July 2009 Seeing is Believing: Promising Practices for How School Districts Promote Family Engagement Helen Westmoreland, Heidi M. Rosenberg, M. Elena Lopez, Heather Weiss Download a PDF of this publication (840 kb)

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Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) and the National Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) have teamed up to bring you this ground-breaking policy brief that examines the role of school districts in promoting family engagement. 

Seeing is Believing: Promising Practices for How School Districts Promote Family Engagement spotlights how six school districts across the country have used innovative strategies to create and sustain family engagement “systems at work.”  Our findings point to three core components of these successful systems: creating district-wide strategies, building school capacity, and reaching out to and engaging families.

Drawing from districts’ diverse approaches, we highlight promising practices to ensure quality, oversight, and impact from their family engagement efforts. We also propose a set of recommendations for how federal, state, and local policies can promote district-level family engagement efforts that support student learning.

Key policy recommendations include:

• Creating infrastructure for district-wide leadership for family engagement
• Building district capacity for family engagement through training and technical assistance
• Ensuring reporting, learning, and accountability for family engagement
• Helping districts understand, design, and implement strong evaluation strategies

Read this report to learn how to:

• Help administrators, educators, parents, community members, and policymakers understand that family engagement is a shared responsibility
• Approach family engagement by fostering district-wide strategies, building school capacity, and reaching out to families
• Compare your district’s family engagement strategies to an emerging set of promising practices
• Talk with stakeholders about ways that public policies can support district-level family engagement efforts

Free. Available online only.

 

Harvard Family Research Project

 

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Over half of world's school dropouts are from minorities: Report

Minority Rights Group International (MRG)

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Achievement Gaps: How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress

Executive Summary

In 2007, mathematics scores for both Black and White public school students in grades 4 and 8 nationwide, as measured by the main NAEP assessments of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), were higher than in any previous assessment, going back to 1990. This was also true for Black and White fourth-graders on the NAEP 2007 Reading Assessment. For grade 8, reading scores for both Black and White students were higher in 2007 than in the first reading assessment year, 1992, as well as the most recent previous assessment year, 2005.

White students, however, had higher scores than Black students, on average, on all assessments. While the nationwide gaps in 2007 were narrower than in previous assessments at both grades 4 and 8 in mathematics and at grade 4 in reading, White students had average scores at least 26 points higher than Black students in each subject, on a 0-500 scale. This report will use results from both the main NAEP and the long-term trend NAEP assessments to examine the Black-White achievement gaps, and changes in those gaps, at the national and state level.

The main NAEP 2007 Reading and Mathematics Assessments included grade 4 and grade 8 students both nationally and for all 50 states, as well as the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) and the District of Columbia (hereinafter referred to as states). Not all states had Black (or White) student populations large enough to provide reliable data, and not all states participated in the earliest NAEP state assessments.

Most of the data in this report comes from the main NAEP assessments, supplemented with some data from the NAEP long-term trend assessments. Main NAEP assessments, which began in 1990 for mathematics and 1992 for reading, are administered at the fourth and eighth grades, both nationally and at the state level. Because main NAEP only assesses public schools in its state assessments, this report contains only public school results. The most recent results in this report are for 2007.

NAEP long-term trend assessments are administered by age rather than grade. This report references long-term trend assessment public school results from the earliest assessment through 2004, with results for ages 9 and 13 instead of grades 4 and 8. The long-term trend assessments provide public school results for mathematics going back to 1978 and for reading going back to 1980, at ages 9, 13, and 17, at the national level only, on a 0-500 point scale.

At both ages 9 and 13, mathematics scores for both Black and White students were higher in 2004 than in any previous assessment. The 23-point Black-White achievement gap in mathematics for age 9 public school students in 2004 was narrower than in the first assessment in 1978 but not significantly different from the gap in the most recent previous assessment in 1999. The same was true for the 26- point gap at age 13.

For age 9 reading, scores for both Black and White students were higher in 2004 than in any previous assessment, going back to 1980. The 26-point gap between Black and White students in 2004 was not significantly different from the gap in 1980, but was narrower than the gap in 1999. At age 13 reading, scores were higher for Black students in 2004 than in 1980, but did not show a significant difference from 1999. Scores for White students were not significantly different for either comparison year. The 21-point gap in student performance at age 13 reading in 2004 was narrower than in both 1980 and 1999.

The following two sections summarize state-level achievement gaps between Black and White students in the main NAEP assessments in mathematics and reading.

State Black-White Achievement Gaps—Mathematics

State Black-White Achievement Gaps—Reading

The NAEP reading and mathematics scales make it possible to examine relationships between students’ performance and various background factors measured by NAEP, such as race. However, a relationship that exists between achievement and another variable does not reveal its underlying cause, which may be influenced by a number of other variables. Similarly, the assessments do not reflect the influence of unmeasured variables. At the state level, changes in the size of the achievement gap between Black and White students could be affected by demographic changes in the size and makeup of the populations involved, as well as policy changes in the schools and communities. The results of this study are most useful when they are considered in combination with other knowledge about the student population and the education system, such as trends in instruction, changes in the school-age population, and societal demands and expectations.

This report focuses on the size of the achievement gap between Black and White students and the direction of average scores within states, regardless of the states’ scores. Large gaps may occur in some states with scores above the national average, as well as in states with scores below the national average. Similarly, small gaps may occur in states with scores above or below the national average. All differences discussed in this report are statistically significant at the .05 level after controlling for multiple comparisons. The technical notes for this report provide information about sampling, accommodations, interpreting statistical significance, and other technical features. For more information on both the main NAEP and long-term trend assessments, see appendix A.

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Racial Gap in Testing Sees Shift by Region

By SAM DILLON

WASHINGTON — Historically, the achievement gap between America’s black and white students was widest in Southern states, where the legacies of slavery and segregation were reflected in extremely low math and reading scores among poor African-American children.

But black students have made important gains in several Southern states over two decades, while in some Northern states, black achievement has improved more slowly than white achievement, or has even declined, according to a study of the black-white achievement gap released Tuesday by the Department of Education.

As a result, the nation’s widest black-white gaps are no longer seen in Southern states like Alabama or Mississippi, but rather in Northern and Midwestern states like Connecticut, Illinois, Nebraska and Wisconsin, according to the federal data.

In interviews, top education officials in several states expressed disappointment at the magnitude of those gaps.

“This won’t be a total surprise,” said Roger D. Breed, Nebraska’s education commissioner, “but it’ll be a shock to Nebraskans that the gap here is as big as it is.”

Officials of the National Center for Education Statistics, which produced the report, told reporters in a conference call that the report offered no hypotheses to explain the evolution in black-white achievement, only statistical comparisons that could spur further research.

Experts said it was impossible to gauge from the report whether the federal No Child Left Behind Law, one of the main goals of which was to reduce the achievement gap, had had an impact.

The study plotted the evolution of average scores of black and white students on the series of federal tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress that were administered every two to four years in both math and reading from 1992 to 2007. Nationwide, the average math score in 1992 for white fourth graders was 227 on a 500-point scale, compared with an average score of 192 for black fourth graders that year, resulting in a black-white gap of 35 points.

By 2007, the most recent year included in the new study, the average math scores for white fourth graders had risen to 248, but the average scores for black students had risen to 222, thus narrowing the black-white gap to 26 points, about the equivalent of two and a half years of schooling.

By 2007, the state with the widest black-white gap in the nation on the fourth-grade math test (not counting the District of Columbia) was not in the deep South, but in the Midwest — Wisconsin. White students there scored 250, slightly above the national average, but blacks scored 212, producing a 38-point achievement gap. That average score for black students in Wisconsin was lower than for blacks in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi or any other Southern state, and 10 points below the national average for black students, the study indicated.

Wisconsin was the only state in which the black-white achievement gap in 2007 was larger than the national average in the tests for fourth and eighth grades in both math and reading, according to the study.

Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit group in Washington that works to close achievement gaps, said principals in Wisconsin were “stunned” when shown the results.

“Black kids in Wisconsin do worse than in all these Southern states,” and the reason, Ms. Haycock said, was that Wisconsin educators “haven’t been focusing on doing what’s necessary to close these gaps.”

New York Times Company

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