Rallying the Troops
Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: Five leading researchers of family-school-community partnerships convened a session at the annual convention of the American Educational Research As-sociation in Montreal last month (April, 2005) to throw a lifeline to scholars and practitioners in this field. e age of gold-standard research is upon us, and coin of that specie is rare in family-school-community partnerships. In fact, as the paucity of entries on the Department of Education’s “What Works Clearinghouse ” website indicates, rigorous evaluation of programs, curricula, and methodologies is scarce throughout the realm of education. For the field of school-home relationships, inadequate evidence of the effects of replicable interventions is a catastrophic deficiency; resources for personnel, programs, and evaluation will be drained away. If the research base for effective teaching practices in mathematics is weak, resources for program design and evaluation will be channeled in that direc-tion. But “parent involvement ” is not seen as a core purpose of schooling. Rather than applying the new standards of evidence to more focused program design and greater commitment of resources, parental involvement is likely to be cast aside. e point is not to pit curriculum and instruction against parent involvement, but to realize the importance of both and the special vulnerabil-ity of the latter. So the stakes are high in what Heather Weiss, Joyce Epstein, Kathleen Hoover-Dempsey, Anne Henderson, and William Jeynes proposed in Montreal. eir proposal to reinvigorate the study and practice of school-home rela-tions by giving it greater research standing centers on four sets of questions:
Author: Sam Redding
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W270852456