Parents and family members are a child's first teachers. Their active participation in school activities improves student achievement, increases school attendance, and decreases student dropout, delinquency, and pregnancy rates. The kinds of involvement that parents want most with schools is how to work with their own child at home in ways that help the student succeed and that keep the parents as partners in their children's education across the grades. Typically, efforts on the part of schools to involve parents start to drop dramatically as early as grades 2 or 3.
Research shows that parents at all grade levels want to stay informed and involved.
Teachers sometimes resist getting involved with parents because they think it involves too much time and energy. But the research indicates that it is teacher practices, not the education, marital status, or work place demands of parents, which makes the difference in whether parents are productive partners with schools in their children's education. For various reasons, some parents can't get to meetings and workshops. They feel guilty about not attending and their children feel bad because their parents didn't participate. To reduce the guilt and distress, schools need a wide variety of ways of sharing the information they normally distribute at workshops and parent meetings.