by LaDonna Hatfield

Created on: December 30, 2008

Low-performing schools need parents' help to improve the educational atmosphere, students' attitudes toward learning, and creating successful expectations for the students. The whole purpose of encouraging parents to play a more active role in the low-performing school is to improve the school's efficiency and effectiveness in teaching all students to learn. In no way does this concept take school boards and teachers off the hook in the educational process. Instead, this construct of parent involvement should be designed to engage parents as partners in helping the school reach specific learning, attendance, and future independence for the students in the school.

Encouraging parental involvement to produce successful outcomes requires planning by all the parties involved. Administrators, teachers, students, and parents need to agree on specific goals to be accomplished and design a method that will work for the individual school to accomplish those goals. It should be noted that some of the parties involved will have different agendas in determining what the best goals to adopt might be. Administrators worry about test scores and the unending challenges of the No Child Left Behind (No Teacher Left Standing) Act. Teachers are concerned about teaching only a to a test instead of teaching students to learn independently and to develop a love and respect relationship with learning. Students are concerned about both test scores and their test practice weariness. Parents want high test scores and creative teaching in their children's classrooms. How do all parties get on board? Realization must set in that higher test scores can be achieved without sacrificing the concepts of independent research and learning, and decisions must be made about how much value will be placed the test score and how much value will be given to creative teaching and learning within the individual school. This kind of decision-making will require compromise and a plan that all parties can embrace if measurable improvement is to occur in the low-performing school.

Teachers and administrators are ultimately responsible for implementing the plans to improve instruction in a school. Parental involvement, therefore, must be a supplemental force that assists administrators, teachers, and students in taking responsibility for implementing the plan successfully. Parental involvement is not the "savior" for a low-performing school. It is just one method of getting assistance to implement goals successfully

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