Blueprint Missing Key Ingredient

President Obama introduced his blueprint on education recently, and now that health care reform is behind us, it will likely begin to move forward. The Blueprint focuses on five key elements: college and career ready students, great teachers and leaders in every school, equity and opportunity for all students, raising the bar and rewarding excellence, and promoting innovation and continuous improvement.

While these are great goals, the devil is in the details. It is striking that in spite of recent research there is no mention of family engagement. Research tells us family engagement has a ton of protective factors and results in students who are better behaved, attend school more regularly, are more likely to enroll in higher level classes, and get better grades and test scores. Nobody believes that family engagement is the only factor that will ensure a student's success. As Dr. Karen Mapp points out when she likens education to baking a cake, good instruction is the flour, but family engagement is the baking soda.

In the past, schools have struggled with how to engage families in ways that will benefit students. We have certainly come a long way since parents were expected to bake brownies or make copies in the office, but we have a long way to go. For many years Federal legislation has required that families participate in meaningful ways in schools that receive Title I funding. Looking at the monitoring reports for almost every state shows schools still don't understand the best way to do this. Parent Information and Resource Centers (PIRCs) have evolved into a technical assistance office within each state to help schools understand what the most effective type of family engagement looks like and how to achieve it in their schools.

The fact that the proposed blueprint contains no language around family engagement and eliminates the PIRCs altogether is troubling. If we truly want to have students who leave school college and career ready, the research tells us family engagement is a key factor. History tells us its hard work and schools need help in getting it done.