How school practices to promote parental involvement influence student success

Major findings. Powerful implications for school practitioners emerged from this research. (1) Independent samples t-tests showed practices to promote involvement have a statistically significant influence on student success. Practices were defined by the Framework of School-initiated Practices to Promote School, Family, and Community Partnerships, which included the elements of outreach, programs and operations, engagement, community building, and support services. (2) Highest performing schools and practitioners invest more time and resources, and are more skilled in building school, family, and community partnerships. They also demonstrate a superior organizational capacity, enabling them to mobilize the community on a regular basis. (3) When practitioners work in isolation from their students' families, parent involvement declines to the detriment of student success. (4) Highest performing schools and practitioners value involvement as an asset, encouraging those contributions and thereby resulting in increased involvement, higher student success, and ultimately better schools. (5) When practitioners work to include parents as equal partners in education, investing time and resources to develop their involvement strategically in ways that intend clear impacts for learning and development, parents increase involvement in ways that benefit children. (6) By facilitating and supporting involvement, highest performing schools and teachers are better at engaging in direct person-to-person interactions with parents. (7) Partnership practices commonly and consistently applied in a concerted manner become culturally engrained in the school community, optimizing involvement in the interest of helping students thrive.;The Framework of School-initiated Practices and Inventory of School-initiated Practices Protocol help guide practitioners in their efforts to build bridges and overcome barriers. The framework and protocol provide insight for practitioners on how to build sustainable comprehensive involvement, what to do and what not to do, as well as how to build infrastructure and then measure practices to achieve institutionalized system-wide change in schools. This study was the first to measure independent family and school sphere activities directly and to provide a clear process for measuring the impact of the practitioner's partnership activities in relationship to student success. This study advances a Model of School, Family, and Community Partnerships..;Purpose. This study examined how school practices to promote parental involvement influence student success.;Research questions. (1) How does parental involvement influence student success? (2) How do school-based practices to promote parental involvement influence parental involvement? (3) How do school-based practices to promote parental involvement influence student success? (4) How do school-based practices and parental involvement practices influence student success?;Research design. Using a mixed methods approach, this research was centered upon a causal-comparative (ex post facto) design. This study was based upon Joyce L. Epstein's Theory of Overlapping Spheres of Influence of School, Family, and Community on Children's Learning and incorporated Epstein's Six Types of Parent Involvement framework to measure parental involvement. It reframed existing theory and advanced a Framework of School-initiated Practices. School-initiated practices were synthesized through empirical literature and further organized and defined by the Inventory of School-initiated Practices Protocol..;Methodology. A sample of 598 randomly selected students from a highly homogenous Title I elementary school district (K-6) in Southern California were selected for this study. Their parents and teachers received coded surveys. Surveys were completed by 187 parents and 127 teachers, representing response rates of 31.27% and 53.59%, respectively. Survey instruments were adapted from Joyce L. Epstein and Karen Clark Salinas's surveys titled Surveys of School and Family Partnerships: Questionnaires for Teachers and Parents in Elementary and Middle Grades. Constructs of parental involvement (Pi), school practices (Sp) and student success (Ss) were tested using independent samples t-tests and correlations in SPSS. The Inventory of School-initiated Practices Protocol was administered at each of the ten schools in the district. School data were compiled into a district-wide report, organized by themes. This served as a means for school comparison. Quantitative and qualitative descriptive data were further collected from surveys, parent focus groups, and site visit interviews, observations, and document reviews.