what we expect and why we are doing what we do needs to be simple and explicit."

Kendall works mostly with bilingual parents. At the same school, Randi Gibson, who teaches several RISE classes, finds that her parents also "are not interested in understanding the specifics of every standard. They want to know how the standards relate to what the students are being graded on. A lot of parents' eyes glaze over when we talk about standards."

Hill principal Robin Samana agrees that many of her parents are not interested in the details, but she hopes that the more they learn about how standards can help hold schools accountable for every child's success, the more they will realize the purposes of accountability beyond the SAT-9 scores. Hill parents attending PTA meetings believe there is too much emphasis on the SAT-9, a major reason why Samana wants to direct their attention to standards because "they represent the skills that kids need."


Middle schools lack a structure for parent involvement

Hill's teachers are so familiar with standards, Samana believes, that they have internalized them and can explain them to parents, "but often it is a struggle to reach parents who really need to know about them." One strategy used by the school is parent-teacher conferences. Hill was the only middle school to make the choice to pay for Saturday conferences from school funds after the state disallowed the use of professional development days for that purpose.

Teacher-parent conferences "are a valuable conversation piece that helps parents understand their children's progress," says Samana. "As an elementary teacher, I knew how much parent involvement impacts on student learning, but at the middle school we do not have a structure for it. Our parents missed the conference time they had when their children were in elementary school."

The Saturday schedule encouraged even greater parent participation, she says, with more than 200 parents picking up report cards compared to fewer than 70 when the conferences were held on a teacher work day during the week.

To Robin Cordell, a parent at Hill, the communication about standards-based instruction has been seamless from elementary to middle school, and she believes the district's efforts to inform parents have been excellent. "They listen really well, and we get answers," she says, "but so much change can be confusing for parents." Kim Watten appreciates "knowing if my child meets the standards, and I like it when teachers give us the curriculum guides" that describe what will be taught all year.


"Standards 101" at Bancroft Middle

At Bancroft Middle School, parents are at the point where they "can talk about standards and scoring guides," instead of being talked at, according to Principal Kelly Hurley. He began with a "Standards 101" open house, using part of the video on standards with all parents, then sending them on a scavenger hunt to look for signs of a standards-based classroom. Parents learned, for example, "that students do well because they do a lot of writing with lots of drafts," he says.

Hurley has used the video and forum discussions several times to keep the interest high, and parents learn even more by taking responsibility to post student work - along with standards and objectives and a scoring guide - throughout the halls of the school.

With examples of graded work all around them, students "see their work in an objective way, instead of subjective ideas of what is expected," says Tina Richardson, whose son Chris "now might understand why he got a 4 and not a 6 on a paper." Nancy McFee's son was so pleased when some of his work was posted "that he is now setting standards for himself, applying them in Scouts and baseball, too."

Talk about standards dominates teachers' lives at Bancroft, where teachers are becoming comfortable with critiquing student work together and "are beginning to plan assessments before planning specific lessons," according to Lou Kearns, literacy expert for the school. "Because we are looking at student work closely, we are looking at ourselves. In the teachers' lounge, the talk is about how kids are learning, not what they're doing."

Hurley believes the focus on student work helps explain Bancroft's high performance on state and district assessments, but he admits that not every teacher is "on board" - some, for example, still question the value of using scoring guides for important assignments. Still, Hurley believes teachers are becoming more and more comfortable with the standards approach as it becomes a more integral part of the school's operations.

Parents also feel more at ease with the standards lingo. Time set aside for parents at the sixth-grade orientation focuses on small-group discussions of standards and student work. Now, when Nancy Hackert's child brings papers home from school, "I see new ways of grading and understand what the rubrics mean."

While parents may not show up at school meetings as often as principals and teachers want, Hackert says, "there are a lot of coffee klatches going on in the neighborhoods where the talk is all about standards and what's happening at the schools."

When that kind of talk becomes commonplace in every neighborhood, the Long Beach community will know that standards-based education has truly taken hold.


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