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Who are the stakeholders? A stakeholder is an individual or group with an interest in the success of an organization in fulfilling its mission—delivering ...
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READING FIRST Sustainability Series
Number 6 · September 2009
Engaging Stakeholders
Including Parents
and the
Community to
Sustain Improved
Reading Outcomes
chools seeking improved outcomes usually have one or more “champions for change” on the inside of the organization, and these leaders can often engage other staff to produce better results in the short term. But these instructional leaders often move to another school, climb the career ladder, or retire. When they do, gains that have been made often quickly fade away. If schools are going to build support for on-going success, they also need advocates for improved program outcomes outside the immediate organization—constituents who understand the mission of the school, who share the champions’ vision and passion for student success, and who have a personal stake in the performance of the school and its students. In this brief, we identify schools’ external stakeholders and offer ways in which these constituents can be a positive force for helping school staff achieve improved outcomes for all students and sustain them over time.
This brief, sixth in a series addressing key aspects of sustainability, can help leaders in your school, district, or state plan for active parent and community involvement and sustain the success they have established through the Reading First initiative. Other aspects of sustaining school-wide reading models that are based on scientific research will be addressed in other briefs in this series. Please check the Reading First Sustainability website at http://www.ed.gov/programs/readingfirst/support/sustaining.html for other titles in this series.
This brief was written by Stan Paine of the University of Oregon and Richard McCann of Research for Better Schools. Dr. Paine directs professional development and outreach services to schools and districts to improve academic outcomes for students. Prior to joining the University, Dr. Paine was an elementary school principal for 22 years. Mr. McCann has provided technical assistance in school improvement to state, district, and school leaders in the Mid-Atlantic region for a number of years.
Sustainability is the ability of a staff to maintain the core beliefs and values (culture) of a program and use them to guide program adaptations over time while maintaining improved or enhanced outcomes. -adapted from Century and Levy, 2002
Who are the stakeholders?
A stakeholder is an individual or group with an interest in the success of an organization in fulfilling its mission—delivering intended results and maintaining the viability of its products, services and outcomes over time. Who are the stakeholders in the endeavor to improve student outcomes in reading and to sustain those increased levels of achievement? To whom does it matter that more students learn to read well and to succeed in school—and that improved outcomes hold up over time? Table 1 identifies key constituencies in the realm of reading outcomes and suggests what members of each group have at stake. Keep in mind that some “stakes,” of course, are held by more than one constituent group.
Stakeholders
and
Sustained
Outcomes
Constituent Groups What’s at Stake? Students Personal success throughout school, future opportunity Parents Pride, success, and opportunity for the students they care about School staff Professional efficacy and job satisfaction School & district staff “Adequate yearly progress,” meeting accountability expectations School board Fulfilling the district’s mission, media coverage, accountability Taxpayers Getting a good return on their tax “investment” in schools Business community Ability to hire graduates with skills needed, community economics Other community members
Community pride and “livability,” real estate values
Why involve stakeholders?
The distinction between internal and external education stakeholders is important. With respect to a school improvement effort, such as a schoolwide reading model, internal stakeholders clearly have greater capacity to produce positive change in schools, but they don’t have all of the power needed to sustain it. Because of factors that can affect organizational performance over time (such as staff attrition, shifting priorities and “mission drift”), improved outcomes achieved one year can easily fade the next. For this reason, external stakeholders also have a critical role to play in sustaining improved outcomes. If they are informed of the school’s effort to improve reading outcomes, they can help sustain the district’s focus over time on “mission-oriented change”—improvement that lies squarely at the heart of the district’s mission or purpose— thereby moderating the effects of staff turnover, maintaining reading as the top priority, and eliminating mission drift. When the long-term success of a school system is deemed important, we must ask: “To whom do the schools belong?” and “Who has a long-term vested interest in the success of our schools and students?” In answering these questions, we quickly find ourselves at the doorstep of our constituents: the families who send their children to our schools, the taxpayers who support the schools, and the businesses who hire our graduates. In this light, external stakeholders can be highly motivated and can become powerful drivers to help achieve and sustain positive change in our schools.
What does it take to engage stakeholders for improved outcomes?
The kind of engagement we are talking about here is different from what both educators and external stakeholders might think of when pondering the notion of parent and community engagement in schools. This is not merely about involvement in social events, fund-raising efforts, or traditional involvement in activities such as parent training, homework assistance, and general volunteering. We are talking about on-going collaboration focused squarely on what schools are there for—student learning—and about transparent dialog on the need that many schools face to improve student learning. Beginning this dialog does not ensure a successful partnership. Here are guidelines for engaging stakeholders: The staff must take the lead to provide stakeholders the data and other information they need to be productive partners around student achievement. Partnership activities must be directly aligned with student achievement goals. Efforts must be collaborative and genuine. There are meaningful roles for each party to play and these must be clearly articulated. Information sharing must be transparent. Achievement data must be clear, accurate, and meaningful. All parties must operate from common values and a common vision for student achievement. All efforts must be mission-oriented and data-driven.
Internal stakeholders are those who work within the school system on a daily basis and who largely control what goes on there. They include school staff, district staff, and, to some extent, school boards. External stakeholders are those outside the day-to-day work of the schools who have a strong interest in school outcomes but who do not directly determine what goes into producing those outcomes.
Categorizing Types of Engagement and Setting
Standards.
Here are just a few of the many organizations that have identified ways that parents and other educational stakeholders can get involved in the work of their local schools.
The National Parent Teacher Association (PTA) has established and promulgated a set of National Standards for Family-School Partnerships (http://www.pta. org/1216.htm), which includes language consistent with efforts both to improve individual student outcomes and to advocate for and support school improvement efforts. The PTA website includes examples of these standards in action and tools for enacting them.
The National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS) is maintained by Johns Hopkins University. They have identified a list of “Keys to Successful Partnerships” very similar to the PTA’s partnership standards, including a focus on decision-making and community collaboration, both of which help schools go deeper in cultivating support for improved outcomes. This work identifies effective partnership practices and articulates a process for implementing them (see Epstein, 1995). The work of NNPS can be found at http://www.csos.jhu.edu/ P2000/.
The Parent Information and Resource Centers (PIRC) , part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, consist of a network of centers that “…helps schools, districts and states implement successful …parent
involvement policies, programs and activities that lead to improvement in student academic achievement…” A National PIRC Coordination Center provides resources to make connections between schools, families and communities. (See http://www.nationalpirc.org/ for more information.)
The Annenberg Institute for School Reform has developed the concept of “smart educational systems,” a type of school-home- community partnership which provides a “comprehensive web of learning support” for students. The Annenberg staff believe that “schools alone cannot ensure that all students have the resources and support they need to [achieve]. Districts, in partnership with community agencies and organizations must help fill this need. The Institute defines smart educational systems as “networks of services provided by schools, city agencies, community organizations, cultural institutions, and business to promote high-quality student learning wherever it occurs—at school, at home, and in the community.” While these supports often feature social services, they could also be focused on implementing and sustaining effective programs for increasing student achievement (See http:// www.annenberginstitute.org for more information.)
Effects of Parent
and Community
Involvement
Much work has been done over the past quarter century to establish a linkage between parent involvement and children’s learning. The National Committee for Citizens in Education (NCCE) summarized the results of nearly 50 studies on this topic and identified one group of studies which focused on building strong relationships between schools, families, and the larger community. The authors concluded that “the degree of parent and community interest in high quality education is the critical factor in the impact of the school environment on the achievement and educational aspirations of students” (NCCE, 1987). More recently, and more closely linked with our focus here, a review of research done by parent involvement expert Anne Henderson and colleagues established the link between parent involvement and children’s learning
(Henderson, Jacob, Kernan- Schloss & Raimondo, 2004) and reported an increase in parent and community organizing efforts to improve schools. Henderson’s work also notes that “unlike traditional parent involvement, parent and community organizing [often] holds schools accountable for results,” a focus that often leads to “positive changes in policy, practice and resources” (Henderson & Mapp, 2002). Although the focus in these studies was not directly on improving reading achievement, the extension of parent and community organizing to this goal seems a plausible one. When parents and other community members advocate for the kinds of systemic changes that can help sustain improved outcomes (e.g., policies, goals, dedicated funding), schools and districts are more likely to focus on these changes and thereby be able to sustain recent improvements.
“Taken as a whole, these studies found a positive and convincing relationship between family involvement and benefits for students, including improved academic achievement. This relationship holds across families of all … backgrounds and for students of all ages.” Henderson and Mapp, 2002
and other community leaders to serve as effective advocates for higher student achievement statewide. This model has since been adopted by a number of other states. The work being done in Kentucky shows that parent and community involvement in the schools need not be
adversarial. It can include all interested stakeholders working in collaboration to provide leadership for improved school outcomes. As the Kentucky experience suggests, this requires training for all parties, including school personnel, in how to work collaboratively, including
the need to listen carefully, communicate transparently and operate from common values and goals. Where this can be accomplished—and when egos, power concerns and control issues can be kept in check—remarkable progress can be achieved, as can be seen in the Kentucky example.
Example 2:
Districtwide
Community
Partnerships
Work began more than a decade ago to improve student reading outcomes in the Kennewick, Washington school district (Fielding, Kerr & Rossier, 1998, 2007). It began with the school board setting a goal that 90 percent of students would be reading on grade level by the end of third grade. Initially, many people thought that this goal was unrealistic. Now, some ten years later, district elementary schools are meeting this goal with considerable consistency. What fueled this remarkable accomplishment? A large part of it was the school board’s initial decision—and its continuing commitment—to set a clear goal for student achievement,
to remain steadfast in this goal and in holding district schools accountable for it. Also important were the efforts to provide strong community leadership and clear communication around the goal and to support this priority for more than a decade through allocation of funds for training, staffing, and materials. This is an extraordinary example of mission-driven leadership by the board and its top district administrators, and it provides us with a strong example of what can be accomplished when district leaders and school board members take their charge seriously and remain focused on their top priority over an extended period of time. But there is also another powerful component at work in the success of the Kennewick district. Early on,
district leaders realized the need not only to welcome parents and give them an opportunity to be involved in their child’s education, but also to give parents an important role in preparing their children academically for school and thereby help to reduce the readiness gap between children coming to school. This parent role is extremely important to children’s success in becoming a reader, but it is surprisingly simple: Read to your child 20 minutes a day. This effort to get parents to read to their young children regularly was formalized by establishing a community reading foundation, and by engaging the community to get the message out to parents. The model which has been highly sucessful, has now spread to a large number of other regions and states.
How can
stakeholders
help sustain
reading
outcomes?
How can we engage our external stakeholders in the challenge of improving student reading outcomes? What messages do we want to give them? What do we want to ask of them by way of support for our students and our efforts? What efforts on their part will help us sustain an effective school-wide reading model over time? Stakeholders can begin by asking school boards and district leaders whether the community is realizing a strong educational
return on tax dollars invested: “Are our schools accomplishing what we, as a community, expect and need them to accomplish?” This role need not be adversarial; if managed well, it can be seen simply as a steady presence capable of helping to sustain the focus on the school’s primary mission and seeking ways to help accomplish that purpose. Constituents can be seen as important partners who are there to help push the mission and to help pull the load.
There are a few things about efforts to improve reading instruction that non-educators would benefit from knowing—and which we would benefit from sharing with them. Knowing these things would enable them to better support our work. These “to knows” include: what we hold as our mission (our purpose as a school), our beliefs about teaching and learning and our vision for student success; what levels of performance we have established as our expectations and benchmarks by grade level; how our students are doing in reading compared to benchmarks and goals; a few key ideas related to reading instruction (e.g., differentiation, urgency); and a few key ideas related to reading assessment (e.g., outcome and progress monitoring measures).
“Society has a stake in the well-being of children down the block …Whether or not kids eat well, are nurtured and have a roof over their heads (and are well-educated) is not just a consequence of how their parents (provide for them). It is also a responsibility of society….” Richard B. Stolley (1995), U.S. editor and child advocate.
From the beginning, school leaders must take the initiative in forming strong partnerships. This begins with identifying what we want constituents to know about our work (see list on the previous page) and our results to date and articulating what they can do to achieve and sustain improved results. Schools exist to serve the educational needs of the community. A community’s schools are at their best when they are sharply focused on specific, mission-oriented outcomes, such as empowering all students to become successful readers, and when they are consistently successful in delivering on the mission. The community itself is at its best when its stakeholders know how the schools are performing and when they advocate for and collaboratively support improved outcomes. Educators know a great deal about “what works,” but they can’t bring about or sustain improvement on their own. Parents and community members must have a strong vested interest in the success of the schools and must co-own the outcomes produced. What is needed now is for schools to identify and actively engage all stakeholders in fulfilling the mission and enacting the vision of all students succeeding in school, starting with success in reading.
As illustrated by the examples and sources cited above, external stakeholders can do a number of things to support schools’ efforts to increase student achievement. Stakeholders in all roles can make important contributions.
read to their young children at home; learn the key information to know about supporting the school’s effort to improve student reading outcomes; follow the progress of their own children and of the school as a whole, talking with teachers and school leaders about how the parent can help when results fall short of goals; and advocate at the school, district, and state levels for systems supports which will help produce and sustain improved results.
learn the key information to know about supporting the school’s efforts to improve student reading outcomes; collaborate with school leaders to identify the variables they can influence which can make a difference in student outcomes; advocate at the community and state levels for systems supports-policies, priorities, training, and resources which will support improved outcomes; and support and promote the improvement agenda of the schools and district.
The Annenberg Institute for School Reform (http://www. annenberginstitute.org/)
The Center for Parent Leadership (CPL (http://www. prichardcommittee.org/CPL/tabid/31492/Default.aspx)
Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership (CIPL) (http:// www.prichardcommittee.org/CIPL/tabid/31491/Default. aspx)
Henderson, A., Mapp, K., Johnson, V. and Davies, D. (2007). Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family-School Partnerships. New York: The New Press.
National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education (NCPIE) (http://www.ncpie.org/)
National Network of Partnership Schools (http://www.csos. jhu.edu/P2000/) National Parent Teachers Association (http://www.pta.org/) National Reading Foundation (http://www. readingfoundation.org/) Parent Information and Resource Centers (http:// www.nationalpirc.org/) The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence (http://www. prichardcommittee.org/)
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This publication was created by RMC Research Corporation under contract ED04CO0041 with the U.S. Department of Education. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the policies of the U.S. Department of Education. No official endorsement by the U.S. Department of Education of any product, commodity, or enterprise in this publication is intended or should be inferred.
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