parental engagement

Paid Leave: Good for Family, Good For Enterprise

September 24, 2018

Families are the building block of civil society. Businesses are also an integral foundation of civil society. Paid family leave policy is important because it impacts families and businesses. Our society is ready for a practical blueprints that give families access to better leave policies while also enabling businesses to do the good they are often afraid to do.

We recognize that family leave is good for families:

A study published in The Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economic found that maternity leave led to women reporting fewer depressive symptoms, reduction in severe depression and overall improvement of mental health. (source)
A study from Columbia University found that fathers who take two or more weeks off are more active in their child’s care nine months later. (source)
A study from the National Institutes of Health found that paid parental leave can reduce infant mortality by as much as 10%. (source)

We recognize that family leave is also good for business:

Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of Youtube, reported that when Google increased their paid maternity leave from 12 weeks to 18 weeks, their retention rate of new mothers increased by 50%. Wojcicki said: “Mothers were able to take the time they needed to bond with their babies and return to their jobs feeling confident and ready. And it’s much better for Google’s bottom line — to avoid costly turnover, and to retain the valued expertise, skills, and perspective of our employees who are mothers.” (source)
In California, a state with an implemented paid leave policy, 90% of businesses surveyed said the policy either had a positive effect on productivity or no noticeable effect (meaning no harm.) (source)
At Demme Learning, We offer 8 weeks of fully paid parental leave. We have found through company surveys that this policy helps boost morale and we have also seen how this policy helps to retain our employees.

Paid leave policies cost money which can make it prohibitive to business implementation, especially for smaller businesses. Often businesses are afraid that they can’t afford to implement such policies even though they might want to. In light of this, how might the government help the private sector do the good they want to do?

Senator Marco Rubio recently rolled out a Federal parental leave plan that shifts future Social Security Benefits to pay for parental leave.

From TheHill.com,

Under Rubio’s bill, which he introduced this week, a new parent that elects to participate would receive an amount equal to three months of what they’d get in Social Security benefits. Households that receive the benefit can use it however they want as long as they take at least two months of leave, and spouses in two-parent households would be able to transfer the benefits to each other, according to Rubio’s office.

Rubio’s office said that most parents making below the median family income of about $70,000 would be able to have the benefit cover more than 70 percent of their wages for two months, and that many parents on the lower end of the income spectrum would be able to use the benefit amount to help finance longer-term parental leave.

I like what Senator Rubio is trying to accomplish but ideally, the most effective initiatives will be found at the state level and with individual businesses. For example, Pennsylvania could adopt an incentive plan that gives tax credits to employers that provide paid leave policies. A similar concept was included in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, for a federal tax credit for employers who provide paid family and medical leave.

The Society for Human Resource Management reported,

Under new Section 45S of the Internal Revenue Code, employers that voluntarily offer qualifying employees up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave annually under a written policy may claim a tax credit for a portion of the wages paid during that leave.

To receive the credit, employers will have to provide at least two weeks of leave and compensate their workers a minimum of 50 percent of their regular earnings. The tax credit will range from 12.5 percent to 25 percent of the cost of each hour of paid leave, depending on how much of a worker’s regular earnings the benefit replaces. The government will cover 12.5 percent of the benefit’s costs if workers receive half of their regular earnings, rising incrementally up to 25 percent if workers receive their entire regular earnings.

It will be interesting to see how this issue continues to evolve as we move through the midterms and into the 116th Congress.

Parental Engagement in Battle Creek

March 12, 2017

Niaka Dunbar, Battle Creek Public Schools’ family and community engagement coordinator, talks to students and parents during a Verona Elementary School literacy fair. (Photo: Al Lassen/For the Enquirer)

In Battle Creek, Michigan, public schools are working to build relationships with parents and the community at large. Niaka Dunbar, a native of Battle Creek, is now working as Battle Creek Public Schools’ family and community engagement coordinator. In an article for the Battle Creek Enquirer, Dunbar explains that when she was training to be a teacher, no one emphasized that her future students come from specific families and communities and that the families and communities are as much a part of the child’s formation as the school. Today, in her role as coordinator, she works to “foster trusting relationships for effective partnerships” to help students succeed by getting the school with the family and the community.

In the year that Dunbar has been working in this position, funded through a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, her work has already had a positive effect: Superintendent Kim Parker-DeVauld reports that now “we have a much stronger focus on both parent and community engagement. We have someone that can organize those opportunities in a way that benefits both the students and the staff in Battle Creek Public Schools and so as a result of having her in that position, we have a lot more opportunities for students to be engaged in the community and for our community to be engaged in our schools.” In addition, Dunbar has helped create family advocate positions to help increase these parental engagement efforts. Regarding her work, Dunbar says:

We want parents to engage in school and what’s happening in the district, but I also want parents to feel empowered enough that wherever they are, they feel like they have something to offer and that they understand that their voice should be heard.

Family and community engagement isn’t a person or a couple of people, it’s something that we all within the district have to work on.

Battle Creek is setting a great example and school districts across the United States should pay attention. By building relationships between the family, the community, and the school, Battle Creek school districts are helping strengthen the support system for students. To read more about Battle Creek’s vision for parental engagement, read this editorial from the Enquirer. To read more about the importance of parental engagement, click here.

Don’t Forget The Families

October 24, 2015

DontForgetFamilies-Report-Cover

The Search Institute has a 2015 study entitled Don’t Forget the Families: The Missing Piece in America’s Effort to Help All Children Succeed. The study looks at how family relationships are a critical, but often overlooked, key to children’s development. The study examined 1,085 parenting adults of 3- to 13-year-olds from across the United States, finding that:

the quality of parent-child relationships is 10 times more powerful than demographics (race, ethnicity, family composition, and family income) in predicting whether children are developing critical character strengths they need for success in school and life. These strengths include being motivated to learn, being responsible, and caring for others.

The study provides a framework of five essential actions for parents. Kids need parents to:

Express Care: Show that you like me and want the best for me.
Challenge Growth: Insist that I try to continuously improve.
Provide Support: Help me complete tasks and achieve goals.
Share Power: Hear my voice and let me share in making decisions.
Expand Possibility: Expand my horizons and connect me to opportunities.

dontforgetfamilies-figure2

These numbers in Figure 2 indicate that parents are quick to express care while not as quick to share power or expand possibilities. These numbers were consistent across all backgrounds with no differences resulting from race, education, household income, etc..

Parents instinctively desire to help their children succeed and guide their children in their development. Yet, the authors of the study point out, parental engagement initiatives are often focused on how parents can support institutions of learning like schools but can “overlook the one thing about which parents care deeply and that can powerfully benefit their children’s development: relationships in the home.” The authors, expanding on this understanding of families as crucial to child development and learning, write:

There is a rich but perhaps untapped reservoir of relational power across the economic and cultural spectrum in the United States. With intentionality, it has even more potential to address the challenges that young people face while also nurturing in them key character strengths that are foundational for success in life.

This is a great body of research that affirms why it makes sense to #trustparents and to empower families. To read the whole report and access additional resources, click here. I’ve written a series of blog posts on Parental Engagement: here’s a post with more research, a post with tips for parents, and here is a link to access the whole series.

#TrustParents

Poverty, Education and Parental Engagement

October 7, 2015

cornfield

Who can help us solve the problem of poverty? Depending on how frame of reference, we might answer this in a number of ways. We might say government agencies, or nonprofit think-tanks, or charitable ministries. Since education is one solution to poverty, we could speak of teachers and school administrators and principals.

While it is true, that all of these people or groups of people have roles to play in ending poverty, it is easy to forget another and perhaps most important group of people: those who live in poverty. In her 2015 TED Talk, Mia Birdsong explains why “the story we tell about poverty isn’t true.” The conventional story of poverty goes like this: those who work hard are successful, therefore those who are unsuccessful (poor) must not be willing to work hard. With this mentality, Mia says, we are “convinced that poor people are a problem that needs fixing.” She goes on to describe the reality:

Marginalized communities are full of smart, talented people, hustling and working and innovating, just like our most revered and most rewarded CEOs. They are full of people tapping into their resilience to get up every day, get the kids off to school and go to jobs that don’t pay enough, or get educations that are putting them in debt . . . They are full of people doing for themselves and for others, whether it’s picking up medication for an elderly neighbor, or letting a sibling borrow some money to pay the phone bill, or just watching out for the neighborhood kids from the front stoop.

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice also critiques the notion that poor people on the whole are passive, incompetent, or unmotivated. At the 2014 National Summit on Education Reform, Rice said: “it is such a mistaken impression that poor parents either don’t care or don’t know what is best for their kids.”

If the story we tell ourselves about poverty is wrong, how might we change it? Mia asks us to ponder some what-if questions. “What if we recognized that what’s working is the people and what’s broken is our approach? What if we realized that the experts we are looking for, the experts we need to follow, are poor people themselves? What if, instead of imposing solutions, we just added fire to the already-burning flame that they have? Not directing — not even empowering — but just fueling their initiative.”

Everywhere I go, I see people who are broke but not broken. I see people who are struggling to realize their good ideas, so that they can create a better life for themselves, their families, their communities.

When it comes to the topic of poverty in the context of education reform, it is important to bear in mind what Mia and Condoleeza are highlighting. We need to start with the assumption that poor parents want what’s best for their children, know their children better than anyone else, and are capable of helping their children succeed provided they are supported along the way by the various institutions of civic society: family, neighborhood community, school, library, church, etc..

We should #TrustParents

Below is the complete TED Talk. Click here to watch Condoleeza Rice’s keynote from the 2014 National Summit on Education Reform.

Lessons Of Hope – Book Review

September 30, 2015

lessonsofhope

Joel Klein was not a field insider when New York mayor Bloomburg asked him to be Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. In fact, prior to, he had worked at a high-paying law firm and in the White House under the Clinton administration. Still, Bloomburg could see that Klein was a strategic thinker and moreover, the kind of man who would stick to his guns under pressure and when the criticism was heaviest.

Alongside Bloomburg, Klein ushered in many education reform initiatives. He championed school choice, smaller schools, more accountability, and better standards. It didn’t take for him to learn that the status quo is not easily challenged and deeply entrenched forces such as teacher unions don’t respond well to change.

In Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools, Klein shares a firsthand account of his experiences as Chancellor. He introduces us to the main characters: the people he worked alongside, the people that opposed his initiatives, and the members of the public whose words changed his life.

There is an urgency in the book. Klein understands firsthand the importance of these reforms, the great need for school choice. At one point in the book, he shares the formative experience of speaking with an African-American father. The man’s daughter was thriving academically, having been admitted to a “good, out-of-district school which accepted students from other communities.” His son, however, was not so lucky: “he attended a neighborhood school with a much worse reputation, where he was not being well educated.” In reflecting on that experience and the heart that father had to see both his children succeed, Klein writes, “to this day, I tear up when I think about that wonderful man.” – pg. 77

Lessons of Hope shines brightest when it focuses in on the power of local communities and the role they play in education reform. Klein writes:

“. . .When it came to public education, New Yorkers, like people everywhere, cared most about their neighborhood schools. They didn’t identify with the system as a whole, which was comprised of more than a thousand schools. The system was as remote to them as any big bureaucracy, but their children and their neighbors’ children were dependent on local teachers, administrators, and staff to keep them safe, teach them what they needed to know, and help them grow into productive citizens. A good local school cast a glow on the surrounding community, becoming a source of pride, social energy, and even economic stability . . .” – pg. 22

As an example of how Klein connects this understanding with specific education reform initiatives, Klein’s team developed an online service giving parents relevant information about their kids and schools. This struck a nerve and hundreds of thousands of parents logged on. Klein writes: “It was exciting: people were getting information about kids and using it to help them improve.” – pg. 201

Lessons of Hope reminds us that we are always learning and therefore, the way we do education needs to grow along with us. Indeed, Klein goes so far as to say that this understanding of learning is central not just to school but also to life.

“Our guiding notion was that every school should be a community of learners. Under this model, students, principals, teachers, support staff, and parents would all act as lifelong students, continually seeking new knowledge and sharing the excitement of learning. In this kind of school, life itself would be defined as a learning process, with every day bringing the possibility of a new skill or idea.” – pg. 192

This one statement summarizes much of Klein’s vision for education. A strong community, excellent leaders, and engaged parents – all committed to lifelong learning – these are tenets that provide the foundation for all the important education reform that is taking place and will continue to take place.