The communication gap is stark. found that 26% of teenagers ages 13 to 17 used ChatGPT for their schoolwork in 2024, up from 13% in 2023, yet most lacked formal instruction on responsible use. According to the , nearly three-quarters of parents report that their children’s schools haven’t shared their AI policies. 

This lack of guidance creates two dangerous extremes: students who fear AI because it’s been branded as cheating, and those who misuse it as a shortcut because they’ve never been taught otherwise. In both cases, young people miss the opportunity to practice the critical thinking, problem-solving and ethical judgment skills regarding AI that education is meant to foster — in other words, to develop AI literacy. 

As a researcher, educator and parent, I have worked to in colleges and medical schools. But I do not see the same efforts in most K-12 schools. Advocacy is key, and parents can help make this happen.

My son discovered ChatGPT in seventh grade. Three years later, his South Carolina school district still offered no clear guidelines for AI use, so I began a methodical advocacy campaign. I attended a superintendent’s coffee chat, shared AI education books with district leaders and followed up with emails and a virtual meeting. For months, it seemed as if my efforts had fallen on deaf ears. Then, I was invited to join the district’s AI planning team, a diverse group including students, teachers, parents, administrators, and AI education consultants. Our daylong session covered generative AI applications, ethics in education and guideline development. 

Following the meeting, we participated in a survey and observed a school board presentation on AI policy development. And in January, the district Board of Trustees governing the use of artificial intelligence in classrooms.

This experience taught me that parent voices matter. But effective advocacy requires patience, persistence and a constructive approach. Fortunately, families wanting to get involved have proven models to follow.

In , the state’s official AI Framework for Education emphasizes ethical use, transparency and family engagement, with guidance for schools to communicate clearly with parents about AI tools. In , the school board voted in 2025 to begin developing districtwide guidelines for classroom AI use, including the creation of family-facing resources to promote responsible use at home. 

Resources like offer a strong foundation for AI literacy advocacy. The handbook encourages parents to stay informed about new technologies, ask questions when schools lack clear guidelines, build relationships with staff and participate in school meetings to influence policy. These efforts can open doors to influencing policy and curriculum decisions.

Parents also can advocate for their school district to join initiatives like the which aims to train 400,000 teachers nationwide in AI fluency by 2030. They can push for partnerships with nonprofits like and , which provide free, grade-appropriate AI curricula, teacher training and ethical use frameworks. If the school district is open to collaboration, they can also request a pilot or demo for tools like , a platform that provides access to multiple AI models in one place with a focus on education. Boodlebox offers to help cover the cost of subscription. 

Local AI councils  — groups of experts from fields such as law, technology, and education who advise local governments on using AI responsibly — provide another avenue for parent involvement. In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania,  the brings together experts from the private sector, academia, public service and beyond. In Montgomery County, Maryland, officials formed an to ”ensure the successful evaluation, coordination, implementation and adoption of AI solutions,” in the county. Parents can encourage their districts to establish similar advisory committees or collaborate with such county-level groups if they already exist in their area. 

Through this process, I’ve compiled a comprehensive list of that parents can use as conversation starters with their districts — from state frameworks to nonprofit curricula — categorized by audience: administration, teachers and students. I also keep an eye out for grant opportunities for my district. For example, the recently opened applications for the 2026 program, which helps high school educators gain AI knowledge and skills that they can take back to their computer science, science, mathematics and health classrooms.The stakes couldn’t be higher. Without AI literacy, students will struggle to navigate a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. They’ll lack the ethical framework to use these tools responsibly and will enter college and the workforce at a significant disadvantage compared with peers who received proper guidance. Momentum is building, but districts won’t act without parent demand and involvement. If parents don’t push for AI literacy now, they risk raising a generation fluent in fear or shortcuts rather than the skills that matter and the resilience needed to thrive.

Wine moms? Try PTA moms. 

It is indeed mothers who, throughout the Twin Cities, form the vanguard of community organizing to keep their kids’ classmates and educators safe. But many of their efforts to supply food, rent money, medical treatment and even veterinary care to people too endangered to leave their homes are ad hoc, emergency extensions of the parent networks that, in normal times, raise money for the things not in their school’s budget, organize events and fulfill teachers’ school supply wish lists.  

Over the last month, parents who belong to PTAs and other Twin Cities school support groups have tapped their collective organizing and fundraising expertise to meet extraordinary needs that school systems and local governments are hard-pressed to address.   

When COVID forced students and teachers online six years ago, schools were pressed into service to meet families’ basic needs. Now, as some 3,000 federal agents target bus stops and school playgrounds in search of immigrants, the need is more profound, according to Minnesota parents who are trying to help. 

This time, there is no federal relief funding, no government infrastructure to coordinate ordering Chromebooks and Wi-Fi hotspots for students forced into distance learning, no eviction moratoriums for those who can’t work, no meal box deliveries and frequently no secure way for principals and educators to communicate to their broader school communities.

Instead, there are dozens of GoFundMe campaigns, organized by parents who, in the last three weeks, have tapped their networks to organize patrols to keep children safe as they move from home to school and back, to deliver diapers and formula and, as Feb. 1 draws near, to crowdsource rent money.

Because many of these fundraising campaigns identify vulnerable school communities and individual parents and educators — and because so-called mutual aid networks have become a prime target of federal agents — Âé¶čŸ«Æ· is not linking to them. In addition to K-12 schools, some of the funds are intended to meet needs at day care facilities and afterschool programs. 

Not all the funds show how much has been raised, but many have running tallies. Some have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars — eye-popping, but, according to organizers, not nearly enough to stave off the anticipated wave of more than 1,600 evictions expected when February rents go unpaid.        

Contrary to the “wine moms” trope, these parents say their efforts are a natural, if unfortunate, extension of the ways in which school-based groups normally attempt to fill gaps. Some of the funds are specifically dedicated to paying for diapers or prescriptions, while the largest are for rent.  

The parents are also screening people who want to join secure neighborhood online communications channels to try to stop federal agents from identifying and following people delivering supplies. Network members hope the same vetting processes are helping recognize opportunists posting scam solicitations.   

“We’ve seen [federal] agents posing as parents to try to infiltrate some of these safety patrols that are happening,” says a mother with two elementary school pupils in Minneapolis. “The level of vetting happening in these virtual spaces is really something.”   

City residents mobilized online to support one another in the chaotic days after George Floyd’s murder by police officers in 2020. The outside provocateurs identified by state officials then were , Proud Boys and other far-right militants who circulated in neighborhoods, sometimes planting homemade explosives in alleys and hedges and setting fire to gas stations, and public buildings such as . Neighbors teamed up to patrol and to alert one another to the presence of outsiders.   

The skeleton of an infrastructure, then, already existed when heavily armed federal agents poured into residential neighborhoods — haunting their schools — over the course of the last month.  

Some districts, such as suburban Fridley Public Schools, have publicly acknowledged that they are accepting donations to distribute to struggling families. Others, though, are quietly letting parent networks know which families staff have been in contact with, and who has the greatest need. 

“We have had schools call our organization and say, ‘We know this family hasn’t been coming to school, can you step in,’” says a Minneapolis mother and advocate whose child attends school in the neighborhood where ICE and Border Patrol agents recently killed two legal observers. 

“The power that is coming from PTAs and school site councils and neighborhood organizations is just considerable,” says the mom. Her two children go to affluent schools where some parents have written five-figure checks.

“We’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that’s hardly the actual cost to our city,” said another mother with three children in high-poverty Minneapolis schools. “Public schools are on the front lines of everything ill facing society — and that’s no different now.”

Demonstrations are taking place throughout the Twin Cities, she continues, but the parents and educators finding health care providers who can make home visits or locating someone to take in children whose parents have been detained didn’t ask to be the spine of the resistance.  

“I wish they would stop calling us protesters,” she says. “Far from being ‘paid agitators,’ we are paying for it, literally.” 

At McDowell County Schools in North Carolina, we’ve learned that trust grows slowly, through hundreds of small, predictable moments, each one rooted in how schools communicate with families, staff and students.

Several years ago, we realized our communication was too fragmented to build that kind of trust. Families received the same information in multiple messages — emails, flyers, texts, social media posts — all with slightly different tones or details. A single snow day could trigger four versions of the same message. Teachers were frustrated, parents were unsure what to believe and staff spent time managing confusion instead of connection.

We didn’t need more communication; we needed better communication. So, brought all the schools in the district onto a single communications platform. We use , but the real change came not from the tool itself, but from the clarity and consistency it allowed us to create.

After years of trial and error, we’ve learned that the most effective district communications strategies share a few core principles. First, simplifying your tools goes a long way — using fewer channels reduces confusion and makes it easier for families and staff to know where to look for information. Second, consistency matters — templates provide a reliable structure that not only saves time but also builds trust with the audience. Third, it’s essential to explain the “why” behind messages. When people understand the context, compliance becomes true buy-in. Fourth, it is important to close the loop: ask for feedback, acknowledge it and show clearly how it informed your decisions. And fifth, through it all, lead with positivity. Celebrating even the small wins can keep morale high and momentum strong.

We started by rethinking tone. Before, a school message about early dismissal read: “Due to an unforeseen scheduling adjustment, students will be released at 12:15 p.m. today. All extracurricular activities are canceled.”

It was accurate, but the tone was impersonal and it didn’t give families the context they needed. The new version focused on clarity, empathy and the why: “We’ll be releasing students early today at 12:15 p.m. so our staff can attend a district training session. We appreciate your flexibility and want to be sure families have plenty of time to plan for pickup or after-school care.”

That change seems small, but families immediately noticed. They told us it felt more human — and it cut follow-up calls nearly in half.

We also reworked how we communicated policy reminders. In the past, attendance updates sounded procedural: “Students with 10 or more unexcused absences are subject to disciplinary action per district policy.”

Now, we frame them around partnership and shared goals: “Every day in class makes a difference. If your child has missed several days, our team is here to help you get back on track. Reach out to your school’s attendance office for support because we want every student here, every day.”

When we shared this shift during a with school leaders across the country, we saw dozens of comments in the chat responding with that same lightbulb moment: Clarity doesn’t have to mean formality.

Over time, those simple, consistent choices have changed our district’s culture. Messages now follow a rhythm and tone that feel uniform, no matter who sends them. Parents know where to look for information, and teachers know their updates won’t conflict with messages from the district. What used to feel like chaos now feels coordinated.

But communication isn’t just about sending the right message — it’s also about listening to what comes back. Every few weeks, we invite families and staff to share feedback through short digital surveys. We ask: Are you getting the information you need? Is there anything that isn’t clear? The answers help us spot patterns before they grow into problems. When families in one area said they were confused about attendance reporting, we realized we’d been using different phrasing in school newsletters. We corrected it across all schools within a day. That kind of responsiveness signals to families that their voices matter, and that’s where trust takes root.

We’ve also learned that not every message has to be an announcement. Some of the most powerful communication happens when sharing small, everyday wins, such as a picture of a student helping a classmate, a quick thank you to families who attended literacy night or a note celebrating staff for extra effort. During the webinar, one teacher joked that “snacks to the rescue” had become their unofficial morale booster after a principal started sharing photos of Friday staff snack carts. Those little touches remind everyone that communication is not just about logistics; it’s about connection.

Transparency has been another cornerstone. When our district rolled out a new cellphone policy, we didn’t just send the rules. We explained why and how the decision came about from staff input, safety considerations and classroom disruptions. We held Q&A sessions and gathered feedback. Families might not have loved every change, but they appreciated being included in the process.

The results haven’t been dramatic headlines or viral moments. They’ve been something quieter but more sustainable: steadier relationships, calmer campuses and a deeper sense of trust between home and school.

Great communication isn’t about perfection — it’s about connection. Families don’t expect flawless wording; they expect honesty, clarity and care. And when they consistently see those qualities in every message, they begin to believe not just in the information they receive, but in the people who send it.

And bedrock attitudes about attendance seem to be changing. A recent noted that one in four students now doesn’t think being chronically absent from school “is a problem.” The study found that about 40% of school districts consider reducing chronic absenteeism among their top three most pressing challenges. One in 12 ranks it as their biggest challenge. 

As school districts push to lower absenteeism rates, the software company , which helps schools keep track of students and communicate with parents, examined four years of its own attendance intervention data across hundreds of school districts. It analyzed 3.3 million text messages across 15 states, representing 88,000 students and 22,000 educators. 

In a , it finds that improving attendance often comes down to a handful of basic tasks. Here’s a breakdown of the key takeaways:

1: Early intervention works

Contacting families before students become chronically absent is crucial. Once a student crosses the 10% threshold, fixing their attendance becomes much harder, so intervening when students register just three to five absences is most effective. Contacting parents early with a letter improved attendance dramatically, reducing absence rates by 28%.

Researchers found that 51% of students whose families receive just one letter don’t need a second one. The “save rate” for these students suggests that many families simply don’t realize how quickly absences accumulate. 

2: Timing and communication methods matter

Parents are highly responsive to text messages, researchers found, with 73% of texts garnering a response from parents in just 11 minutes. They’ll engage with schools when communication is “accessible, timely and specific.”

“The method does matter,” said Joy Smithson, a SchoolStatus data scientist. “We get a lot higher rates of response with text messages.” Placing a phone call, on the other hand, is “for those more critical conversations,” she said.

Kara Stern, the company’s director of education, agreed. “Not every parent is in a position where they can pick up a phone call during the day. For many people, it might jeopardize your work situation, and so to assume that that’s the best way to reach a parent is not necessarily to be in tune with the actual realities of the parents in your community.”

The best times to text families, the data suggests, are either around 8 a.m., when parents and students are preparing for school, or 2-4 p.m., typically during pickup times. These align with natural breaks in parents’ daily routines, when they’re most likely to check their phones.

The best time of year to engage families is August or September. Parents who hear from schools early maintain higher response rates throughout the year — 77% vs. 71% — and respond, on average, one minute faster. By January, 33% of these parents are still engaging with schools, compared to just 16% of parents who first heard from schools later in the fall term. 

That suggests that early conversations “do extra work,” researchers maintain, establishing trust, opening communication channels and signaling to families that working together matters.

“It’s important to reach out at the beginning of the year, so that you’re not waiting for a crisis,” said Smithson, “because it’s too late to build a relationship at that point.”

3. Plain language outperforms edu-jargon

Researchers found that being specific about how much school a student has missed outperforms vague messages such as, “We’ve noticed some absences.” 

Direct offers of help, such as “Reply if you need support with transportation or health concerns,” also outperform lengthy explanations of attendance policy.

And when students are older, direct messages can be very effective.

“What this data shows us is that connection is really driving so much of a student’s experience,” said Stern. “When a school is able to reach out to the kid and say, ‘Hey, Greg, we missed you today, what’s going on? What do you need to help you come to school?’ that’s a really different experience than having a form letter appear at your house saying, ‘Greg has missed school six days.’” 

She added, “What I hope districts will take away from this report is that communication is intervention,” she said. “It’s not extra work. It’s the work that makes everything else stick.”

4: Three key moments merit extra attention

Students at three moments in their school careers are more likely to be chronically absent: in pre-K, sixth grade and high school. Stern called them “high alert moments.”

Surprisingly, pre-K students have the highest chronic absenteeism rates of any group, mostly due to the high frequency of illness and families underestimating the impact of missing school. 

Sixth grade is “the tipping point,” said Stern, with chronic absenteeism spiking by 3.3 percentage points from fifth to sixth grade, the sharpest increase across all grades.

Smithson said middle-schoolers typically have more autonomy. They’re often getting their first mobile phones. And current sixth-graders, she said, were in kindergarten when COVID hit in 2020. “So just imagine knowing that patterns get established in kindergarten,” she said. For those kindergartners in 2020, school “really got disrupted,” with their baseline experience of school being “categorically different” from what it should have been.

And for many students, the transition from elementary school to middle school represents a shift from a safe, contained environment, where both students and parents are highly engaged, to a less personal one, with less consistency and connectivity, said Stern. Students “don’t know that there is someone who’s really paying attention, who cares that they’re there, who knows what’s happening with them, and so maybe it doesn’t really matter if they’re there or not.”

And middle school can also be the place where many students first experience bullying, which also worsens attendance.

In high school, chronic absence rates more than double, and students have lower response rates to traditional methods like letters, suggesting that schools should contact students directly — actually, they found that direct student messaging could work for students as young as 11. 

A text message to a high school freshman can start a conversation that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Pairing these messages with notes to parents can improve response rates in these critical years, researchers found.

“The chronic absenteeism numbers in high school suggest that kids are really voting with their feet,” said Stern. “And so one way to get them back would be to invite them in to be part of the solution, to say, ‘What is it that is not meeting your needs? How can we include your voice in the process of making high school what you want it to be?’”

In many ways, the new findings echo what researchers like Johns Hopkins University’s and have long suggested. Chang, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit , said Wednesday’s report “reflects what we know from common sense and research. Improving attendance is possible when we use data to take early action as well as determine where we should invest in building relationships so we can partner with students and families to encourage showing up, monitor absences, and address barriers to getting to school.”

But Chang said that while timely, data-informed engagement of families is essential, “it is not always sufficient and should be combined with other strategies for identifying and addressing barriers to getting to school.” Those barriers could exist in the community or in schools and should be addressed in “a comprehensive, systemic approach.”

She suggested that of interventions is sometimes necessary, including “intensive interventions” for students who miss more than 20% of school days. It could include housing supports, a student attendance review board, a community-based, non-criminal truancy court, individualized learning and success plans and even, as a last resort, legal intervention.

Stern and Smithson said the findings boil down, in a larger sense, to the importance of what they call “active noticing” about attendance. 

“I really think that it would be a big plus for faculties to actively notice every week and go through their rosters,” said Stern. “‘Who do we not know? Who can’t speak about this child? Who doesn’t know anything about this student’s life after school? We have someone that we need to actually pay attention to learning more about — who’s suddenly not coming to school, who’s turned it around and suddenly being there?’ ” 

Smithson said the biggest takeaway for educators is that “Timing is everything. Do not wait. Act with urgency. It’s about building those relationships, and it’s just so important — and it’s so important to start right away.”

The superintendent waits for her turn to step to the mic. She’s here to explain the district’s new artificial intelligence pilot: a tool teachers say will give them back an hour per day for one-on-one time with their students. She’s just two minutes into her explanation of how the tool will work, when the first parent stands up and approaches the mic. She’s followed by others, who form an increasingly long line. The first parent calls the tool “surveillance.” The second warns of “robots grading our kids,” and a third questions “what are we paying teachers for.” By the time the vote happens, the pilot is tabled. The tool hasn’t failed. The story has.

We’ve seen this movie before. In the 2000s, No Child Left Behind brought nationwide accountability; in the 2010s, Race to the Top accelerated standards and testing. But then Common Core arrived and, in too many places, the fight wasn’t about better learning but about who was in charge. A student data platform launched into a vacuum of trust. District tools that could lighten teacher workload get framed as replacements for teachers. In each case, a new idea walked into an old narrative, and the old narrative won.

This isn’t a communications problem at the end of the process. It’s a design problem at the beginning.

The education sector spends billions designing programs, products and policies but spends almost nothing designing the story that helps people understand what they are and what they do. When narrative is an afterthought, the public makes meaning on its own, using their most familiar, vivid and available shortcuts.

Those shortcuts are powerful:

• Top-down control: When reforms arrive without local authors, communities read them as done to them, not with them.
• Data equals danger: Years of breaches and sloppy practice have built a trust deficit with families.
• Tech replaces people: In schools, the default story about technology as substitution — a zero-sum trade against human connection and judgment.

The result is predictable: Good ideas stall not because they’re bad ideas, but because their stories arrive late, or not at all.

A Better Way to Build: Frame → Test → Iterate → Scale

Narratives can be built with the same rigor brought to product development. As researchers who’ve spent over two decades framing research across issues from health to early childhood, we’ve learned that meaning-making is designable — and testable — if we treat it like R&D. The key steps include:

Frame. Start by clarifying the story you want people to understand. That means articulating the core ideas — what you want people to know, feel connected to, use, and ask for — and mapping how your audiences currently make sense of the topic: their mental shortcuts, blind spots and sticking points.

Test. Turn those insights into values, metaphors and explanations that close gaps and avoid unproductive defaults. Pressure-test them: on-the-street interviews, small-group conversations, then survey studies that quantify “frame effects” on understanding, support and willingness to act.

Iterate. Use what you learn to refine and improve. Co-design with the people who will use the strategy — teachers, principals, parents, students — and embed short-cycle tests in real communications.

Scale. Package the strategy so others can pick it up: make-and-use toolkits, visuals, model language, and training sessions. Keep support alive with checklists, refreshers and coaching.

Done well, this cycle doesn’t just produce better talking points. It builds a shared narrative that prepares the ground so good ideas can take root.

A district hoping to reboot its approach to standards and testing, for instance, could map local mindsets and realize they were up against a consistent pattern of thinking: that standards are being read as a scoreboard for punishment, not a roadmap for instruction. 

The team could reframe the work around “clear signposts for students’ future success” and swap abstract promises for concrete examples: student work samples, teacher-led walkthroughs, and community nights where families tried out classroom tasks. Instead of a press release about new assessments, the launch could lead with a values statement: “We need to give every student a fair shot and clear feedback.” The debate wouldn’t disappear, but it would move forward. People would begin to argue about how to do the work well, not whether to do it at all.

The same approach could work for a district introducing an AI pilot. Before getting started, district leaders could put four words on the whiteboard: Frame. Test. Iterate. Scale. Early on-the-street interviews would reveal the dominant default understanding: AI will watch our kids and sideline our teachers. So the team could test a different narrative: AI as a teaching assistant that handles routine tasks and frees teachers to do what only humans can do: build relationships, diagnose misconceptions and motivate. 

What Works — and What Backfires

Through our work, we’ve distilled some key insights for education leaders trying to implement new approaches:

• Lead with widely shared values — like every student needs a fair shot and schools should equip young people to thrive. Start with why before what.
• Give the public a picture in their heads. Tested metaphors like “co-pilot,” “teaching assistant,” or “signposts” help people picture how a tool or policy works and what it changes.
• Explain the mechanism. Don’t just claim impact; show the steps from cause to effect (e.g., AI drafts feedback → teachers spend more time in 1:1 interactions → students revise more often).
• Show the humans. Center teachers and students explicitly; make technology the helper, not the hero.
• Name and neutralize risks. Address privacy, bias and misuse plainly and show your guardrails.
• Avoid traps. “Silver bullet,” “crisis-only” and “us vs. them” framing activates skepticism, scarcity and blame. They shrink your coalition and make backlash easier to trigger.

Public reaction to today’s ideas is shaped by yesterday’s scars. Communities remember when reforms felt like they arrived from far away, when data was used on them rather than for them, and when vendors treated schools like markets instead of partners. If we ignore that history, our messages will land as spin and we’ll just add to skepticism and doubt.

Trust is rebuilt through design choices: who authors the narrative, whose voices lead, what benefits arrive first and for whom, and how transparently we report what we learn. When communities that have shouldered the most underinvestment see themselves in the story — and see safeguards and benefits by design — support grows and sticks.

Innovation doesn’t lack for ideas. It lacks the narrative infrastructure that makes them legible, trustworthy and adoptable. The fix is straightforward: put narrative prototyping on the critical path. Fund it. Time-box it. Test it. Ship it alongside the product or policy.

If we do, school board nights will sound different. Less rumor, more reasoning. Fewer boogeymen, more “show me how.” More time on what matters most — students learning well, with adults they trust.

Let’s build the stories that give great ideas a chance to work.

But I wasn’t just a passive observer. While my children were in public schools, I was also an advocate. Here are three things I learned after 20-plus years:

There is So, So Much to Advocate For

Because of my children, I’ve advocated for advanced academic opportunities for all students, especially those in underserved communities. Because of my children’s experiences, I realized that school cannot be one-size-fits all, and that there is more than one way to get the education you crave for your kids — even if it means abandoning the traditional system altogether. And, because of my children’s example, I learned that you can, in fact, fight City Hall — and win.

Thanks especially to my daughter, I became caught up in battles to from school to school, to challenge and remove ineffectual teachers and, most recently, to fight for a school to stay .

Whatever issue you care about, somewhere in the public schools, someone is doing something to make it more difficult, even impossible. And those students, families, and teachers need your advocacy.

There Is No Quick Fix

My husband, a middle school teacher, warned me from the start, “Remember, anything you do to improve a school, you’re doing it for someone else’s kids, not yours. By the time any changes take place, your kids will be long gone.”

He was right. Despite parents advocating to follow and reopen schools that had been closed by COVID-19 as early as June 2020, , and , didn’t return to full in-person learning until September 2021. This decision led to what is now being called COVID’s — students who are struggling academically and socially, and many who have simply stopped showing up. 

A similar, pandemic-influenced decision came when the city used COVID as an opportunity in 2020 to get rid of screens, which employed grades and test scores, for middle school admissions and severely weaken them for high schools. Affected families pushed back immediately, but it wasn’t until September 2022 when some districts were allowed to go back to minimal screening for the incoming September 2023 class. There are still than were available pre-pandemic.

Unfortunately, those parents who had campaigned against the initial rollback couldn’t take advantage of the subsequent, hard-won change, as their children had aged out of the affected grades. But they had made a difference for the next class of kids.

Parents Can’t Do It Alone

There is still so much to be done. Current issues in New York City range from the watering down of gifted-and-talented programs to the cutting back of sports to a mandate for smaller class sizes that requires the hiring of over 3,000 “high-quality, experienced” teachers out of thin air. It is also resulting in the loss of music and art rooms, as well as gyms, as schools scramble for new space to accommodate these smaller classes.

But — and here is the most important thing I’ve learned after 20-plus years of advocacy — public school parents alone can’t make a difference. 

Enrollment in the NYC public school system is dropping precipitously, down to around from a high of . That includes kids in universal 3K and 4K; take them out, and NYC in reality is down to around ). But even when the kid count stood at over a million, that still wasn’t enough parental pressure to make a meaningful dent with NYC politicians. 

On the other hand, there are over across the five boroughs. According to market researcher YouGov, , during the 2024 election cycle, “Fewer than one in five voters choose education as one of their top three issues.”

That’s not a lot of voters to hold elected officials accountable. Which is why parents can’t be the only ones in this fight. They need help from those who think they have no skin in the game.

Everyone has skin in the game.

All citizens should care about education, because everyone has no choice but to live in a society of people who have been educated — for better or for worse. The goal is to make it better.

While the low number of voters who care about educational issues is the bad news, there’s also good news in turn out for non-presidential year elections, like the one scheduled for 2025.

This bad civic engagement improves the odds for those who do vote, because it makes every ballot count that much more. Which means those who have an interest in education can have an outsized impact on policy.

Still, again, parents can’t do it alone. They need allies. They need people who care about what’s best for all kids in NYC and across the country, not just their own. And who possess the patience to stick with it for the long haul, even after their children have graduated.

At a recent meeting in my community, one fact hit hard: Our reading pipeline is broken. Instead of the expected 80% of students succeeding with general instruction, only 11% of Milwaukee students are on track. A staggering 65% need frequent, in-depth, individualized support — far more than the system was ever built to provide.

When a speaker cited these numbers, the crowd nodded at the urgency and applauded calls to retrain more than 1,000 teachers in evidence-based reading instruction practices. I applauded, too — schools have the greatest opportunity and obligation to provide high-quality reading instruction at scale. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that teacher training alone clearly wouldn’t be enough. 

In classrooms crowded with kids who have extraordinary needs, even the best teachers can only do so much. Better prepared teachers would be able to gradually increase the share of kids who are on track with reading and prevent more students from falling behind. But many kids would still need targeted small-group support, , and, crucially, support from home.

Teachers, no matter how well prepared, build on the foundations kids have. The odds of reading success are largely shaped beyond the classroom. consistently confirm the essential role that families play in kids’ reading achievement. The early language experiences and alphabet knowledge students bring to school profoundly shape their literacy trajectories.

Once kids enter school, parents’ influence remains powerful but increasingly overlooked. Too often, schools unintentionally sideline parents, treating them more as homework helpers than true partners. 

Parents facing economic hardship or lingering distrust from their own schooling may not immediately see the value in engaging. Even motivated families struggle to prioritize vague school requests amid a myriad of real-life demands.

Rather than grow cynical, school staff must actively earn families’ engagement. They need to clearly, specifically, and respectfully show families how their involvement benefits their children’s development.

This is Marketing 101: speak to what matters. Frame requests in ways that align with parents’ hopes and addresses their real concerns. If parents don’t understand how a request helps their child, schools have to connect those dots.

from the Harvard Family Research Project shows that families make a measurable difference when they actively attend conferences, visit the classroom, and volunteer. Other studies document the value of parents engaging in literacy-specific activities like teaching letters, sharing books, and fostering reading at home. Schools can motivate parents by showing them that their efforts directly affect their kids’ reading gains.

have passed legislation to spur reading improvements and sprinkled amid the new curriculum and professional development requirements they’ve mandated are some directives for parents, too. Wisconsin’s Act 20, for example, rightly emphasizes parents’ critical roles: sharing family learning histories, monitoring learning disabilities, implementing literacy strategies, tracking reading plans, and even filing complaints when necessary. Yet, the law provides little tangible guidance or support. Ask a Milwaukee parent how to help their child meet reading expectations and you may get a shrug — not from indifference, but from genuine confusion.

Schools must translate mandates into meaningful guidance. When staff get strategic about what they ask families to do, they create space for real partnership. Generic advice like “read aloud every night” can evolve into more specific grade-level guidance like “Read this book to practice the ‘oo’ sound your child is learning in class.”

I recently observed a work session between school staff and local nonprofit tutoring groups. The educators invested months designing targeted, straightforward home literacy activities that were aligned closely with common student needs in the district. Next, they planned to test the tools with real families, revise the instructions based on feedback, and then film demonstration videos, so parents could clearly see what success looks like. Tips are helpful — but seeing another parent do it builds belief.

Once complete, these tools will provide teachers with a library of targeted activities to share with families based on specific student needs. The anticipated result? Fewer, clearer asks for families and greater impact.

Across the country, different family engagement models are emerging. In New York, the held 10-week online sessions to teach families the science of reading. The sessions aimed to strengthen home literacy routines, as well as inform participants who could then share effective strategies with other families. The hosts virtual workshops that are accessible to parents anytime, enabling them to tune in at their convenience. Both these programs acknowledge that families want to help, but need accessible, credible resources and consistent encouragement. 

Raising our nation’s reading achievement is an all-hands-on-deck effort — inside and outside of school. Teachers, instructional coaches, literacy specialists, staff, administrators and community volunteers can all support families. But for these partnerships to flourish, we’ve got to get honest about who teaches kids: all of us.

Ultimately, the strongest readers aren’t shaped in classrooms alone. They’re nurtured at home: word by word, story by story, conversation by conversation. To help reading reforms succeed, we need to do more than retrain teachers and revise curricula. We must support the first, most constant teachers all children have: their families.

Then her own mother connected her with Show Me Strong Families, an initiative of the St. Louis affiliate of the national Parents as Teachers program. The initiative, which just celebrated its 10th year, connects trained parent educators who conduct every-other-week home visits with families, beginning in the prenatal stage up until the child begins kindergarten. 

Johnson immediately bonded with her parent educator, who would bring activities to their visits and check on the baby’s developmental progress and Johnson’s well-being. The educator invited her to Show Me Strong Families events: cooking classes, a first birthday party, and a meetup of parents with similar-aged children. When Johnson wasn’t sure about her child’s development, the parent educator who worked with her to get an evaluation that led to an autism diagnosis and then supportive services. When Johnson became pregnant with her second and third children, the program connected her with a doula to attend the births and provide support through labor and c-sections. 

“It made me a better mom,” Johnson said. “I felt like I was safe and there was someone I could call if I needed extra advice about something. They gave me that mindset that I could do it, and they never gave up on me, so I didn’t either.” 

The program serves 200,000 families through 900 affiliates in all 50 U.S. states, and in 115 Tribal organizations, five other countries, and one U.S. territory. The model has four components: home-based visits, group socialization, health, and developmental screenings for both baby and family — which include screenings for domestic violence and postpartum mood disorders and resource connection. The latter is intended to provide community support so that families can navigate complicated systems, including early intervention screenings, accessing education and housing and safety concerns. 

Angela Byas has been working with Parents as Teachers since 2015, first as a parent educator for Show Me Strong Families and now as its affiliate director, training and overseeing other parent educators.

As a parent educator, Byas planned her visits around the milestones the baby was approaching. She brought bubbles to help with language development, beads and string for fine motor skills, or books to promote reading habits, and spent time with the mom discussing how-are-you issues focusing on the health and well-being of the entire family. If a mother expressed an interest in going back to school, or concerns about a developmental delay, or a hardship at home, Byas offered support and resources to help. The visits lasted between an hour and 90 minutes, and Byas averaged 20 families on her caseload — though as a supervisor, she now has fewer. 

Byas credits the home visit aspect of Parents as Teachers for facilitating a close connection and high retention rate among families participating. “With a home visit, you’re seeing families in their environment,” she explained. “We don’t go into their home to try and change anything that they have going on in their home. It makes it easier for the children, as well, because we are in their environment.” 

Families find the program through word-of-mouth — as Johnson did — or through online research, a referral from the school district, or from brochures left in grocery stores or doctors’ offices. While most of the caregivers are mothers, those raising grandchildren or foster children can enroll, too. There is no cost to families: Program costs are covered by federal and local grants, including money from the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and private funds. Parents as Teachers was from philanthropist McKenzie Scott and an increase to $15 million in grant funding from .

For most of the families, poverty and lack of education make a vulnerable period even more precarious. A spokesperson for Show Me Strong Families estimates that 90% of participants are from low-income backgrounds. The parent educators are trained early childhood professionals, but ultimately what they do is show up, consistently, for families when they are bringing a new baby into the world and are at the and . Show Me Strong Families has piloted a doula program, which Johnson participated in, giving families the option to have the doula attend their child birth at no additional charge. 

And when a parent educator can help a family identify a problem, they are also able to pivot and offer a road map for early intervention services, helping to offset or reduce delays if properly addressed. that more than half of the children served by the Parents as Teachers program observed with developmental delays overcame these delays by age 3. 

The curriculum and the training that parent educators focus on helps them detect early signs of developmental delays and connect families to the appropriate services. This often involves identifying behaviors that may indicate a need for a referral to a health care provider for diagnosis.The nonprofit’s research estimates that parent educators identify approximately 32,000 developmental or health concerns each year. 

Byas recalls a mother who enrolled in the program when her child was 8 months old. Byas immediately observed signs that the child might be autistic, but the mother wasn’t convinced and was unwilling to talk about options. As their trust deepened, the mother began asking questions, had her son evaluated, and found an early intervention program, as well as support services through the local school district. 

Group socialization is another component of the program, aiming to shore up community support and help mothers connect with one another. This includes celebrating milestones like a child’s first birthday, which is especially important that infant mortality rates are far higher for families in poverty. 

“We like to recognize them and celebrate that they made it through that little phase where it is crucial,” said Byas. This past December, the birthday theme was PBS Kids’ cartoon character Daniel Tiger, complete with hats, cupcakes and games. 

A Future with Uncertain Federal Funding

Like any social services program funded by government dollars, the Parents as Teachers program faces some uncertainty surrounding the deep federal budget cuts and how they will affect early education. Constance Gully, the organization’s president and CEO estimates that 30% to 40% of the programs receive federal funding through HHS. “It’s authorized by Congress, and we expect it to continue.”

Gully of their programs’ success: an improvement in positive parenting practices, fewer maltreatment reports, reduced child protective services reinvolvement, and improved factors like parental resilience and children’s social-emotional competence. The families involved are more likely to gain employment, pursue higher education, and improve family economic self-sufficiency. Families also show greater awareness and use of financial resources like the Earned Income Tax Credit, while reducing neglect.

“The return on investment from early childhood is not forgotten — on families and children and the workforce in general. We have had the privilege for many years of bipartisan and bicameral support,” Gully said. “We are all on pins and needles and hope that the return on investment in early childhood doesn’t get lost in translation with all these cuts.”

How to Listen So Teachers Will Talk

Parents see one side of their child. Teachers see another. My husband, a teacher, advised that the best thing to do is, “Listen. Don’t bring up any issues first. You don’t want the teacher to mirror you. You want them to provide information of their own. Always ask for numbers to go with words. It’s nice that they’re a joy to have in class. But that doesn’t tell you how they’re really doing. Ask for hard data.” 

When to Listen to Teachers

Teachers know things about kids that parents don’t. When my oldest was 4, his preschool teacher informed us, “He can read.”

“Oh, no,” we dismissed. “He just memorized a lot of sight words. He can’t read.”

He could read.

A few years later, that same child was in his school’s lowest math group. He was struggling. His teachers recommended we move him up a level. That made no sense to me. The teachers moved him up anyway. His performance improved. They had intuited that he was bored and tuning out, and that he’d do better if presented with the material faster. They were right. I was wrong.

When Not to Listen to Teachers

From the time my daughter was in second grade, her teachers would show me sloppy, dashed-off written work, full of misspellings, random transitions and sentences that stopped in the middle of a thought, and lament, “What comes out her mouth doesn’t match what she puts on the paper. She must have a learning disability.”

“No,” I’d say. “She just doesn’t check her work.”

Her teachers would look at me with sympathy – another deluded mother – and promise, “We’ll send her to the learning specialist. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

A few weeks later, I’d get the follow-up phone call. “We heard back from the learning specialist. It appears she just doesn’t check her work.”

When Not to Listen to Your Child

A similar situation popped up with my younger son. His teacher reported he’d gotten a D. “It might be a learning issue.”

“It is a learning issue,” I confirmed. “He didn’t learn the material.”

My son insisted the work was too hard, he didn’t understand it, he couldn’t do it. That same week, he was invited to join his dance school’s pre-professional program. I replied, “It’s a multi-hour-a-week commitment. You can’t accept if it takes you hours to finish one homework assignment.”

His learning issue miraculously cleared up.

Yes, teachers very often spot problems parents are oblivious to. With my oldest, we didn’t realize he’d suffered a hearing loss/auditory processing disorder. It took professionals to point that out. We’re grateful for the intervention. 

But with the two younger ones, it was laziness. Both were willing to hide behind inaccurate diagnoses, and their teachers were happy to cut them the accordant slack. I was the one forced to call them all out on it.

When to Listen to Your Child

Then there was the time I really got it wrong. Third grade was a nightmare for my middle child. He’d made a mortal enemy. They fought, using words and fists. The teacher advised us that this was a personality conflict between two boys who’d taken a strong dislike to each other; both were equally at fault. My son insisted the other kid started it, but the teacher was blaming my son disproportionately.

Years later, in conversation with other parents from that grade, I learned that the boy my son was feuding with had targeted other kids. We’d all been convinced by the school that this was an individual issue when it was a widespread one. My son, I was told, defended other kids against this bully.

Even more heartbreaking, my older son confided, “I saw it. The teacher was picking on him.”

My son told me. But I’d believed his teacher, instead.

Reasons to Attend Conferences

In New York City, attendance at parent-teacher conferences is since before the pandemic. In 2016, reported that while 89% of families nationwide attended elementary school conferences, that number dropped to 57% by high school. A fellow senior year mom told me she just couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to attend her child’s final, spring semester conference.

Here’s why I went to every single parent-teacher conference: because I wanted to hear how my children were doing. I wanted to hold my children accountable. I wanted to hold their teachers accountable. I wanted the teachers to know my children had someone looking out for them. Despite how I failed my middle one in third grade. I learned. I’ve tried to do better since.

Reason to Attend the Final Conference

But the primary reason my husband and I logged into our final parent-teacher conference was that we wanted to say thank you.

Thank you to the English teacher who made Bronte and Shakespeare compelling to jaded seniors and spent many more hours advising the school play than his union contact mandated (including a midnight run to Home Depot).

Thank you to the marine biology teacher who brought in live samples. Thank you to the coach who launched an Ultimate Frisbee team with no budget, and to the AP Government teacher who gamely tried to connect lessons on how the system should work with how it actually did.

Thank you, especially, to the AP Calculus teacher who saw our daughter for office hours in the morning before school and then again in the afternoon. When we told him how thrilled we were with her B in the class, we said, “We know how hard you both have been working.”

Parent-teacher conferences can be a chance to see your child through fresh eyes, to find out what issues they’re having, to decide on a plan of action — and to push back when you don’t agree with the school’s perspective. It can be a chance to stand up for your child, and an opportunity to let your child know they were in the wrong. And it can be your best chance to say thank you to the people who contributed to the adult your child will become.

Report cards are the culprit. Almost say their child consistently brings home B’s or better on their report cards. But those grades don’t necessarily reflect whether a student is truly performing at grade level. — they also factor in elements like classroom participation, attendance and completion of assignments. While important, these additional factors can make it difficult for parents to assess whether their child is where he or she needs to be academically.

What would happen if families had an accurate and holistic picture of their child’s and school’s academic progress? Virginia is about to find out.

Over the past two years, Virginia has developed a new accountability model for K-12 schools that prioritizes transparent and timely information for parents. It focuses on academic mastery and growth as well as skills necessary for life after high school, such as collaboration, critical thinking and communication. 

Instead of simply receiving quarterly report cards with classroom grades and an end-of-school year report showing how their student performed on a single exam administered in the spring, families will also get fall and winter that show how their child is progressing throughout the year.

This new system, part of which was created in partnership with Learning Heroes, will provide parents with a host of data points and resources about their child’s performance. And they will come early enough in the year to let families know if they need to sign their child up for tutoring or summer school.

In addition, parents of K-3 students will receive the results of a new literacy screener designed to identify students in need of additional reading support, as well as . And, a new provides information for educators and parents, including a range of tools to guide conversations between parents and teachers and online children’s books, math games and puzzles to help families reinforce their kids’ grade-level skills.

To help parents gauge how well their school is doing, a new online platform will rank each into one of four categories — distinguished, on track, off track, and needs intensive support — explain what each rating level means and provide specific data points for the public to explore.

This is a huge change from the old system, which sorts schools into broad categories based on whether they meet the minimum criteria for accreditation — meaning that parents cannot differentiate between a school with standout performance and one that is mediocre or stagnant.

To help teachers have meaningful conversations with parents, Virginia’s initiative provides training in how to communicate with families about their child’s progress and create a personalized plan to help students recover academically from the effects of the pandemic. Giving families a holistic picture of their child’s and school’s academic progress seems like common sense, but it’s actually all too uncommon.

This focus on improving teacher-parent communication is particularly important in light of the disruptions caused by COVID-19. Many children have faced significant learning setbacks, making it essential for schools and families to work together to help them recover. And, , parents said that they trust communication from their child’s teacher more than any other indicator of student performance.

Research from Learning Heroes shows that when parents know their child is struggling academically, they take specific actions. One of the they take is talking with their teacher. Parents who know their child is behind stack rank academics . But they cannot help solve a problem they do not know they have.

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this essay.

When I partnered with the Center on Reinventing Public Education on a reviewing how transparent state report cards are in reflecting COVID-19 learning loss and recovery, I came in with an open mind. I expected they would contain most of the information we sought and would mostly be pretty usable. I was wrong. I think everyone on our team was incredibly disappointed by many of the state report card websites and their inability to answer our primary questions of interest about the effects of COVID on student outcomes.

Here are four questions from our five analysts about these sites, based on direct quotes from a written interview we all completed after we finished rating the report cards, that we think states should consider moving forward. 

Where Is the Data?

The high-level takeaway from our report: It is extremely difficult on most state report card websites to track longitudinal performance data at the school level going back to before COVID. There are a few exceptions — seven states (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee) earned an A for having this data available.

But even in many of these better-performing states, there were problems. Many state report cards make it difficult to do things that should be easy. Parents should be able to use the report cards to compare schools they are considering for their children, but in too many places, that is impossible. Advocates should be able to understand, at minimum, the performance of federally mandated student groups, such as children with disabilities and English learners, but many states completely bury these data. Further, report cards often lack other kinds of data that parents might want about available services, like advanced coursework, counseling, even sports and the arts. Overall, the reviewers were disappointed and disheartened.   

Are There Really No Best Practices?

We were struck by the variation across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. One reviewer commented, “It was as if 51 different contractors designed these report cards without so much as a single best practice about how they’re supposed to look or function.” Some states leaned on graphs, others on tables. Some websites were easy to navigate, while others were befuddling. Some made subgroup data easy to find; others made it nearly impossible. Some report card websites couldn’t even easily be found through a Google search.

Our analysts also noted the difficulty of simply figuring out the basics of each site. “I was surprised with how different each state report card was and the amount of time it took to familiarize myself with it enough to find the data I was looking for,” one wrote. I felt this acutely as I examined all 51 report cards. It sometimes took two or three 10- to 15-minute visits to feel like I understood the layout of some of the sites. 

Overall, we felt that there surely must be some in reporting these kinds of data that states could draw on to improve their report cards. We all wanted easily navigable sites (i.e., that made it clear where to click to find what you wanted) where 1) measures were described in clear language and organized thematically, and 2) users could manipulate the data to answer their most important questions. No site met this bar, though some, such as Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma, were far better than others; Alaska, Louisiana, New York and Vermont

were among 11 states that earned the lowest grade for usability. There could be real value in researchers working with organizations like the Council of Chief State School Officers to lay out some explicit design principles. 

Who Is the Intended User?

State report cards are intended principally for parents. Realtors certainly think parents care about school quality; otherwise, they wouldn’t name local elementary schools in their listings. The popularity of sites like proves that at least some demand for school performance data exists. However, if parents are the main intended audience for these reports, it sure doesn’t seem that way. “I could see [parents] spending considerably more time on this compared to our research team,” said one of our researchers. Another described the situation for parents as “frustrating and disempowering,” echoing what the Data Quality Campaign found last year when it asked . 

We felt that the report cards were perhaps trying to serve too many audiences and, in the end, not serving any very well. States need to think clearly about whom they’re serving and redesign their report cards from the ground up, working with those groups to ensure usability. In particular, the language of the report cards needs to be clear for people who may not be experts in accountability terminology and education-related acronyms. Even with our levels of expertise, we were sometimes unclear about what different data points meant. 

Are State Reports Doomed to be a Compliance Exercise? 

A few reviewers thought some state report cards seem like a compliance exercise: States post them because the federal government requires them to, but, ultimately, they’re not concerned about whether these websites are usable. This is a somewhat cynical take, but it’s hard not to feel that way after reviewing some of these sites. 

But even if report card sites did start as compliance exercises, they can still serve a positive function in the long run. We don’t want to be Pollyannaish about their potential, but parents clearly care about the effectiveness of the schools they choose for their children, and states clearly can do better at communicating schools’ effectiveness.

We hope this review is a wake-up call for states to consider better reporting of school performance data. While private companies, like GreatSchools, can provide alternatives, states are missing an opportunity to shape parents’ thinking about what matters for school effectiveness, and why. The failure of states to provide high-quality, usable report cards raises a fifth question: Given the importance of effective public education and the apparent need and demand for the data, how can states justify doing such a lousy job at informing parents?

Parents have been kept in the dark about how far behind their kids are in school. The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are devastating for our students, including many who are just starting high school and don’t have time to waste. 

We all agree the stakes have never been higher. The COVID-19 pandemic widened educational and economic inequality.

As the mother of five boys who struggled during school closures, and as we continue to navigate today’s education system, worries about their future trajectories are never far from my mind. As the president of the National Parents Union (NPU), I spent the last three years in constant communication with families nationwide. Parents are sending a message loud and clear: we want better, more accurate information about our kids.

about their children’s educational and life experiences and what it means for them long-term. 

The more parents learn about the state of education, the more concerned they become and for good reason: the kids are not alright. Parents widely agree that America’s education system is in despair.

• label it a major problem that students are still behind academically, according to the Nation’s Report Card, including 34% who say it’s a crisis.
• agree the mental health challenges among children is a major problem, including 34% who say it’s a crisis. 
• believe America’s education system needs to be overhauled.

We want policymakers to acknowledge the pandemic’s impact on our children’s learning and development, and comprehensively address the challenges facing our education system to ensure students fully recover with pathways to economic mobility. Elected leaders and education decision makers must move past culture wars, rhetoric, and finger pointing with legislation and policies that reflect the reimagined experience parents want for their kids.

Policymakers can contribute to a more equitable, resilient education system with some practical solutions. These proposals are based on over decades and innovative approaches developed during the pandemic. They are aligned with what parents want for their children. 

First, give parents a seat at the table

Parents should be partners with schools from the beginning: participating in strategic planning, budgeting, leadership changes, and contract negotiations. It’s not enough to ask them for permission after decisions have already been made. Only collaboratively can we create a path forward. 

After our heroic leadership as facilitators of our own children’s educations and powerful partners in school reopening and recovery, we expect to continue to be involved in decision making and want a say in how education will be reimagined. Over the past few years, we established greater transparency and communication with policymakers about strategies for addressing today’s challenges. We must continue to deepen these efforts.

As the clock runs down on billions in financial aid, we need to examine what is working and what isn’t. We’re looking at an abrupt funding stop and deep cuts beginning in the 2024- 25 school year and our most vulnerable students will suffer when the fiscal cliff hits. This is the moment to rethink how we teach and finance education.

Parents want , as well as additional educational and mental health support.

Enter a new age of honesty and transparency

Policymakers and educators need to welcome a new age of honesty and transparency with parents, families, and communities. Assessment data plays a critical role in driving student progress by providing educators with a clear picture of learning and identifying areas for additional interventions and investments. 

• would like their child’s teachers to discuss their child’s performance and progress with them more often.

Data helps teachers individualize instruction and ensure all students reach their full potential. Tracking student progress over time allows educators to identify patterns in student learning and adjust instructional strategies as needed. We must also be flexible to change when plans do not yield the results our children deserve. 

Offer diverse pathways

With all of its complex challenges, the pandemic also provided the opportunity to create more flexibility in the education system. It highlighted the limitations of traditional classroom-based learning and the need for alternative approaches. Now we are hungry for more options for remote learning, hybrid learning models, and other approaches that will accommodate the diverse needs of children and families.

• want to have a personalized pathway plan for their child, outlining classes they could take in K-12 to help them achieve their individual career or college goals.

Any expectation that families will continue to conform to an outdated school model holds us all back. The path forward is clear for parents. 

• said K-12 schools should change the way they teach students reading and math to line up with what the newest research says is best practice.
• say schools should do more to have school schedules and calendars reflect research on how and when kids learn best.
• say schools should do more to provide opportunities for additional learning time, such as after-school or summer academic programs.

Urgent support for teens

Our teens need more support to ensure they aren’t simply pushed out before we’ve adequately prepared them to launch. 

• say schools should do more to ensure college-bound students and students who choose different pathways have equally good opportunities to prepare for their future while in high school.

Many of our youth have lost out on important opportunities including internships, job shadowing, or other career-related experiences over the last several years. They struggle with depleted family resources and basic needs, preventing them from pursuing postsecondary education and training opportunities. 

• support student loan relief as a tactic for economic mobility.

Will families still be willing to take on unending debt to pay for tuition in our colleges and universities as a good investment for our children in the future? Multiple recent surveys suggest they won’t.

Increased access to alternative opportunities for students to gain valuable career experience— including virtual internships, work-based and skills-based learning opportunities, adult education programs, vocational training, and more—will help prepare students for the future.

Prioritize mental health

In addition to academic support, parents want policymakers to prioritize students’ mental health and social-emotional well-being.

• believe policymakers need to prioritize addressing their children’s mental health needs. 

The pandemic took a toll on our students’ mental health, increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns. We want to see more funding and long-term investments in school based mental health and social-emotional resources.

Needed: Transformational change

We must put an end to petty political fights, institutional racism, an antiquated status quo, and policies that prioritize adults over kids and instead collaboratively address the transformational changes our children and families need. NPU will continue to work with lawmakers on key priorities to improve the quality of life for families across the country. Now is the moment for elected leaders and education decision-makers to act with bold urgency and a renewed commitment to courageous conversations about how our nation’s schools can truly change—systematically and thoroughly. Parents will be watching.

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its .

The school, which serves 400 students pre-kindergarten through second grade in Maryland’s Baltimore City Public Schools, is rethinking the way it operates to boost parental involvement, said first-grade teacher Kaylah Crawford.

Crawford, who is in charge of family engagement at Arundel, said every student will lead their own parent-teacher conference this year, giving their families a glimpse of what they do in the classroom.

“Students will be leading their conferences by saying, ‘This is what I’m doing in school’ and then parents will be able to see (their child’s work) firsthand,” Crawford said. “It’s more engaging for families to hear from the student about how they’re performing.”

Parent perception of their child’s educational progress is tricky for many schools around the nation. A recently released national study has unveiled there’s a stark gap between parents’ knowledge of their child’s performance in school and their actual achievement in the classroom.

released in November by Gallup and the nonprofit Learning Heroes, surveyed roughly 2,000 parents of K-12 public school students nationwide about their experiences with and perceptions of their child’s educational achievement.

What researchers found was that parents don’t have a complete understanding of their child’s progress, said Bibb Hubbard, founder of , a national parent advocacy organization.

Nearly 9 out of 10 parents surveyed believe their child is performing at grade level in reading (88%) and math (89%) despite standardized tests showing far fewer students are on track. showed that at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, public schools reported on average half of their students were below grade level.

“We just can’t afford to leave parents on the sidelines right now. We absolutely don’t have 9 out of 10 students performing at or above grade level, unfortunately,” Hubbard told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “We need to give parents more information.”

The study also found that nearly two-thirds of parents (64%) said report cards — often considered the “holy grail” of measurements, Hubbard said — were important in determining whether their child is at grade level. And for 79% of parents surveyed, those report cards showed their children getting mostly B grades or better.

Hubbard said oftentimes, good grades equal “on grade level” for parents.

“That’s because they’ve not been told otherwise,” she said. “Grades don’t necessarily reflect grade-level mastery. You can also have your fourth grader getting an A or B in reading and that’s because they are reading at a second-grade level and they are getting B’s on their quizzes at a second-grade level.”

Crawford said her building principal strives to be transparent with parents about grades, but recently it has become more evident that some students complete homework without understanding all of the content.

“(Turning in finished homework) doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re able to read or even always able to complete work independently,” Crawford said. “So one of the things that we’ve done to target some of those discrepancies is starting different family programming.”

Arundel Elementary School launched a program called Family University in December, Crawford said. Parents can communicate with school staff to learn more about what’s happening in the classroom. They will also get feedback about what their child needs to work on academically.

“We learned through every program that we have within the building that the goal is to teach the parents something that would better prepare them to have a scholar within the school system,” Crawford said.

When parents are more informed about their child’s academic progress, they are more likely to take action and discuss concerns with their child’s teacher, Hubbard said.

The study found that 97% of parents who know their child is below grade level in math are worried about their child’s math skills. Only 22% of the parents who knew their child was at or above grade level in math were concerned about their child’s math skills.

Parents were also asked about what worries they have about their children.

“For the parents who perceive their child to be at or above grade level, their top worries are social media and emotional well-being 
 reading and math fall to the very bottom of their worries,” Hubbard said. “For those parents who have information that their child is not performing at grade level, their number one worry is math or reading.”

Researchers also unearthed racial differences in parents’ perceptions of how well their child was doing in school. The study introduced a hypothetical scenario to participants where their child receives a B in math but has two below-grade-level math test scores. While more than half of parents (56%) said they would be very or extremely concerned, Black parents were more likely to say they would be concerned (72%) compared with Hispanic (56%) and white parents (52%). 

Black and Hispanic parents were also more aware of their child’s academic performance in the study, Hubbard said.

Black (42%) and Hispanic (40%) parents were found less likely than white parents (54%) to say their child was performing above grade level in reading, with a similar finding in math. 

Contradicting that Black parents don’t care about their child’s education, Hubbard said, “Black parents in particular are taking more action, thinking and more deeply worrying. The Black parent in this dataset really emerges as the super active parent that’s really focused on academics.”

Lakisha Young, co-founder of Oakland REACH, a parent empowerment group that recently launched a large-scale parent-led tutoring program, said Black parents in Oakland have been more aware that something isn’t right with their child’s achievement, but they don’t know what to do about it.

“They’re definitely plugged in around something not being right,” Young said. “We asked our parents what was keeping them up at night and they just said, ‘I know my child’s not reading on the level they should be. But I’m not really getting a lot of help from the school to figure out the best thing for me to do to move forward.’ ”

The parent perception problem in education is solvable, Hubbard said — parents need to look beyond their child’s grades and engage with teachers to get to the bottom of their achievement.

“Teachers say that the number one way to know how your child is achieving is to ask them,” Hubbard writes in the study. “Asking teachers to unpack those factors and focus on grade-level learning is how to know where to lean in and help.”

Young said when her own son is struggling in his eighth-grade classes, he’s not the one to inform her — his teachers are. 

“I think things that continue to be helpful for families is to be able to feel like they can engage with the school and I think it really starts with building a relationship early,” Young said. “Kind of (letting) the school know, ‘I’m here, I’m accessible. I care. I want to understand these things about what’s going on with my kid.’ ”

Learning Heroes has been working to boost parent engagement across the nation, most recently with its campaign. The campaign partners with local nonprofits to connect parents with teachers and helps them understand achievement scores, among other resources. 

In addition to the national project, Go Beyond Grades has local campaigns, most recently launched in St. Louis, Missouri, but is also in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Houston, Boston and Sacramento.

“Grades are important, but we need to unpack that a little bit and get some additional information about how your child is doing,” Hubbard said. “The call to action is pretty simple.”

Disclosure: The Carnegie Corporation of New York provides financial support to Learning Heroes and Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

While her son, Roy, would ace spelling tests at the Leadership School in St. Louis, Missouri, his mom said, he would cry while doing homework because he couldn’t read any of the questions.

Ross-Porter’s realization solidified when she received a letter in the mail from his public charter school — part of a new statewide literacy awareness campaign — informing her that Roy had a reading deficiency.

“He made it through kindergarten and first grade and nobody said he was behind or he needed tutoring or extra help,” Ross-Porter said. “I don’t know where the disconnect is.”

Ross-Porter is like many parents around the St. Louis area who are now receiving the same letters in the mail, explaining that their child scored below grade level in reading.

The letters are coming as a surprise for some who are unaware of how their child is really doing in school, said Rachel Powers, a partner with a St. Louis education foundation.

“Parents really just don’t know. Everyone thinks, ‘My kid is good. My kid is fine’,” Powers said. “Or maybe they’re like, ‘Something seems off, but I don’t really know what to do about it. The report card seems OK, but they are struggling with their homework.’”

The Opportunity Trust and , a national parent advocacy organization, announced on Oct. 24 the launch of . It’s an awareness campaign for Missouri families in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County, they said,to improve the gap between the perception and reality of their child’s progress in the classroom.

Go Beyond Grades STL is partnering with St. Louis nonprofits to connect with parents in order to help them understand their child’s achievement scores and teach them how to communicate with schools, along with offering them other resources. It’s also working with schools to improve relationships between teachers and families.

The campaign is part of a national Go Beyond Grades movement organized earlier this year by Learning Heroes, in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Houston, Boston and Sacramento.

Learning Heroes representative David Park said the organization created the national Go Beyond Grades campaign because of the increasing number of parents who are unaware of how their child is doing at school.

“There’s a significant amount of parents who believe their child is fine — and it’s not their fault,” Park said. “Eighty percent of students nationally come home with a B or above on their report card.”

In the St. Louis area, that number is nearly 90%, according to an August survey commissioned by Learning Heroes and conducted by Edge Research, a Virginia-based research firm. The survey found that 96% of St. Louis parents believed their child was at grade level in reading and 94% thought their child was at grade level in math.

Most students aren’t even close, Powers said.

St. Louis has been hit especially hard by the pandemic, which burdened elementary and middle schoolers with some of the worst learning damage suffered by any students in the United States, recent research shows.

In 2022, 42% of students in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County were at grade level for reading, while 36% were at grade level for math, according to .

In just the City of St. Louis, the numbers drop to 23% for reading and 17% for math.

“Parent-teacher conferences are 15 minutes (long),” Park said. “What we’re pushing more than anything is ongoing communication with the child’s teacher — setting up a learning plan and touching base regularly — that’s what teachers say is the most important.”

Ross-Porter said that would be essential for her. The second-grade mom said she can’t understand Roy’s achievement scores and what they mean for her son’s progress. She said she doesn’t even know what the school letter about Roy’s reading scores really means.

Mary LaPak, a representative for Rockwood School District, the largest public school system in the St. Louis area, said while the district hasn’t worked with Go Beyond Grades STL, it values a trusting relationship between parents and teachers.

“We encourage transparency and recognize that open communication is vital between parents and Rockwood staff in order to support all students,” LaPak said in an email. “Rockwood parents are essential partners and allies in the education of our children.”

Powers said parent-teacher communication about the recent reading letters is one of the main reasons The Opportunity Trust launched Go Beyond Grades in the St. Louis area. The letters are part of a new literacy law passed earlier this year in Missouri.

The legislative piece was included in the , created by the state education department. It’s a comprehensive plan that aims to increase evidence-based literacy instruction, a part of the science of reading, in order to improve the .

The law requires schools to identify students who are reading at one or more grade levels below what they should be. If a student is found with a reading deficiency, parents are sent a reading success plan, which provides a set of goals and skills needed in order for the child to reach their grade level. 

“We wanted to get the word out about what that law means for families, what it means for schools, how families and teachers and educators connect and work together to really address this issue that is happening,” Powers said. 

Powers said staff with Go Beyond Grades have been contacting St. Louis area schools to pinpoint when letters will be sent and learn how they plan on implementing the reading success plans. They also have been talking to parents about what they can expect if they receive a letter and what resources they should seek out to help their child.

“We want to make sure parents don’t just get a letter at their house and then they go on about their business,” Powers said. “And then it kind of gets lost in the shuffle. Like, no, this is really important, this really means something if you’re getting this letter, this is really important for your family.”

When parents are involved in their children’s schooling, students show higher academic achievement, school engagement and motivation, according to a of 448 independent studies on parent involvement.

High levels of family engagement also helped decrease chronic absenteeism for students before the pandemic, according to research by Learning Heroes and other partners.

Ross-Porter said her involvement in Go Beyond Grades STL prepared her for October parent-teacher conferences. She and Powers worked together to decipher Roy’s test scores so she could arrive armed with a long list of questions to ask Roy’s teacher.

“The questions that she gave me were able to get me better answers, just because of the way the questions are worded,” Ross-Porter said.

Powers said she hopes Go Beyond Grades STL can one day go beyond the boundaries of the St. Louis area and help parents across Missouri. For now, billboards are going up around the city and county to alert families to the importance of being involved in their child’s education.

“How do we make sure folks are clear about what to expect from their schools and how to partner with their educators to really support their children? Because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re fighting for,” Powers said. “What we’re trying to really support is our kids, so they can have a strong future with the basics of reading and math.”

Disclosure: The Opportunity Trust provides financial support to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to Learning Heroes and Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Chris Riback: Darlene, welcome to the studio. Thank you for coming.

Darlene Walker: All right, thank you for having me.

Chris Riback: So, tell me about Hampton Roads. What is the community like and tell me about your affiliate.

Darlene Walker: Well our Hampton Roads area is really what we call the 757. There are eight cities to include Williamsburg. Virginia Beach is included in that as well. So we have Hampton, Newport News, which is all of what we call the Peninsula. And then we have Norfolk, Portsmouth and Chesapeake. And so we are military based. I don’t know how many bases and everything in that area. Our ships are there. Newport News ship building is there.

Chris Riback: There’s a lot going on.

Darlene Walker: NASA Langley. Yes, and everything has that military tone to it a little bit. So it’s a military town for sure.

Chris Riback: Why is your affiliate your BCDI Hampton Roads affiliate needed?

Darlene Walker: We are so needed, number one, because there aren’t very many, if any, organizations in our area that really address the issues of what’s going on with African-American children and their families. And so there are lots of organizations that deal with children, but not necessarily with a focus on our African-American children. Even as we focus on the kids, we don’t leave anybody out. So wherever we go, everybody benefits from whatever it is that we’re doing, whether we are giving books away, having parent workshops and things of that nature.

Chris Riback: So let’s talk about a couple of the areas that your group really hones in on. I think the first one is literacy.

Darlene Walker: Literacy and parent engagement are the two things that we focus on immensely. The parents are really engaged in what’s going on with their children, where they are, where the school, they know who the teacher is, and things of that nature. They’re more apt to come out to those parent workshops, more apt to come to PTA and things of that nature. So when they’re seeing what’s happening, it makes it easy for them to engage in that, and then pull away from that how I can help my child or what part of that is going to help our family.

And so that’s one of the things that we want to boost is that engagement factor. So with BCDI-Hampton Roads, we want to be sure that we are doing that. Hosting the workshops for the parents and things of that nature, along with the literacy factor. So at this point we probably have given away about 15,000 books throughout our Hampton Roads area. We want to promote that in-home reading library factor. Because with that in place, children can go right in their room, pull books off their little shelves, and read comfortably, and it doesn’t turn into a punishment or banned to the basement almost kind of thing.

Chris Riback: Yes, it’s something to look forward to.

Darlene Walker: It is. It is. And some of our parents, we have to just remind them that children do know once they’re in school, the preschool programs, they know how to handle books. They’re taught that.

Chris Riback: And I just wanted to confirm, do you find that music just seems to follow you wherever you go?

Darlene Walker: I’m glad. It keeps us upbeat and going.

Chris Riback: Yes, it keeps a little bit of energy. With the parents, because you talked about how when parents are involved, when they’re engaged, the kids do better. What’s the biggest question that parents have for you about how to help raise, engage children?

Darlene Walker: They don’t really have a question for us as much as they have the reasons as to why they don’t. The reasons why they don’t sometimes because they want to, is because they’re working. We have lots of parents that are working two jobs. We have parents who work the late shift so that they can get kids off to school in the morning.

So their shift is a little bit later so they’re not off until 5:00, 6:00 or 7:00, and those are the 6:00, 7:00 timeframes that we’re hosting parenting classes. So they’re explaining that. They know they should be. They just don’t have the energy to be. I know I have two sons myself and it was a challenge for me as well.

Chris Riback: It takes a lot of energy.

Darlene Walker: And I knew. So it took a lot to push through because I know I need to be there. They prepared for us. We need to be there. So the challenges are them working. We do always have those parents that just don’t worry about it. But mostly it is parents working and transportation.

Chris Riback: And it really shows how to raise a community of children, the way that the efforts that you’re involved in. It’s not just schools, it’s parents, it’s infrastructure, it’s work, it’s transportation. It takes everything.

Darlene Walker: It is. It’s a lot of things. Sometimes people try to pinpoint and say what the one key thing is and it’s not. There are many factors there.

Chris Riback: What’s next for BCDI-Hampton Roads? What are you going to really focus on, let’s say in the next six to 12 months?

Darlene Walker: In the next six to 12 months, we’ll still be aligning ourselves with the eight essential outcomes that are part of our strategic plan for the national organization. And so we’re just making sure that we’re in line with that. And then some of the projects that we were just having some bright ideas about, do they line up with that? Sometimes we got to keep the main thing, the main thing, and not stray too far off the path. So we’ll just make sure that we are on that track.

Membership is a big whoop-de-doo for us. That’s the year-round. Because we’re a membership organization and so individuals join us to do the work. That’s a challenge as well, because we are still looking for those people who are out there working, who are out there working two jobs, who have kids, other obligations and responsibilities. So they have to figure out if they can carve a little niche to be able to come into National Black Child and be supported.

Chris Riback: There’s a lot of work to be done.

Darlene Walker: It is. We look forward to it.

Chris Riback: I’m sure you do. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Darlene Walker: Oh, no problem. Thank you again for having me. Appreciate it.

As this event shows, parents are extremely interested in shaping the educational experiences of their children and those in their communities. The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the role of parents in their children’s learning and challenged the traditional model of how educators and families interact. It was a shift no one was prepared for, yet a late 2021 found that over 90% of parents surveyed planned to be as or more involved in their children’s education than during the 2020-21 school year, when the effects of the pandemic on at-home learning were still being felt deeply. 

At the same time, an increasing number of parent-based advocacy groups, such as The Oakland Reach, PAVE, Atlanta Thrive, Moms for Liberty and the National Parents Union, have been with the education system. These parent advocates are helping families select high-quality schools, providing leadership training, examining district policies, sharing information about key education issues and investigating what is being taught in classrooms. 

As a result, educators are realizing the need to strengthen relationships with parents. 

Parent power is a core pillar of Rocketship’s model. Organizing committees of 10 to 15 parent volunteers each lead advocacy work at each of the network’s schools with the support of full-time school staff dedicated to building parent leaders. These committees have led campaigns on issues ranging from school-specific concerns to those that impact families across the country. Along with hosting mayoral forums, Rocketship families have pushed for better traffic safety measures, raised awareness about the importance of voting, participated in marches and rallies, and advocated for policies that are supportive of charter schools. For many parents, these experiences have led to increased self-confidence, lasting friendships and, in some cases, jobs in advocacy and government. And, as a recent shows, by participating in these activities, Rocketship parents are learning to use their voices to influence local and state policies that impact their families and communities.

Rocketship’s approach points to several key strategies for building and supporting parent leadership and advocacy. 

• Create a strong family engagement culture. Developing an environment where parents feel welcome, contribute to decision-making and have opportunities to get involved sets the foundation for later participation in advocacy efforts. Rocketship engages parents by asking them to complete “parent partner” hours, which they log for activities such as hosting school staff for home visits, reading with their children at home and attending community events. Through these interactions, parents build relationships at the school, which are critical for developing trust and making them feel comfortable transitioning into advocacy activities. Education organizers meet with parents for one-on-one meetings where they learn more about the advocacy program. Parents also decide on the advocacy issues they address, leading to buy-in and sustained efforts over time.  
• Commit to prioritizing parent leadership and advocacy across the organization. Advocacy is most effective when leaders at all levels understand and champion the work and provide the necessary structures and resources. Principals connect with families and encourage parents to participate in organizing initiatives (for example, by sharing information and providing food, child care and translation services). Network or district leaders allocate critical resources, such as funding for full-time staff positions like education organizers and ongoing professional training. Building school-level support requires parent advocates and education organizers to clearly communicate with school leaders about the purpose of the advocacy and provide opportunities for school staff to observe these activities in action. 
• Tailor advocacy efforts to meet the needs of the local community. The ability to respond to local needs and engage community members and organizations is a critical component of advocacy. Parents need the opportunity to learn about local concerns, and education organizers need to be familiar with cultural traditions, the local political landscape and other specifics so they can effectively assist with researching issues and organizing campaigns. Rocketship uses the model to structure its work with families and has found this model effective because it provides a common framework across the organization, yet is flexible enough to account for local needs. Additionally, collaborating with other organizations engaged in similar work affords access to more resources and connections, and expands reach of advocacy efforts.      

These strategies form the basis for how Rocketship school staff engage with families and encourage them to participate in advocacy efforts. As parents’ interest and involvement in their children’s education continues to increase, schools can leverage these strategies to build stronger family-school partnerships and robust, meaningful opportunities for parent leadership.

Implementing programs that help students build social-emotional skills like communication, confidence and problem-solving requires commitments from the district level all the way to the individual classroom. But one major piece of the puzzle is often overlooked when schools think about how to implement SEL: family engagement.

that when families are involved in their children’s education, students attend school more regularly, stay in school longer and perform at higher levels. This is true for academics, when, for example, educators send home report cards, make phone calls with detailed academic updates and host curriculum nights to show what students are learning.

Engaging families in social-emotional learning is equally crucial to supporting children’s growth. SEL when it is reinforced , throughout the day, in different environments. So it is important for educators to prioritize the learning students are doing outside the classroom, and to consistently emphasize this priority to families, offering parents and caregivers the opportunity to help their kids build social-emotional skills outside of school. 

A recent Committee for Children concluded that 8 out of 10 parents support SEL in schools, and 3 in 4 agree that schools and families should work together to teach kids social-emotional skills. Still, many schools and districts are hearing skepticism and concerns about SEL. These findings should give educators the confidence to address misconceptions and clarify what SEL really is.

To do this, it is essential to create lines of open communication. Simply put, families want to know their voices are being heard in these conversations. It’s also important that educators frame SEL in language that families in the community understand and value, and that is free of obscure jargon. 

In some places, it might be more useful to refer to SEL in terms of life skills and emphasize their practical application in the workforce. Remind families that skills like social awareness and problem-solving are vital in every professional field, and that SEL can help build those practical abilities. Emphasizing the correlation between SEL and academic achievement or college acceptance can also be helpful.

Many families are rightly concerned about the learning loss that has happened as a result of the pandemic. It’s tempting to conclude that the only solution is to double down on core subject areas — math, science, reading and language arts — in order to mitigate those losses. But doubling down will go only so far, and families can benefit from understanding why. If kids don’t develop the fundamental skills that allow them to function not just in the classroom but in society, their academic gains may be harder to sustain in the long term. But when students can collaborate with peers, feel calm in emotional situations and think critically about things they’re experiencing in their classrooms, hallways, lunchrooms and sports fields, they’re better equipped to succeed both in and out of the classroom and far into the future.

Ongoing communication is critical to engaging families in this essential work. This goes beyond sending kids home with worksheets and asking for a parent’s signature. Instead, schools should try to create opportunities where families can participate in SEL with their children in meaningful ways. For example, teachers can provide some ideas for ways that families can practice social-emotional skills with their kids at home, or encouraging reminders to check in with their children about how they’re feeling at school, not just how they’re performing academically.

Connect with families regularly through social media or invite them to an online SEL forum. Distribute a newsletter in families’ home languages that focuses on SEL-related updates, activities, and school and community events. Provide a space for families to offer feedback (Google forms and surveys can be a great tool for this). Finally, keep communications brief but meaningful — the last thing families need is busy work.

A commitment to engaging families in SEL has to occur at every tier in the education system. If the responsibility falls on teachers alone, their efforts, valiant as they may be, will only go so far. If you’re an administrator, support your staff in this work. And if you’re a classroom educator, ask for buy-in from your leaders.

Helping kids build essential life skills, like confidence, decision-making and the ability to cope with difficult times, takes families and schools working together to teach kids what they need to thrive.

This Week’s Top Story

• “ ‘Parents can’t solve a problem that they don’t know they have,’ said Cindi Williams, co-founder of Learning Heroes.”
• “Evena Joseph was unaware how much her 10-year-old son was struggling in school. She found out only with help from somebody who knows the Boston school system better than she does.”
• “The progress report for Tamela Ensrud’s second-grade son in Nashville shows mostly As and a B in English, but she noticed her son was having trouble with reading. She asked to discuss her son’s reading test scores at a fall parent-teacher conference but was only shown samples of her son’s work and told, ‘Your son is doing well.’ ”
• “Opportunities to catch up are plentiful in some places, thanks to federal COVID aid, but won’t last forever. It will take better communication with parents to help students get the support they need, experts say.”

  

  The Big Three

  • “Before the pandemic, about 8 million U.S. students were considered chronically absent, according to the research group Attendance Works. That’s when a student misses 10% or more of the school year. By spring 2022, that number had doubled to around 16 million.”
  • “In a survey of 21 school districts in rural, suburban and urban areas, NPR found most districts 
 still had heightened levels of chronic absenteeism.”
  • Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto Carvalho “describes the same attendance challenges NPR heard from multiple districts around the country: a youth mental health crisis, heightened fear around health concerns, transportation difficulties and poverty and homelessness, which can make it difficult for students to keep a routine around going to school.”
  • “Even as schools wield billions of dollars in federal COVID relief, only a small fraction of students have received school tutoring, according to a survey of the nation’s largest districts by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press.”
  • “In eight of 12 school systems that provided data, less than 10% of students received any type of district tutoring this fall.”
  • “The startlingly low tutoring figures point to several problems. Some parents said they didn’t know tutoring was available or didn’t think their children needed it. Some school systems have struggled to hire tutors. Other school systems said the small tutoring programs were intentional, part of an effort to focus on students with the greatest needs.”

  

  • reports on a new
  • “25.9% said they had lied about their child’s COVID-19 status or failed to adhere to at least one of seven recommended behaviors meant to curtail viral transmission.”
  • “The most common untruth was not telling someone who was going to spend time with their child that they knew or suspected the child had COVID-19, and the most common adherence failure was allowing their child to break quarantine rules. A total of 19.4% of parents didn’t have their child tested for COVID-19 when they suspected infection.”
  • “Just over half of parents who lied (52.4%) said they exposed others to their ill child because they wanted to exercise their parental autonomy, while others said their child didn’t feel very sick (47.6%), they didn’t want to miss a fun event to stay home (44.4%) or they didn’t want their child to miss school (42.9%).”

  Federal Updates

  National Center for Education Statistics:

  • This data challenge invites members of the AI community to develop predictive models for scoring open-ended NAEP mathematics assessment items.
  • The total prize purse for the challenge will be $100,000. The application deadline is April 17, 2023.

  National Telecommunications and Information Administration: Is of two components of the Digital Equity Act of 2021: the $1.44 billion State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program and the $1.25 billion Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program.

  White House: The Office of Science and Technology Policy will host a series of virtual listening sessions to inform the development of the 2023-28 Federal STEM Strategic Plan. . (If you would like to provide information in addition to or in lieu of your participation in the listening session, you may send a brief message to stemstrategy@ostp.eop.gov.)

  COVID-19 Research

  • The Food and Drug Administration and CDC sent a , warning him that his claims about COVID-19 vaccine risks are harmful to the public.
  • “The claim that the increase of [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] reports of life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere represents an increase of risk caused by the COVID-19 vaccines is incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public.”
  • on a new .
  • “People who tended to report lower trust in public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the pandemic believed those agencies’ health recommendations were politically influenced and inconsistent, according to a study published Monday in Health Affairs.”

  City and State News

  Illinois: “, district officials cautioned principals during a recent meeting, though the district said in a statement the rate ticked up above last year’s February rate, to about 88%.”

  Missouri: Students did worse across the board on the latest round of standardized testing, with 112 districts and charter schools scoring low enough to be classified as provisionally accredited.

  Oregon: As Portland Public Schools prepares to close its at the end of the school year, .

  Virginia: Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced that some families would soon be able to .

  Viewpoints and Analyses

  • “What first looked like a pandemic blip has turned into a crisis. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
  • “At worst, it could signal a new generation with little faith in the value of a college degree. At minimum, it appears those who passed on college during the pandemic are opting out for good.”
  • “Fewer college graduates could worsen labor shortages in fields from health care to information technology. For those who forgo college, it usually means lower lifetime earnings — 75% less compared with those who get bachelor’s degrees.”

  Done Right, Tutoring Can Greatly Boost Student Learning. How Do We Get There?

  • Via Kevin Huffman in Âé¶čŸ«Æ·
  • “I worry that policymakers will pretend high-dosage tutoring is happening at scale and then, when student outcomes do not measurably improve, declare that it hasn’t worked. “
  • “Early evidence suggests there are multiple ways to effectively deliver tutoring — not just the frequent, in-person, one-to-one or small group models that have been tested in the past. We have grantees using in-person instruction, remote delivery of person-to-person tutoring, artificial intelligence-enabled programs with human facilitation and additional hybrid models.”
  • “States can remove barriers and issue specific guidance on grant and funding opportunities. They can offer models and waivers for implementing tutoring during the school day. And they can set expectations for accountability and reporting student progress.”
  • Related: Researcher Matthew Kraft on How the Right Tutoring Materials & Training Can Help Students Progress
  • “McKinsey surveyed more than 1,800 U.S. educators, school leaders and school mental health professionals at the end of the 2021-22 school year.” 
  • “Approximately one-third of respondents said they planned to leave their role before the next school year began.”
  • “Teachers who are thinking of leaving cite compensation, unreasonable expectations and an inability to protect their well-being as their top motivators 
 while those who plan to stay cite meaningful work, quality colleagues and compensation.”
  • “Though our research shows that compensation is a top driver of both attrition and retention, school districts typically do not have much leeway to alter salary ranges. States and districts are exploring different models of addressing compensation concerns.”
  • “Districts and state education systems could also consider tailoring bonuses to teacher segments that are particularly prone to attrition.”

  …And on a Lighter Note

  A prophet for what was to come: The sixth anniversary of Robert Kelly’s .

  Dogs Ask:

  https://twitter.com/buitengebieden/status/1632660021904384001?s=20

  For even more COVID policy and education news, .

  Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

Both CA Parent Power and Oakland REACH introduced a resolution to the school board that would give parents “.”

In California, open contract negotiations between school districts and unions can occur only if both parties agree. It looks like it could happen in Oakland.

“We support parents at the bargaining table,” said Kampala Taiz-Rancifer, second vice president of the Oakland Education Association.

District and union officials alike across the country have long resisted opening up the collective bargaining process to public scrutiny, never mind participation. Reasons range from a fear of posturing on the part of negotiators to a loss of control over the proceedings. I suspect the real reason is that closed-door bargaining enables each side to construct its own narrative about what the other side is up to.

“Only those at the table know what really transpires, and either side can be and usually is painted as villainous,” .

But open bargaining may be the only public education issue whose supporters include both the most militant teachers unions and the staunchest union critics.

Like the Oakland parent groups, union opponents such as the , the and the all see closed bargaining as a way for officials on both sides to work out inside deals, then present the public with a fait accompli.

This occurred most recently in Seattle, where, after a week-long strike, teachers and the public both complained of a lack of transparency. Only after teachers ratified the agreement did district officials wonder .

Closed negotiations are still the norm in most school districts, but the doors are slowly creaking open. Progressive unions and their allies are among the most prominent advocates of this exposure. Granted, their motives are self-serving, but that doesn’t automatically make it a bad idea. These unions are convinced citizens would be wholeheartedly on their side if they were present at negotiations.

Colorado voters approved a ballot measure 70% to 30% in 2014 that opened public-sector bargaining across the entire state. Though initially opposed, the Colorado Education Association has since embraced the new transparency, using negotiations as a way to rally members and the public to its cause.

“We want to be open and transparent with the community and public. Having that open bargaining allows for those conversations to take place,” .

The Chicago Teachers Union asked for open bargaining and got it, with .

Local teachers unions in Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington all pushed for open bargaining, and all for the same reason: to use it as an organizing tactic.

In Brookline, Massachusetts, the union brought more than 100 rank-and-file members to negotiation sessions to witness “.”

In Minnesota, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers went a step further. It brought 50 teachers, dressed them in union T-shirts and “prepped them for their role,” . They were allowed to speak in support of the union’s proposals for special education.

Merrie Najimy was president of the Concord Teachers Association when the union pushed for open bargaining. She later became president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. “When they see the outrageous behavior of the other side and the dignified behavior of the teachers, as well as [our] visionary proposals, that’s where you win,” .

Jane McAlevey is a senior policy fellow at the UC Berkeley Labor Center who has long advocated for open bargaining as a way to increase member support. She believes open bargaining is a way for a union to display its trust in its members.

“Too many officials have very little faith in the intelligence of ordinary workers who could be involved in the union,” she said. “They’ll just say to me, ‘How did you control everybody?’ It’s always about control.”

It’s important to specify that “open bargaining” is a catch-all term, and there are various steps along the spectrum. Some districts simply make bargaining proposals public as they occur. Others allow silent, in-person public observation. Others, like Chicago, add online streaming. Formal public input while negotiations are ongoing is very rare.

Still, more sunshine is better than less. No one should be put off because unions might use open bargaining to manipulate public opinion to their cause. School district officials represent the public at the bargaining table. If they don’t trust the public to observe, never mind to participate, they should seek other employment.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

I felt as though I were right back in those days as a single mom when someone had a cold, someone had a science project, I had a deadline and how was I going to get all this mess to work? Always with the question running in the background, “Is this what my life is about?” Then, I read Garbe’s eloquent reflections on mothering as maintenance and maintenance as essential and honorable. It makes the world go round; it keeps life happening.

I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book that made me feel more seen; I wish I had had it years ago when I was up to my neck day in and day out with all that mothering.

The way Seattle author Garbes defines mothering, though, a lot of us are always up to our necks in it. She traces her understanding of mothering beginning with her first book, “,” about the science and culture of pregnancy, to her much broader view now that mothering is a verb and “the action of mothering 
 includes anyone who is engaged in ‘the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.’” The work of raising children is mothering, she writes, and includes people of all genders, extending to nonparents — preschool teachers, babysitters, good friends who are so close with their caring that they almost become co-parents.

Garbes wrote “Essential Labor” during the pandemic as her daughters’ preschool, along with much of the rest of the world, locked down. As a writer, she didn’t get a regular paycheck or health insurance and her husband did, so by default it became her job to care full-time for their daughters, 2 and 5 at the time. The pandemic underscored for all of us that the essential work of caregiving is the only truly essential work humans do. During the “long, strange season” of the pandemic, people began to see — maybe for the first time — that caregiving is hard work — mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting. It is also highly skilled labor without which nothing in the world works as it should. Yet, what recognition do those involved in this essential labor receive in reality? Beyond hollow atta-girls and sentimental talk about the importance, yea even the sacredness of mothers, how does American society actually recognize the people do the care work, the maintenance and domestic labor that keeps the whole shebang running?

Garbes alternates her well-researched, fact-based reportage on the state of mothering and caregiving in the U.S. with personal reflections of her upbringing as a Filipinx-American with two parents in the health care field, a lens that allows a particularly powerful insight into the work of caregiving in America. The Philippines has for decades served as the farm team for the U.S. health care workforce, providing nurses and other healthcare workers to make up for shortages in the U.S. workforce. As is always the case, the immigrants ended up taking or being assigned the jobs the white workers didn’t want, which for nurses often meant the ICU or critical care jobs that required them to be more intimate with patients’ bodies.

During the pandemic, Garbes writes, she read that Filipinx nurses made up 4% of the nursing workforce in the U.S. and accounted for 34% of Covid-related nursing deaths — a gut punch, she says, because any one of those deaths could have been her mother. When she saw all of her “wild, racing thoughts and frustrations about the state of caregiving in America” showing up all over the media and in every Zoom conversation, she felt in her bones that the time had come to, as she writes, blow open the conversation, invite in new perspectives, and imagine new possibilities. As a growing body of us have realized during the past two and a half years, if we don’t fix this, our society is going to go off the rails. It’s time to double down on the radical power of mothering, she says. (And let all say, “Amen.”)

Lest it seem that “Essential Labor” is a scolding polemic, it is anything but. She writes deliciously about mothering as survival, mothering as valuable, sensual and even erotic labor, taking Audre Lorde’s depiction of the erotic as “the deepest life force 
 which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.” Love is an action verb, acts of attention. Mothering is service and attention to the body, the “geography of mothering” (lovely!), which can’t be conveyed to a child in words. If ever there were a situation that demanded deeds not words, it’s mothering.

She also writes about mothering as interdependence and underscores what so many of us have seen during the pandemic: No one gets out of this alone: Community sustains us, even if it’s limited to our Covid pod or wine shared by Zoom after the kids are asleep. To nurture our children, support our elders and our disabled, and to tend to our sick, we have to take care of each other.

Garbes shies away from nothing — ear wax, stinky toes, the incessant role of mucus, barf and other bodily fluids in caregiving. Bodies do all of that, and attention must be paid. Her frankness extends to details about some of her intimate moments with her husband which may land as TMI for some of us, but her point about the power — and necessity — of pleasure is well-taken.

She’s also not afraid to tell one on herself, relating how a friend on a camping trip showed her how to blow on the campfire to get it going. When she asked how this (white) friend learned how to do that, the friend said that as a kid her family was too poor to stay in hotels, so when they went on vacation, they always camped. In that moment, Garbes had a sudden reckoning with her own privilege, in many ways a typical, middle-class family whose parents could afford to send their children to private school and take vacations that involved staying in hotels with swimming pools.

But she writes of also seeing the way her successful, hardworking parents endured the immigrant indignities of having their competency questioned, being condescended to socially and professionally, being essential yet infantilized, oddly echoing motherhood itself. Garbes demands more for mothers, for caregivers — more acknowledgment, more information, more pleasure and compassion, more recognition that cultivating and nurturing a child’s life force and essence can be more deeply satisfying for both child and caregiver than any other life experience.

“Essential Labor” is both a memoir and a call to action. The caregiving crisis the U.S. finds itself in now will outlast the pandemic and we must figure out ways to care for each other. Individual people patching together individual solutions will never work, and it’s up to all of us to take what the pandemic has taught us about essential caregiving and turn it into political will and action. It isn’t rocket science: Societies throughout the world have sorted this out and created solutions that allow caregivers to be acknowledged and caregiving to be shared. Part of mothering, Garbes writes, is to insist on worthiness. It’s time the U.S. does that now — insist on the worth of caregiving — and in the process, build something more powerful than we’ve ever known, based on love, inclusion, mutuality, and acceptance.

“Once children start producing humor, they’re doing so every three hours,” says the survey’s co-lead author Dr. Elena Hoicka, associate professor at the University of Bristol’s School of Education. “And that’s a conservative estimate because the parents may have put their child to bed several hours before filling out the survey, or they might have missed an instance. So, it’s a pretty conservative measure. But it’s safe to say that kids are appreciating and producing humor really frequently.”

involved a 20-item questionnaire for parents about their children’s humor development from 1 to 47 months, such as whether they were playing peekaboo or laughing at their adults making funny faces. The survey pooled data from multiple studies involving families in the U.K., U.S., Canada and Australia to create a global taxonomy of humor development in the first four years. The researchers found that children in all locations were developing humor at the same rates and were responding to and creating the same sorts of humor, suggesting that humor is universal.

“The caveat is, of course, that these are all English-speaking countries,” Hoicka says. “One of my colleagues is now working on a Turkish version and it will be interesting to see if we’ll get the same results or if things look a bit different when we look at other countries. But across these English-speaking countries, we didn’t find differences related to income, gender, parents’ education level or other such factors.

“I would have thought that having an older sibling might increase a child’s humor, but we didn’t find that. Based on our data, it seems that children are developing humor at the same general rate, regardless of other children in the home.”

Hoicka says the researchers wanted to create this survey to establish when humor emerges and what sorts of humor children appreciate, and as a tool to see how development of humor relates to other stages in children’s development. Humor affects many other stages of life such as making friends, coping with stress and creativity. The intention is that systematically charting early humor development will be useful for other researchers who will be better able to target their future experiments and observations, as well as for parents and early childhood educators. Media professionals who are developing children’s programming can use the survey to target what kinds of humor will work at different ages.

The survey starts with babies at one month old, though Hoicka says it isn’t clear whether babies before three or four months really know what they’re doing. They do smile at their parents doing silly things like making funny faces or weird noises. In baby psychologist Dr. Caspar Addyman’s research on infant laughter, parents sent in videos of very young babies laughing, a few as early as one month.

“So, we decided to start our survey at that earliest age,” Hoicka says, “and though it’s rare, we do have some parents reporting humor appreciation and laughter at one month. But babies actually appreciating humor starts with, at best, three months and most are smiling and laughing at jokes (like peekaboo) at four months.”

Hoicka offers a word of caution in taking the timeline too much to heart. She doesn’t want parents thinking their child is a humorless dud just because they aren’t losing it at Daddy’s clowning by their fourth month. Children are born with different natures — some are naturally more somber; some seem to be born light-hearted. They’re going to respond to the world and the people around them on their own timelines. And sometimes Daddy’s clowning around just isn’t as funny as he thinks.

The development of humor is a complex process, and it understandably tracks with the child’s other developmental trajectories. For example, the first year is devoted to sensory development, so disruptions to the ordinary in what the baby hears and sees can be great material for eliciting a laugh. The element of surprise is important in humor of all sorts and equally so with babies. A sound they’ve never heard before can be startling but also hilarious. For example, entire YouTube channels are now devoted to babies cracking up over their parents tearing paper.

Humor and laughter are inherently social and, Hoicka says, can be a first step in parent-child communication. Babies at an early age don’t understand language, so clowning and playing provide some of the earliest opportunities to communicate and bond. Humor is also a place for children to practice creativity, because in making a joke or a funny face, the child is getting experience with the something-from-nothing that is the basis of any creative endeavor. Humans spend a lot of time in life trying to get it right; with a joke, the stakes are low and there’s no messing up — it’s just all part of the goofiness.

The call-and-response of humor is another way in which adults scaffold children’s development. The adult provides a cue, and the child responds to the cue; then the adult builds on that with another cue and, like conversational turn-taking, their information highway about the world is strengthened. They learn that when Mummy pretends to eat their toes that she’s really not the toe-eating sort and when Daddy pretends to sneeze a strand of spaghetti out of his nose, why, that’s just silly.

One-year-olds engage in tickling, chasing and funny bodily actions in tandem with their advances in motor development. As they grow older and begin to wrap their heads around language, the types of humor often shift to word-based jokes and riffs, which can be great practice for understanding fact and fiction and putting them to good advantage for a laugh.

“If you’re 4 and you know where the chocolate bar is but mum doesn’t, that can be leverage for a joke,” she says. But for the child to understand and deliver the joke, they must understand that they’re trying to get their audience to consider what’s true or not true at the same time to pull one over on mum. Pretty sophisticated thinking for one so young.

Children don’t really understand types of humor like knock-knock jokes and puns until they’re somewhat older — around 7, Hoicka says — but that doesn’t necessarily keep them from giving it a shot. “KČÔŽÇłŠ°ì-°ìČÔŽÇłŠ°ì.” Who’s there?” “¶ÙŽÇČ”!” isn’t exactly a knee-slapper, but it’s good practice as they sort not only what lands, but why.

For humor to be funny, it needs a positive environment, Hoicka says. Among many mammals, playfulness is used as animals are learning fighting or hunting, for instance, signaling that “Yes, we’re fighting, but let’s not actually hurt each other, shall we?” When “funny” gets too pushy or mean, it ceases to be funny and is read for what it is: aggression.

“Aggressive humor is not linked well to good mental health,” Hoicka says. “It’s linked to bullying and, although a lot of people seem to find it funny, it isn’t adaptive to human development in the way other types of humor are. Saying nonsense words is going to get you a lot more friends, for instance, than pushing someone even if you find that funny.

“We haven’t studied this as much as I’d like, but with aggressive humor, it looks as though not everyone gets there even by 47 months. Some kids maybe just aren’t as into it — that’s certainly what we see in older kids and adults. Some people just aren’t into meanness and aggressive humor.”

Beyond a certain age, Hoicka says, there’s a certain type of humor that rarely fails to land. She has a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old and says the richest vein of jokes for either is anything having to do with bodily functions and toilet humor, which a quick scan of some of the highest-grossing (pun intended) movies in the U.S. tells us never goes out of style.

“My daughter, the 3-year-old, has just discovered whispering,” Hoicka says. “She’ll call me over, ‘Come here, come here!’ and I just know what’s going to happen. I lean down and 
”

Yep.

“Poo-poo,” she whispers, followed by delighted laughter.

Gets ‘em every time.

This dearth of dads in language learning needs to change, says Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramírez, director of the University of Washington’s Language Development and Processing Laboratory. But just knowing that things need to change doesn’t mean it will be easy.

Infant directed speech refers to the high-pitched, singsong, slowed-down way adults talk to babies that signals to them that “This conversation is for ČâŽÇłÜ.” Sometimes called “parentese,” it typically involves eye contact, interactive play and shared attention. Researchers agree that children’s language development is a social process; it takes place within the web of relationships and interactions that make up the child’s daily experience. Adults talking specifically to babies in this context communicate affect — how they turn their heads, widen their eyes, smile, wait for a response — and engage the infant’s attention, facilitating both social interaction and language learning.

Though research over several decades has focused largely on the contributions of mothers, a quick scan of family dynamics in the U.S. makes it clear that there’s more to the story. Women’s careers have expanded, and fathers have become more directly involved in their babies’ upbringing. With the pandemic, those demographic changes that were accelerated in many families, profoundly shifted mothers’ and fathers’ interactions within the family structure.

“In many families, due to the pandemic, dad’s job ended up being more flexible than mom’s, or for whatever reason (sometimes COVID-induced unemployment), fathers were home, in some cases more than mothers,” says Ferjan Ramírez. “For some families, that was a huge shift. Not for everybody, certainly, because we know women have been affected by the pandemic too. But in many families, there was a dramatic shift in the types of child care responsibilities that dads took on.”

It was an adjustment for families, she says, but also for researchers who had been asking mothers almost exclusively to bring children into their lab appointments.

“If the dads are going to bring the children in,” she says, “maybe we need to rethink the types of activities we’re asking parents to do with children when we’re studying them in the lab. Maybe we shouldn’t ask everyone to sit on the floor and read a book but should include some things the dads like to do. Why not study their language interaction during rough and tumble play or soccer, for example? Nobody has done that in the past, but we should because we really don’t know what happens.”

Fathers Have Their Own Way with Words

Including fathers in the research is essential not only because they are central to children’s web of social relationships, but also because fathers bring unique characteristics to IDS. Studies have observed that fathers use a higher number of rare words and fewer common words than mothers. Though fathers typically use fewer words with their infants, their speech is more diverse and more challenging to the child. Recent studies have found that fathers used significantly more wh-words (why? what?), asked more questions and asked for clarification more often than mothers. Posing wh-questions elicits a verbal response from the child which researchers believe helps foster their reasoning abilities in addition to building vocabulary.

Other studies have found that fathers’ use of such diverse speech was a unique predictor of their children’s overall language at 24 months and one study observed that in an economically and culturally diverse sample of families with children from 6 to 36 months, fathers’ use of wh-questions during book reading was significantly associated with children’s vocabulary when they entered kindergarten.

None of this is to say that fathers’ IDS is superior to that of mothers, but that their approach to their infants’ language learning matters and ought to be considered in the research. That may sound like a foregone conclusion, but as Ramírez points out, it’s complicated, starting with LENA (Language Environment Analysis), the recording device that captures and analyzes conversations between babies and their caregivers. Analyzing recordings from children’s ordinary interactions with all the caregivers in their lives, LENA’s software analyzes the number of words spoken by women and those spoken by men. One large study reported that mothers accounted for 75% of adult words spoken around children from 2 to 48 months. However, follow-up research assessing LENA’s reliability found that when male speakers used a higher pitch to address their infants, they were more likely to be wrongly tagged as female.

Because multiple studies have noted this error, researchers looking to distinguish mothers’ and fathers’ speech are encouraged to supplement LENA with manual annotations — a process Ramírez points out is slow, labor-intensive and expensive.

When researchers did make this adjustment, they found that mothers still verbally interact with their babies up to two times more than fathers do — a gap that’s especially pronounced in the baby’s first six months — but not 75% as previously reported. Researchers also found that when fathers interact one-on-one with their infants, they engage in equal amounts of IDS as mothers, but when mother comes into the picture, fathers speak significantly less. Some researchers propose that mothers act as “gatekeepers” and automatically assume the more active role with their babies or that fathers feel less responsible for holding up their end of the conversation when mom is present. Either way, the more accurate measurement of of IDS fathers’ engagement underscores that infants learn language within a social construct, and scientific research into parents’ effect on language development needs to acknowledge these complexities, Ramírez says.

“If you understand that mom takes over the conversation when she’s around,” she says, “it will be important in research to make sure we sometimes study dads without mothers present, as well as studying the triadic interactions of mother, father, child.”

New Approaches Needed

If fathers are to be included in language-learning research, she says, studies must be set up differently. In North America, where paternity leave is still an outlier, fathers may not be as free to come to the lab during weekday daytime hours, so labs will need to extend their hours to accommodate their different schedules. Labs also need to consider fathers’ different behavioral styles, she says. Studies have shown that fathers tend to engage in more energetic, playful, stimulating physical interactions with their children than the mother’s “smoother,” more flowing interaction.

“My husband would prefer to bounce a ball with our kids, while I might prefer to read,” Ramírez says. “That’s not a bad thing, it’s just different styles. But what that means is that it’s not as simple as, ‘Hey, let’s invite the dads to the labs.’ We really have to rethink how we’re going to do this so dads feel welcome and valued. This means developing new protocols, which shouldn’t be based on maternal templates alone.

“But to develop a protocol for studying language during soccer play, for example, requires extra resources and additional funding, in addition to first having to convince the funders that it’s necessary from a scientific perspective.”

Ramírez has firsthand knowledge of what an uphill battle that’s likely to be. When she sent out her on fathers’ IDS and its influence on language development for peer review, one reviewer’s comments were, “Why do you care about this? Is studying dads really going to make the needle budge? Why are you even writing this paper?”

“They eventually reconsidered, and the paper got published,” she said with a laugh. “But comments like this demonstrate that including fathers in research is still not a given in academia.”

Given the dramatic difference fathers’ infant-centered speech can make in the child’s vocabulary building and cognitive development, research must do better if it’s to adequately reflect contemporary language learning. Further study might reveal significant differences in paternal IDS that current research has not discovered and could lead to coaching sessions and interventions much more finely tuned to how fathers actually interact with their children.

This dearth of research is even truer of families headed by LGBTQ parents and same-sex couples, who are under-represented practically to the point of invisibility in the research. Ramírez’ will soon launch a study on infant language development in same-sex families, using LENA recordings and eye-tracking to analyze the preference for male vs. female parentese.

“Future research might consider parent gender as fluid rather than binary,” Ferjan Ramírez says, “and that’s going to require different strategies, more resources and a different approach to recruit and welcome parents to the lab. But until that’s done, we really can’t claim to fully understand the role of parents in children’s language learning.”

Turns out, that’s not necessarily so. According to a recent study, Latinx fathers actually do speak to their infants in “parentese,” that unique style of speech known and loved by babies everywhere. And that’s a very good thing, says Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramírez, assistant professor in Linguistics at the University of Washington, because such speech supports the babies’ language learning and brain building. Mostly, dads don’t know that.

The importance of speaking with infants in this special way is backed up by a large body of research showing how much impact caregivers’ social interactions have on babies’ cognitive and linguistic development. In speaking  — pitching their voices higher, slowing their speech and exaggerating their intonation — caregivers emphasize language for babies in a way that tells them, “This is for you, I’m speaking to you,” and elicit the kind of call-and-response “”feedback loop that’s the keystone to the child’s language development.

Recent studies highlight the important role fathers play in their infants’ language learning, but Ramírez has observed a persistent gap in the literature concerning the contributions of mothers and fathers. That gap is especially notable, she says, when it comes to infants of bilingual and culturally diverse background, such as Latinx babies.

In what Ramírez and her fellow researchers believe is the first study comparing the amount of mother and father parentese in a bilingual context, 37 families with bilingual, Latinx infants were set up with special Language Environment Analysis () recording devices. Often referred to as a “talk pedometer,” the LENA recording device captures and analyzes the back-and-forth talk among children and their caregivers, without identifying individual words.

Researchers asked the parents to put the devices on their babies on a typical weekend when both parents were home and not working. The device then “listened to” and analyzed when language was directed at the child and by whom. Prior to the listening sessions, the researchers surveyed the fathers about how often they performed specific parental responsibilities, such as changing diapers and singing to their children, plus additional questions on language development.

Once the LENA recordings had been analyzed, the results were unequivocal: Every father spoke parentese. Both mothers and fathers spoke directly to the children in Spanish and English; language-mixing was common in both, and all the fathers engaged in the parentese that elicited turn-taking and infant responses.

“I’m impressed that every single dad in the study used parentese,” says Ramírez. “This is something we’ve seen in non-Latinx dads and now we’ve observed it in our study of Latinx dads too. The proportion of how much they use parentese varies from family to family, but they all use it.”

Ramírez, lead author on the article, “,” which details this research, has investigated infant language-acquisition for years and has become acutely aware that most research thus far has focused exclusively on mothers. Traditionally, fathers have been considered “secondary caregivers” who were less involved in childrearing and often not on the research radar. But the world is changing in countless ways and two of those ways that Ramírez has her eye on are the increasing involvement of fathers with their children and the demographic shifts in the U.S. which predict that Latinx families will account for more than 30% of the population by 2050.

“In some states, like California, more than 50% of the kindergarten classes within the next 10 years is going to be of Latinx descent,” she says. “So, we need to expand our understanding of bilingual language acquisition, and we need to develop a better knowledge of the social differences with Latinx families — if there are stricter gender roles or different attitudes toward the role of father, for example — so that whatever interventions we design are culturally informed and sensitive.”

“Also,” she says with a laugh, “I have a personal connection to this situation. My husband is Dominican, and I’ve been observing Latinx families from the ‘inside’ for years.”

One of her primary observations is that two important cultural beliefs in Latinx culture — machismo and familismo — are at odds with each other, particularly when it comes to men’s interactions with their children. Machismo is the cultural view that values strict gender roles and defines men as being strong, masculine and dominant, encouraging an authoritarian style of parenting and less direct involvement with their babies. Many scholars and members of the Latinx community suggest that this portrayal of Latinx fathers is outdated and inaccurate, but it does persist — even in the way men sometimes view themselves. However, as Ramírez has observed personally and in her research, machismo is trumped again and again by the more-abiding value of familismo, the commitment to family as a source of loyalty, closeness, connection and strength.

“So, the main message we got from our study is that, yes, these dads are very much involved in and part of their babies’ lives,” she says, “and they adjust their speech in their interactions with their infants.”

One remarkable, though maybe not completely surprising, aspect of this and other studies of fathers’ interaction with their infants is the ratio of speech babies hear from their mothers compared to their fathers. On average, babies hear two to three times more child-directed speech (meaning language directed to the baby rather than just overheard) from women than from men. In this study, Ramírez, et al, discovered that infants heard on average 18,545 adult words per day: 11,954 from women and 6,591 from men, or an average of 50.4% fewer words from men. Fathers produced on average 43% less parentese than mothers, and the higher the family’s income, the more parentese both parents used. The biggest gap between the amount of language babies hear from mothers and fathers is when the infant is the youngest.

“We’re not 100% sure why that is,” she says. “It may have to do with just the behavioral differences between moms and dads, where dads tend to be more energetic and playful and prefer physical activities little babies can’t engage in yet. There’s also a whole literature on the hormonal differences that exist between moms and dads at this age, so there might also be a biological reason for this. Knowing that is really meaningful for me because if I design an intervention, I will want engage fathers when the babies are really little.”

The study also found that infants whose fathers who were more involved in child care responsibilities tended to hear more daddy-talk, though not necessarily more parentese, with one exception: Researchers saw a strong relationship between fathers’ use of parentese and their awareness of its importance. The more they know about the difference it makes, the more fathers use infant-directed speech. This positive relationship between use of child-directed speech and the parent’s knowledge, beliefs and attitudes around child development has been well-documented in English-speaking mothers, but Ramírez and her fellow researchers say theirs is the first study they’re aware of that demonstrates such an association in fathers.

“This is something I experienced over and over again when I spoke with parents (not just in this study),” she says. “The dads will say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s how my wife talks, and I don’t know why. It’s annoying. I’m going to talk to my baby like they’re a grownup because I want them to learn language. Then, when you record them, there it is: Parentese.

“When you explain to them what ‘turn-taking’ means and how much it matters to their child’s development, they’ll say, ‘Oh. OK, I think I can do this.’ And then we say, ‘Here’s the recording: You already do. Now let’s think of additional day-to-day situations and routines where you may not yet use it, but you could.’”

Understanding these dynamics matters to linguistics scholars like Ramírez because the knowledge will help shape the type of parent coaching interventions that she creates for her own lab, the Language Development and Processing (LDP) Lab, and the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS), both at the University of Washington. As the demographic shifts now at play in U.S. society continue their seismic activity, fathers increasingly will be viewed not as secondary caregivers, but as parents — and fluent fatherly parentese will be an increasingly important part of infants’ learning and language landscape.

Naja Ferjan Ramírez is a distinguished professor with the University of Washington’s Language Acquisition and Multilingualism Endowment, which provided funding for the study.

The capacity to synchronize movement with another human is central to social interaction. When children jump rope, when one player passes and the other blocks, or when partners grab hands for the next round of West Coast swing, all those actions involve the ability to move in relation to one another.

Scientists have studied this “behavioral synchrony” primarily during stationary, face-to-face interactions between infants and adults, observing the matchup between facial expressions and vocalizations that make up the social dance between baby and caregiver. Drs. Justine Hoch and Ori Ossmy, postdoctoral fellows with New York University’s department of psychology, and Dr. Karen E. Adoph, NYU professor of psychology and neural science, wondered if that dance continues once the infants have begun to find their own way around the dance floor.

To find out, they set up a large playroom in their laboratory outfitted with toys, risers, slides with stairs and platforms, and observed 30 pairs of infants aged 13 months to 19 months and their mothers for 20 minutes. The mothers were instructed to play with their children as they normally would in their homes. From the moms’ and toddlers’ perspective, it was a fairly low-tech challenge. The children didn’t have to wear any monitoring devices and the mothers didn’t have to keep track of anything except keeping baby from doing a faceplant off the little slide. Behind the scenes, however, was whirring along.

Using wall-mounted and hand-held video cameras, researchers tracked mothers’ and babies’ even-miniscule movements, which were then analyzed by cutting-edge recording technology and machine-learning. The lab is among the first to document in this ultra-high-tech way what babies see, hear and do in their everyday lives, and how the input changes when infants acquire new knowledge and skills as they develop.

The lab developed , a free, open-source coding tool, to powerfully annotate this video data and founded  a secure web-based video library, now available for other scientists to use in their research on human movement.

What the researchers discovered in the mother-child synchrony study was the mother-child dyads do engage in a coordinated, related way as they moved through the playroom, though not all synchronize in the same way.

“In this lab playground environment with things to climb on and things babies maybe could fall off of, we found that moms and babies synchronize their locomotor activity,” Hoch says. “More interesting is that we found two distinct groups that accomplished that synchrony differently. One group had a leader-follower dynamic and the other had a dynamic where both the baby and the mother went away and then came back to their partner.”

The mothers and babies didn’t mirror each other’s movements, but their locomotion was coordinated and correlated, indicating that they scaled their movements to each other. Patterns of locomotion differed among the mother-child duets with about half the moms keeping pace with their infants and following whenever the child veered in a certain direction (see “faceplant” above). The other half of mom and baby duos “yo-yoed” to and from each other, with the infants doing most of the back-and-forth, often in an attempt to get Mama’s attention or just to touch base for a little dollop of social interaction. And then off they would go again.

Differences in how much the children moved and the ground they covered were not influenced by differences in age, experience or walking skills. Predictably, the babies moved much more than the mothers did and covered more ground relative to their size, with moms able to cover the territory they just galloped over with three big steps to their 30. (Some of the lab’s earlier research found that the average toddler clocks more than two and a half miles a day.)

“In general, mothers move about a third as much as their babies do,” Hoch says, “but how much they move is correlated with their babies’ movement. The best predictor of how much moms move is how much their babies move.” Baby leads, Mama follows, moving in close when they climb too high or get too close to edges. In turn, mothers sometimes take the lead in ways that expand the child’s horizons—encouraging them to take a look at this or that thing just out of their reach. “What’s over here?” “Look at this!”

In addition to supporting the theory that mothers and babies synchronize their movements, this and related studies provide a few other important takeaways, the researchers say. One is that toddlers don’t need a destination to get in motion: They just move to be moving.

“We have found that a lot of our ‘commonsense’ assumptions are just wrong,” Adolph says. “Like everyone else, we thought, ‘Well, babies move for the same reason we do. To get to a destination. And, of course, they can. But if you put toys or snacks on the floor, about half the time, they’ll just walk to the other end of the room.”

Another takeaway from observing the babies is how they play with different types of toys. “When the babies have things like a stroller or balls, a broom and rolling carts, not having their mom right there isn’t a big deal,” Adolph says. “But when the toys are manipulative, like shape sorters or a Pop-Up Pal, the babies just carry them around. When the caregivers come play with them, it depresses locomotor activity and boosts manual play.

“That’s how caregivers play with little babies. They don’t do a lot of, ‘Let’s run, run, run. Chase me!’ stuff. They’re more like, ‘What’s this? Look at this thing? What’s this called? Let’s put that shape here 
’ Which is what you want if you want your child to learn manual and fine motor skills. Babies are going to learn how to run and walk and explore the larger environment without their caregiver. But to learn the toys requiring fine motor skills, they need a knowledgeable adult with them to help them discover what to do.”

Another important takeaway, Adolph says, is how adept babies are at making their own fun. Left to their own devices with just about anything they can manipulate with their hands — a building block, a crumpled piece of paper, the dog food bowl — they’re going to have fun with it whether it comes with a “Made for Babies” label or not. (This information should gladden the heart of anyone working on a holiday gift list for the 3-and-under set: Get them a set of plastic measuring cups and some nesting mixing bowls and don’t go crazy with trending toys from big name brands.)

Their paper, “Dancing’ Together: Infant-Mother Locomotor Synchrony,” proposes that both the face-to-face and locomotor synchrony that researchers have observed serve a similar function in the child’s development. They create a pathway — a scaffold — to the child’s interactions with the outside world. In coordinating face-to-face with mother or other caring adults, babies learn social skills, how to coordinate their attention with another human, how to interact with objects — how to be social beings in the complex world they now inhabit. And once they get their walking papers, whole new realms open. With Mother’s support and synchrony, they can move beyond the blanket and start investigating boundaries.

The work being done at the Infant Action Lab shines a bright light on the mother-baby social dance that gives infants what they need to make their way in the big, wide world.

Even from an early age, it matters whether a parent says, “Whoa! You hit that ball really hard,” or “Good job! World’s Best Tee-Baller!” in response to their child’s effort.

There is a lot being written about praising children these days, but some recent literature has also focused on criticizing parents, calling this “world’s-best” language, “overpraising the child” or “overparenting.” According to Ellen Galinsky, chief science officer for the Bezos Family Foundation and author of “,” labelling parents not only doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, it diminishes the efforts of parents who almost always are trying to do what’s best for their children.

“We live in a world where it’s pretty easy to blame parents,” Galinsky says. “So, I always try to be conscious that we as parents want our children to have as good a life as possible, though we might not always go about it in the most effective way. The most important question for us as parents — or as adults in children’s lives — is to step back and ask ourselves, ‘What do we want for our children — not just right now, but years down the line?’”

“I think the role of praise is that of being a facilitator, a prompter of their learning.”

An observer in any public space, anywhere in the country, will hear the “Good Job!” chorus resounding as parents and caregivers do their best to cheerlead children into a sense of self-worth. The problem with all the “good jobs,” Galinsky says, is that it’s become rote with repetition, an automatic response that can become meaningless to the parents and ultimately meaningless to the child.

The more serious problem with the line of praise that merely tells a child how wonderful their accomplishment is: it isn’t specific to the child’s actual efforts or strategies. Similarly, saying things like “You’re so smart! Look how smart you are!” addresses aspects of the child’s feel-like traits (being smart) and therefore provides little access to action. You’re either smart or you’re not; you’re either the best little athlete in the world or you’re not. The praise of traits and characteristics fosters the child’s desire to hang onto their smartness or cuteness or cleverness that earned the praise, rather than building an eagerness for mastery, a drive to keep taking on new challenges.

“There has been a lot of emphasis in recent years in building a child’s self-esteem and resiliency,” she says. “But I want to see us go a step beyond that. Remember those little figures that, no matter what you did, they would always pop back up?” (Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!” Who could forget?)

“Well, all that bouncing back and bouncing up again really isn’t taking anyone forward. I’m interested in kids who take the next step forward, who try harder. The challenges we encounter in life aren’t predictable — I mean, look at this pandemic year—and we want kids who can take on those challenges.”

In considering the relationship of praise to a child’s development, Galinsky points to the groundbreaking work of Dr. Carol S. Dweck, author of “,” whose decades-long work on mindsets and motivation has distinguished the types of feedback that can encourage a child to seek challenge and pursue accomplishment, or to seek praise and look for the easy way out.

“Carol Dweck started doing her work during the whole self-esteem movement in the 1990s. She told me that at that time, the self-esteem gurus were telling parents and teachers, ‘You must praise your child at every opportunity. Tell them how talented and brilliant they are. This is going to give them confidence and motivation.’ Dweck was actually interested in students’ attitudes toward failure. She asked the question, ‘Who are the children who wilt in the face of challenge?’” From that seminal question and many studies, Dweck coined the terms “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset” to describe why some students were devastated by even modest setbacks and some would persevere when challenged.

As it turns out, telling a child “You’re so beautiful. You’re so smart. You’re such a good athlete” actually had the opposite effect from what was intended. Rather than building self-esteem, it created a fear of risking the inevitable mistakes humans make when they’re learning something new. The child digs in and hangs on, developing a fixed mindset that resists risk, which is a part of all learning.

Parental hyperbole can actually increase a child’s insecurity — and may reflect their own. The parent may be afraid that the day their child stops being amazing, they’re toast. That’s a lot of freight for tiny shoulders. The grandiosity can also make cynics of children who have keen built-in baloney detectors and know Grandma is making stuff up when she says they’re the genius of all geniuses. What else is she being insincere about?

Sometimes a parent’s endless praise can also push the child away from what started out being a pleasurable activity. The child is painting and just wants to keep exploring with textures and colors, but suddenly Mom is telling everyone what a brilliant artist she is and showing everyone who walks in the house the amazing pictures the child has created. The kid just wants to see if mixing yellow and blue together actually will make green and suddenly, it’s all performance art and zero fun.

Galinsky says this doesn’t mean that parents shouldn’t say anything or that caregivers should ignore achievement.

“Children want to learn. They want to explore, and we don’t need to step completely out of the way, but we need to see if we can help them figure out what they did and what they’ve learned from it. How can they do it again? Let them do things for themselves and ask questions about their strategy. ‘You worked really hard to figure out what happened when you mixed colors together. What did you do to get that new color?’ underscores their agency in a way that ‘You tried so hard’ really doesn’t.

“Prompting them to consider how they accomplished something helps keep the fire for learning burning in children’s eyes,” she says. “When we look at newborns and try to figure out what they’re learning, we (researchers) notice what they’re looking at. When they’ve had enough, they move on to something new. Children explore. They don’t need to be taught to be creative or rewarded for their explorations. The learning is the reward.”

And that, she says, is the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic reward. Babies who are encouraged to maintain their own motivation will usually stay self-motivated, lifetime learners as they go through life. Little ones who get a reward for solving a puzzle, for example, may then want to be rewarded as they get older.

“There are endless books about the number of kids in college who are struggling. Some of them may have gone from a life where they were always praised for being wonderful and they were used to having people fix problems for them, rather than helping them learn to fix things for themselves. Suddenly, there may be no one around at college who’s going to do that for them, and they can feel very lost.”

It’s important to remember that none of the habits we as parents and caregivers have picked up are set in stone. Advances in neuroscience have revealed just how plastic and malleable even adult brains are and how all of us can learn new ways of doing things. For big people as well as little ones, mindsets can change and an orientation for growth can become just as much a part of the wiring as those less-effective approaches have been. As is evident on every page of “Mind in the Making,” Galinsky is a major cheerleader for those who are doing their best to raise healthy, well-rounded children.

She’s just not likely to be yelling, “Good JOB!” from the sidelines.

The Bezos Family Foundation provides financial support to Early Learning Nation.