Last year, she found Rich's MegaSkills book. Johnetta Smith, principal of Charles Young Elementary School in Northeast Washington, has trained her teachers to incorporate MegaSkills into the curriculum, and she holds workshops to show parents how to follow through at home. It's hard to get children not to give up. This helps them and their parents learn values that help them stick with it and succeed. As a result, U.S. legislators in the 1990s made parent participation a requirement for funding in major legislation, such as Title I, for schools in poverty areas, and the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Reasons are many.
Ferguson also blamed the accountability movement and its emphasis on standardized tests. One reason may be uncertainty over what kind of parent involvement works. A study conducted in the late 1990s for the National Council of Jewish Women, analyzing 200 research papers on the subject, concluded that less is known about which forms of parent involvement are most effective than is commonly assumed. Joyce Epstein, director of the Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University, takes issue with that, saying her research shows that school involvement with families and communities can be viewed through six lenses. Some of the goals help the school grow as an institution, and some help individual children succeed with specific academic goals.