The Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University was awarded a five-year grant to continue developing and improving the National Network of Partnership Schools. The project, Family and Community Involvement: Achievement Effects, is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD). It is part of an interagency initiative with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) to learn more about designing and scaling up school improvement programs and components.
NNPS will work with district and school members to learn how to increase the number and quality of programs of school, family, and community partnerships. We will study, with increasing rigor, the effects of family and community involvement on students’ reading, math, and science skills and other indicators of student success in school.
There are four parts to the funded project. The main study, led by Dr. Joyce Epstein with all of the NNPS staff, will explore the long-term effects of NNPS approaches on school and district programs of partnership using longitudinal data from UPDATE surveys and schools’ data on student achievement over five years. Epstein explained, “For the first time, we will be able to conduct ‘nested’ or hierarchical analyses to understand how district leadership can best assist schools to improve their partnership programs.” The grant’s emphasis on “scaling up” means that NNPS will welcome many new schools, districts, and states that are ready to build better programs of family and community involvement.
With this grant, NNPS will continue to assist schools, districts, and states across the country to develop, strengthen, and sustain their partnership programs. This is good news for all of us committed to improving student success through family and community involvement. NNPS will ork to improve its training workshops and conferences; redesign the NNPS web site with additional information and tools; create helpful brochures, resource books, and tool kits for district leaders and school teams; and increase two-way communications with Key Contacts.
Dr. Mavis Sanders will conduct a study of eight school districts in NNPS, as they work over time to improve their leadership and partnership programs. The study will delve deeply into the strategies that leaders use to organize district-level activities and to guide schools in developing programs of family and community involvement. The results will be used to create new tools to help NNPS district leaders work more efficiently and effectively with schools’ Action Teams for Partnerships.
Another special study will focus on Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork (TIPS) interactive homework in the elementary and middle grades, led by Dr. Frances Van Voor-his. This multi-year, comparative study will explore the effects of interactive and “regular” homework on parental involvement and on students’ skills in math, science, and language arts. The results will help teachers learn how to use TIPS to design engaging, curriculum-related homework for students and their families to share.
In the third special study, Dr. Steven Sheldon will examine the impact of schools’ partnership programs on parents’ social networks and student achievement. With NNPS elementary and middle schools, this longitudinal project will study the effects of changes in partnership program quality on parents’ connections and interactions with one another and their influence on student attitudes and achievement. The results will be useful to all NNPS members who are interested in fostering parent networks to help improve results for students.
NNPS is grateful to several leaders who wrote letters of support for our proposal, including partners from Albuquerque, NM; Anoka-Hennepin, MN; Canton City, OH; Chaska, MN; Cleveland, OH; Fresno, CA; Howard County, MD; Long Beach, CA; Miami-Dade, FL; Naperville, IL; New Orleans, LA; San Diego, CA; Seattle, WA; Taunton, MA; and the Accelerated Schools district in the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The new grant enables NNPS to continue its unique mission to conduct research that will be useful in practice and to learn with educators and families about new topics and questions that will, in turn, advance research. We look forward to working with NNPS districts and schools on all of our new projects.