Challenges in Creating Effective Home-School Partnerships in Adolescence: Promising Paths for Collaboration.

Abstract Home-school partnerships for adolescents should extend beyond a focus on school performance issues to a broader set of common concerns for parents and teachers, including helping students forge a positive, constructive identity. After providing an overview of key elements in adolescent identity development, we highlight five critical development needs that comprise essential aspects of positive identities: appreciation, belonging, confidence, competencies, and contribution. Then we describe four co-occurring processes-love and caring, laughter, limits, and linkages-that must be kept in balance in order for these outcomes to be achieved. Families and school personnel can keep these processes in balance when both sets of partners work together, each from their own vantage points and strengths. Specific examples of contexts that lend themselves to home-school partnerships include: academics, routine parent-school interactions, everyday parent-child interactions at home, and lifestyle habits. We offer recommendations about ways educators and parents can collaborate with each other in these contexts to benefit young people. As each group reaches out effectively to the other, new contexts for partnership are likely to be forged, and the challenge to find new and lasting pathways for home-school partnership is likely to be met. Key Words: school family partnerships, home school relations, parent involvement, adolescents, adolescence, identity formation Introduction In a thoughtful compendium, Christenson and Conoley (1992) compiled advice and information about home-school collaboration that is as relevant today as when it was published. Among the findings were some that are relevant to understanding what happens as children move into adolescence, a critical developmental period. Christenson, Rounds, and Franklin (1992) reaffirmed the long-standing observation that parents' involvement falls off dramatically when students enter secondary school; the decline actually seems to begin around fourth grade. This occurs in spite of the fact that students are moving toward coursework and schoollinked experiences that are relevant to their career paths, future educational plans, and health risk behaviors such as smoking, substance use, dangerous driving, and poor eating, sleeping, and other lifestyle patterns. Although parents are less involved in their adolescents' education, they remain generally positive about the job secondary schools are doing. While many parents would like to have better and more frequent communication, and more personalized, less "business-oriented" contact with teachers and other educators, they also recognize that, especially in middle and high schools, the numbers work against that. Most parents trust that schools are doing a good job and that teachers know what they are doing. Thus, one reading of the data would be that reduced parent involvement is not necessarily a cause for concern. Christenson and Conoley (1992) provided chapters that addressed numerous areas with which schools need to be concerned. These included improvements in the following: problem behaviors; homework completion; overall school discipline; divorce and bereavement; child sexual abuse; parents' relationships with school professionals; and the adaptations necessary as schools address various mixtures and changes in culture, race, ethnicity, diverse family structures, and socioeconomic levels. This list was created before the recent focus on school violence and the complex sequel of September 11, 2001, including continuing concerns and actions related to national security and anti-terrorism abroad. In a concluding chapter, Epstein (1992) pointed out that studies of how parents and schools might work better together in each of these challenging areas, while helpful, are misleading. Programs and efforts may be directed at any one of them, but they occur in multiples in schools. Epstein issued a call for reconceptualization of how schools are organized, especially with regard to school services, communications, contacts, and relationships with parents. …