Trusting Teachers Is a Means to Authentic Parent Engagement

If the educators in our schools don’t have the authority to make decisions influencing school success, then how could they share any authority with parents and students?

In this guest post for the Of, By, For Education Week blog, Kim Farris-Berg writes:

If the educators in our schools don’t have the authority to make decisions influencing school success, then how could they share any authority with parents and students? In this context, authentic engagement is essentially impossible. It’s not surprising that, under these circumstances, educators tend to pass the expectations for compliance onto parents and students.

Happily, there are public schools across the nation where complicit behavior is not assumed, and where teachers, parents and students have successfully taken on new roles. In some of these schools the teachers have collective authority to make the decisions influencing school success.

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Designing parent engagement strategies