ABSTRACT
The case for parental involvement in schools includes, but is not limited to, promoting children’s academic and socioemotional development. Eccles and Harold (chap. 1, this volume) deal well with student outcomes that stem from parental involvement in schools. To complete the model that they present in their chapter, it is of worth to consider other outcomes that are not so readily discernible:
Teacher outcomes: Through increased parental involvement in the schools, school staff increase their knowledge base of the sociocultural context of the communities served by the school. This knowledge base enables staff to gain a greater understanding of the students ranging from idiosyncratic speech and language patterns to the stresses that children encounter in their daily lives outside of school and that have an impact on their learning. This knowledge base is likely to lead to an increased sense of efficacy among teachers and more effective and improved classroom climate and thus the teacher’s sense of efficacy among teachers and more effective classroom management strategies and pedagogy.
Parent outcomes: Parents who become involved in the school learn ways to help their children and become motivated to further their own education, and those parents who are alienated from mainstream culture or have had negative school experiences could come to perceive the school as a bastion of hope for their children and for themselves.
School outcomes: The key to sustaining educational change, when the new initiatives are no longer “new,” is through empowering parents to be advocates of their children; the stake parents have in their children’s school success is a powerful change force when parent involvement is an integral and significant aspect of school changes processes that mobilize parents.
Community outcomes: When these two primary societal institutions (the family and the school) team up, the school becomes a potent force in the community, in promoting healthy holistic development among all children. Instead of taking upon themselves the tasks of families or relegating parental involvement to narrow areas of activity such as monitoring homework completion and supplementing teacher assigned lessons, schools need to encourage parents to broaden their spheres of activities so that parents become catalysts for change in the school and the community and informed advocates for their children. In order to do so, schools “must become more flexible, responsive, child-centered, culturally sensitive, community linked and family connected” Haynes, Gebreyesus, & Comer, 1993, p. 165).
