Word: parents
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...Parent academies are particularly helpful for urban communities full of mothers and fathers who for various reasons are disengaged from their children's education. Many are single parents with second jobs that leave little time to help with schoolwork. Some are immigrants who don't understand much English. Some are parents uncomfortable with schoolwork - a survey released by Intel on Oct. 21 found that more than 50% of parents would rather talk to their kids about drugs or drunk driving than about math or science. And then there's the general confusion that often comes from dealing with a bureaucracy...
Picture yourself in any one these hypothetical scenarios: you're a parent who never graduated high school; you're a parent whose only interactions with schools have been negative ones; you're a parent who has zero recollection of how to divide fractions; you're a parent who has no clue as to what the important dates are on the college-application calendar. Now picture yourself experiencing all of these hypothetical scenarios at once, and then imagine how your child would suffer from your knowledge deficit. For as much as the current wave of education reformers like to maintain that...
...years now," she says. "And there's 40 years of research that indicates a pretty positive relationship between families being engaged in their children's education and positive effects on students in terms of their academic achievement." Mapp is currently helping write a case study on Miami's Parent Academy program, which is one of the nation's most successful big-city attempts in this area. Privately funded by local philanthropists (it is in the midst of a three-year, $18 million grant from the Knight Foundation) and businesses, the Parent Academy has seen more than 120,000 people participate...
...Philadelphia, superintendent Arlene Ackerman instituted a Parent University this year after expressing concern over low literacy rates for parents and children, as well as a general lack of parental engagement among low-income families, especially among African-American men. Tasked with cherry-picking the best elements from other programs around the country (and tossing the worst), Karren Dunkley, deputy of the Philadelphia School District's Office of Parent, Family and Community Services, and her colleagues realized that they needed to ground the program within the context of adult continuing education. That is, if you're trying to teach adults something...
Supported primarily by federal funds, the Philadelphia Parent Academy's "curriculum" runs the gamut from a 10-week math-literacy course to a multipart social-etiquette class to a one-day session on attendance and truancy that teaches parents about "compulsory education and attendance law." It's all targeted toward families in need: parents of children at low-performing schools and residents of housing projects and emergency shelters. Of course, there's no guarantee that the people who need these programs the most will actually take advantage of them - you can't force parents to care, no matter how many...