Moving Beyond Parental Involvement to Parental Engagement
Public education is a community effort. It’s one that requires a close, and ongoing, partnership between various stakeholders: Parents, educators, staff, governing and regulating institutions, taxpayers and, most importantly of all, students.
Stakeholder involvement is critical in order to make any partnership work. Regular two-way communication, transparency and opportunities for stakeholders to interact with each other are ways in which parents, teachers, and the public can get involved. When it comes to building an excellent public school system, however, we believe that something more is required.
We propose an additional paradigm:
that of parental engagement.
Parental engagement focuses on inclusivity and treating parents as valuable partners in the education process alongside students, teachers, administrators and other community members.
Parental engagement recognizes that students, teachers and parents each have rightful roles, responsibilities, and areas of expertise in shaping our students’ education.
Parental engagement encourages all education partners to leverage opportunities to contribute their knowledge, abilities and interests to our children’s education.
Parental engagement values what our children can learn from other adults and students when it comes to deep conversations about exploring different perspectives.
Parental engagement puts students at the center of the conversation, recognizing that our children are distinct individuals and that our role as parents is to guide, not control.
Parental engagement is rooted in our state’s constitutional duty when it comes to public education and seeks to support and empower teachers and administrators in providing programs that meet the needs of all students.
We believe this paradigm makes for a more productive and empowering approach to education, one that moves us away from disputes over who gets to control what and shifts conversations to finding ways to work together to promote the interests of our kids and helping them realize their full potential in the world.