Partnerships Among School, Family, and Community: What the Research Says

Joyce L. Epstein

The term "partnership" comes up again and again in recent publications about school governance. Many educators think that schools cannot be effectively reformed until parents and community members become involved in school decision making. However, research shows that it is much easier to talk about partnership than to implement it. Joyce Epstein, codirector of the Schools, Family, and Community Partnerships Program at Johns Hopkins University, has drawn up a point-by-point summary of impediments to true partnerships—and steps that can be taken to remove them.

In surveys and field studies involving teachers, parents, and students at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, some important patterns relating to partnerships have emerged.

• Partnerships tend to decline across the grades, unless schools and teachers work to develop and implement appropriate practices of partnership at each grade level.
• Affluent communities currently have more positive family involvement, on average, unless schools and teachers in economically distressed communities work to build positive partnerships with their students' families.
• Schools in more economically depressed communities make more contacts with families about the problems and difficulties their children are having, unless they work at developing balanced partnership programs that include contacts about positive accomplishments of students.
• Single parents, parents who are employed outside the home, parents who live far from the school, and fathers are less involved, on average, at the school building, unless the school organizes opportunities for families to volunteer at various times and in various places to support the school and their children.

Researchers have also drawn the following conclusions.

• Just about all families care about their children, want them to succeed, and are eager to obtain better information from schools and communities so as to remain good partners in their children's education.
• Just about all teachers and administrators would like to involve families, but many do not know how to go about building positive and productive programs and are consequently fearful about trying. This creates a "rhetoric rut" in which educators are stuck, expressing support for partnerships without taking any action.
• Just about all students at all levels—elementary, middle, and high school—want their families to be more knowledgeable partners about schooling and are willing to take active roles in assisting communications between home and school. However, students need much better information and guidance than most now receive about how their schools view partnerships and about how they can conduct important exchanges with their families about school activities, homework, and school decisions.

Questions

1. Looking back over the schools you have attended, do you see any of the "patterns" of interaction that Epstein describes?
2. In the school district with which you are most familiar, what steps are the schools taking to involve families and parents? What steps would you suggest they take?
3. What could you do, as a teacher, to involve parents in their children's education, both in the classroom and in the school community as a whole?

Source: Joyce L. Epstein, "School/Family/Community Partnerships: Caring for the Children We Share," Phi Delta Kappan (May 1995), p. 703.