The Super Bowl is an advertising extravaganza. This year companies spent $2.6 million per advertising slot. Many of the biggest names like Coca-Cola, Doritos, and Budweiser purchased multiple slots, and spent months of creative energy and hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop their ads. What is it that they get for their investment?

Robert Passikoff, founder and president of New York-based Brand Keys says “It has nothing to do with "being watched" or awareness levels, and everything to do with viewers being emotionally engaged." A former CEO of WalMart said it best - “we are not in the business to be noticed; we’re in the business to be chosen.”

School efforts to engage families in the academic life of their child are no different. It is not enough for families to know that the school has undertaken an initiative to increase their involvement. With limited resources of time and money, schools must carefully choose both what activities they pursue, and how and where they communicate with families to get them to actually engage. So how do you do that?

Brand Keys has developed a Super Bowl Engagement Survey designed to measure just how much “bang for the buck” a company is likely to get for their investment in a Super Bowl Ad. Doritos, for example, gets a whopping 1500% return on their investment. Disney can expect a mere 200%. Brand Keys helps clients shape their message to engage their target market, and maximize the value of their investment.

In the same way, the Engage Workshop 5-Step Process begins with a Family Engagement Survey to determine where a school should focus to get the greatest return on investment. Schools and districts are often tempted to skip this step and simply have a Certified Family Engagement Specialist come and speak to their leadership team or staff. Experience has shown that the return on investment for these “events” is always less than the return on a carefully crafted, data-driven 5-Step Process. The Engage Workshop partners with schools in the 5-Step Process to interpret the data and coach them through the process of developing and executing their engagement goals.

The good news is that the 5-Step Process is far less expensive than $2.6 million for 30 seconds. The great news is that it works!

Check out the Super Bowl ads here!

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition has become one of my favorite television shows. The show, which airs on ABC, is dedicated to rebuilding a family’s home when the family is in need of hope. The transformation is no mere facelift. There are no new coats of paint, additions to the existing structure, or patches here and there. The old is literally torn down, and while some of the elements of the old house may be reused in new ways, what emerges is a completely new home.

Schools could learn a lot from that show. There are many students and families who have lost hope in schools all over this country. The hopeless leads to despair and disengagement, and without outside intervention, these situations can’t be rebuilt. Band-aids, newsletters, and progress reports will not create the extreme makeover for these students and their families.

On the television show, a small team of people arrives at the house of the family for whom the makeover is being done. They spend time getting to know the family, connecting with them, learning about each person’s unique interests, and any special needs or circumstances that will need to be considered in the makeover design. Community resources are then marshaled, as scores of individuals and businesses rally to replace the old structure with just what is needed for each member of that specific family to give them new hope for a brighter future.

The disillusioned and disenfranchised families in our school communities are not all that different than the families on the ABC show. The circumstances that have led to their sense of hopelessness and despair, and caused them to disengage are really not important. What is important is what WE do next.

What if we sent a small team of people to the home of that family? What if we spent time getting to know them, and learning about their unique interests, needs, and circumstances? What if we reached out and helped meet those needs and began restoring hope?

Rhonda Ulmer of Van Bokkelen Elementary School in Severn, Maryland did just that. Five years ago, Van Bokkelen was one of the worst performing schools in the entire state, and was in danger of state takeover because of failure to make AYP for more than one year. Rhonda knew that something major needed to happen. And so she started reaching out to families in the community, soliciting help to get the school turned around. It didn’t take long before it was clear to her that the reason that many families were not more engaged in the school was because all of their time and energy was going to solve more basic challenges like providing shelter for their family, getting medical care for their children, putting food on the table, and trying to keep their children safe while they worked two jobs to just keep their head above water most of the time.

So Rhonda started marshalling community resources to meet the needs. She convinced the city to buy an abandoned building in the middle of the neighborhood, just up the street from the school, and put a medical clinic there. She had local groups bring first time homebuyers programs, complete with incentives that contributed down payments to purchasers completing a financial education program to the school. She brought GED programs to the school. She brought job skills training programs. She brought after school enrichment and child care programs. She brought more and more programs that addressed more and more of the basic needs the families needed. The school became the hub of the community, meeting the needs of more than just elementary aged students. As families started coming to the school to access these basic needs through the services offered there, they began connecting with teachers, with the principal, and with each other.

Five years later, Van Bokkelen has been transformed. Seventy-eight percent of fifth graders scored proficient or advanced in state math testing this year. The school has made AYP 4 years in a row. Grades and test scores are up across the board – but even more importantly – hope is restored to families who were desperately in need of hope – and re-engaged in the educational lives of their children.

Where will the next Extreme Makeover: School Edition be?

I get asked this question a lot. Unfortunately, the word “friendly” has all sorts of connotations in the minds of many that do not further the cause of systemic family engagement. Many people loosely throw the term around to mean everything from caving in to every parent’s demands to using it as a battering ram to clobber any decision, regulation, or policy that somebody, somewhere doesn’t like. I thought it was time to set the record straight. From our perspective, the following paragraphs constitute the foundational philosophical pillars of what we believe constitutes a Family Friendly School.

A family friendly school is one that is committed to establishing healthy relationships with all families to support the learning outcomes of all children through active family engagement.

Schools that support a family friendly philosophy believe in and nurture the active engagement of all parents and families and put into place systems and processes to engage those parents and families that may, for whatever reason, be disengaged. Schools that are family friendly understand that families are the first and most influential teachers of their children. Without successful relationships and engagement, the ultimate goal of all students learning may remain an elusive dream.

A family friendly school is a welcoming school that desires effective two-way communication with families and is committed to ensuring that all students and their families have successful experiences. At those junctures when conflict or problems arise, a family friendly school is committed to an open dialog about issues. A family friendly school engages families in the creation of procedures, policies, and practices and continuously reviews them to ensure applicability and clarity. Once established, policies, procedures, and practices are adhered to by all staff, students and families and are communicated diligently throughout the school and community. The key to success is constancy to purpose.

A family friendly school has at its core the fundamental principle that families must be engaged in the academic lives of their children and to that end, incorporates the philosophy into an overall continuous improvement plan. School staff reach out to all families, with an emphasis on those families that are non-traditional or whose situations may lead to disengagement from education. All staff support the important construct of home learning by designing systems and processes to build the educational culture, capital and capacity of all families so that their children, regardless of circumstances, are successful.

Most importantly, a family friendly school does not surmise successful engagement based on anecdotal information but rather, engages in a model of quality planning and evaluation that incorporates specific data to ensure the continuous improvement of efforts to engage all families and thus, improve the learning outcomes for all children.

For every year that I was a principal, I reminded my staff that the holiday season usually characterized by celebrations, gifts, and glad tidings, was a difficult time for many families. Not every child is happy during the holidays. Not every family comes together to celebrate in a Norman Rockwell style. While the holidays are cause for positive feelings in most students, a small but significant number of students will react negatively to the festive atmosphere which surrounds them.

Some families are poor and will have no presents or celebrations at Christmas. Some families are broken or dysfunctional and the holidays only exacerbate the negative situation the family finds itself in. Some families are homeless and for them, a warm place to sleep and a meal takes priority over presents and parties. The children in these families sometimes act out negatively in school during the weeks preceding the holiday vacations. Their frustrations will manifest themselves in unusual and disapproving behaviors.

'Tis the season to understand that not every child finds happiness at this time of year. It would serve us well to pay special attention to those students whose behaviors seem unusual or uncharacteristic. Many times these uncharacteristic behaviors are caused by the contradiction between a joyful atmosphere at school and the reality of their personal circumstances. The best gift a child could receive is a teacher or principal who understands their world and appreciates them just the same. At no cost and very little time, we can provide the wonderful gift of understanding and value.

I wish you a healthy, happy, and peaceful holiday season. Thank you for the work that you do with children each and every day. We need you and I appreciate you.

The Program for International Student Assessment has released findings for students in science around the world. As is almost always the case, the United States is painted as lagging behind the world.

18% of the variance of the American student science scores was related to the students’ socio-economic status. The fact that socioeconomic factors appeared to be less of a factor in higher-scoring nations is no accident, say the authors of the report, from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which oversees PISA.

“PISA suggests that maximizing overall performance and securing similar levels of performance among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds can be achieved simultaneously,” they write. “Quality and equity need not be considered as competing policy objectives.”

Even with NCLB, our public school system continues to give low SES students a less rigorous curriculum and less educational resources. Title I funding is designed to support underprivileged children and their families.

If we could rally behind these kids and in tandem raise the academic culture and capital of their families, I believe we could be successful in closing this gap once and for all.

I am always both delighted and mystified by schools and districts that subscribe to various programs and trainings within the field of family engagement. I applaud the efforts of any district willing to take this step. Certainly any attention to families is delightful to me! With that said though, there still is a part of me that is baffled by the idea that incorporating one strategy will bring about the needed change of culture so that all children can learn and that family engagement is a driving force in the support of learning outcomes.

Many schools have upgraded technology so that parents can view grades and other information on line. Further, teacher websites and blogs are becoming more and more popular. I also read recently that many schools are training their teachers to make home visits. I think that is fantastic. We have known for years that outreach is the key to engaging disengaged families. Our battle cry of “before they will come to you-you must go to them” should be familiar with anyone who has hung around an FFS workshop or Workshop. Two-way communication is paramount to lasting success with families.

My concern centers on the idea of systemic implementation. Web sites and home visits, like any other strategy in a comprehensive family engagement process, are beneficial if all teachers and staff participate and believe by doing so they can make an academic difference in the lives of the children who need it most. I often use the following scenario in workshops to illustrate my point.

You are a parent. Your child is placed in a classroom of a teacher who believes in the power of family engagement and as a result, works tirelessly to build strong relationships with families. This teacher makes home visits, sends weekly newsletters, keeps website information timely, and is in constant telephone communication about progress, balancing positive and negative information to parents and families. Parents and families quickly understand the passion this teacher exhibits and are extremely appreciative of the efforts. At the end of the school year, neither the child nor their family wants to leave this teacher.

The following year, your child is placed in another classroom with a teacher of equal academic skill and compassion for learning, but one who does not fully subscribe to the tenants of family engagement. Communication is sparse and the teacher chooses not to make home visits, chooses not to use the web as a communication tool, and only uses telephone communication to share negative news. Families equate this to a rug being pulled from under them. They now have negative feelings toward this teacher and soon those feelings are translated toward the school. The mere fact of the inconsistent use of strategies to engage families itself becomes a catalyst for disengagement.

In the midst of writing this article, I did a mini-study. I visited the websites of twenty school districts, randomly selected from various state departments of education websites. Within each of the districts, I visited one elementary site, one middle school site and one high school site. That means that I visited 60 individual school websites. Of the sixty websites, 36 of them featured teacher web pages. Of the 36 sites that use individual teacher website technology, none of them-not one-had all of the teachers using this technology. When parents and families visit the site, and see that their child’s teacher does not use the technology, the message they receive is that the school or the teachers don’t care enough to supply this information. The blank sites do more harm than good.

All or nothing. I have believed for years that the correct approach to family engagement is to understand that it is a process to which all must subscribe and one that has the ability to change the culture of an organization so that the efforts are sustained and produce lasting and measurable results. Strategies employed devoid of a process are sporadic and temporary at best. We have spent too many years wasting resources and the valuable time of teachers by parading endless programs of sure-fire strategies without connecting those strategies to a complete system of reform. Let’s watch and see how many schools that have employed these strategies are still doing them in a year; or two years; or five years.

I’m so excited, I could bust!

Finally, after years of NCLB and the Bush rhetoric about parent involvement centering on parental choice, a study has concluded that parental choice doesn’t necessarily reap academic achievement.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin has had a pioneering effort to give parents choices as to where their children would attend school. So no one thinks I am hyperbolizing or making stuff up, let me share some significant quotes from the article. You can read the entire article here.

“A new study shows that the Milwaukee, Wis., school system’s pioneering move toward parental choice isn’t reaping significant educational achievement….The option does not seem to inspire parents to choose schools based on academics.

Only 10 percent of Milwaukee public school parents exercise choice by considering at least two schools and basing their decision on academic criteria and school performance, the study says.

The Milwaukee study, however, suggests that allowing parents to choose a school does not necessarily inspire parental involvement.

Milwaukee has been the focus for some time on the parental choice/voucher option as a way to improve public education. So far the results there give little comfort to that view.”

The Federal Government, since this administration has taken control, has completely disregarded what family engagement is, that being the strong relationships that need to exist between home and school so that a child’s academic progress is positively affected. Of course, in true Republican style, the right-wing think tank that did the study indicated that parental involvement may not be the key to school success. Unfortunately, even when being beaten with their own bat, they still don’t get it.

I have said in every speech and workshop that I have ever done that parents want to know that their child’s school cares about their children and that they have some say and understanding with regard to the education of their children. Simply giving them a choice of schools, most of which shun real involvement and parental engagement, is like giving them a choice between cancer and polio. Most parents believe that it is better to stay with the “devil they know.”

Don’t get me wrong, I think parents should have a choice in where their children are educated, whether that be at home, in public, or private school. I just don’t think it is prudent to define parental involvement as “parents right to choose a school.” That definition barely makes it into the category of shortsighted and self-serving.

Hopefully, hundreds of studies will be done and everyone will start to see what we have known for a long time; parent involvement is not the only conduit to improved achievement, but without it, we most likely will never get to where we want to be with regard to all children learning.