Making Parent-School Relationships Work

There's no question that good things happen when parents get involved in their children's education. But doing that isn't simple, particularly at the middle school level, says Duke psychology professor Nancy Hill.

"There's a straightforward model in elementary school," Hill says. "One teacher has the same 25 children, and there's a system for parents to come visit the classroom and help the teacher on special events. It's a welcoming environment for parents.

"But it gets more complicated once you move into adolescence. At middle schools, teachers suddenly have 150 or more students, the communications with parents are more difficult and the context for parent-school relations is entirely different. In particular, parents with few resources are often left at a disadvantage."

On July 20-21, Duke's Center for Child and Family Policy, the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation will bring together academics, educators and policymakers for an interdisciplinary look at this question. Too often, academic researchers and policymakers don't communicate about issues that concern them both: Academic research doesn't always get communicated to educators and sometimes research doesn't address the most pertinent issues for policymakers.

The conference is an example of Duke's effort to bridge that gap and bring scholarship to bear on real-world problems. The conference on "Family-School Relations during Adolescence: Linking Interdisciplinary Research and Practice" will be a technical look at policy issues, and was organized with an eye on the 2007 reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

That legislation requires schools to have parental involvement. "But what it doesn't do is to provide a framework to allow parents to be able to navigate a really complicated school system," Hill says. "We're telling parents to be more involved in schools. We're asking them to make more choices, to consider vouchers and charter schools, but they may not know how to access this information.

"For many parents, educators and policymakers, it's not clear what model of parental involvement works best, particularly for adolescent children."

One unusual feature of the conference is that it will bring academics from a broad range of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics and other social sciences, together with educators and policymakers,, Hill says.