Families at the Center: Shaping the Future of Education

“Families trust educators often more than educators trust families. So we need to create the conditions for educators to challenge their mindsets, to actually learn what it means to effectively engage families. One of the things we often say here at Flamboyan is ‘Families are experts in their child. As an educator, you are an expert in content and pedagogy so how you support the child is going to be different than how the parent or family supports the child.’ For us, the most powerful family engagement investments are those that help change how systems are seeing families, how educators are practicing this partnership, and how leadership is defining success.” 

–Emily Garcia, Flamboyan Foundation

Emily Garcia offered the above reflection as she described Flamboyan Foundation’s approach to family engagement, noting that Flamboyan views families as an “all too often untapped asset” rather than as a “problem to be solved” as it works to help educators and systems better partner with families. 

Moderated by Gregg Behr of The Grable Foundation, the conversation explored the robust and growing body of research affirming the positive outcomes of strong parent-educator partnerships, the various ways that funders can strengthen those partnerships, and future opportunities for systems-level changes to sustain and scale effective family engagement.  

Behr began by inviting two leading researchers — Eyal Bergman, Ed.L.D., of Learning Heroes and Emily Markovich Morris of the Brookings Institution — to share what they are investigating and learning about family engagement and its impact on student outcomes. Bergman provided highlights from the Phase 1 of the Family Engagement Impact Study that compared post-pandemic student attendance and achievement data for schools with stronger and weaker pre-pandemic family partnerships and offered a sneak peak into Phase 2 and future plans for Phase 3. Controlling for poverty, race, prior achievement, and various community factors, Phase 1 of the study found a 6.2 percentage point difference in chronic absence rates.  

“The family engagement score actually showed a stronger relationship with chronic absence than poverty rates….This is a fundamentally good news story, affirming that we can do a lot to counteract many of the effects of poverty in community if we invest in building strong relationships with families.” 

–Eyal Bergman, Ed.L.D., Learning Heroes 

Morris described how the Center for Universal Education at Brookings has investigated family, school, and community engagement in 16 countries across six continents, engaging more than 25,000 students, educators, and family members to understand their respective beliefs on education and explore opportunities to partner and work together. She shared a new report by Brookings that examines perspectives on the risks and potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in education along with tips for families to understand the research behind AI and its utilization in education. Morris underscored the importance of relational trust in forming strong home-school partnerships and shared that Brookings is creating a scale to help schools understand and measure relational trust.  

“We found that care of families and educators was quite high across schools, but the sticking point was often integrity and following through on promises….We found different cultures of listening across schools. Those schools that create two-way conversations that allow families to be heard were able to build this vision and this trust. And if they had this trust, there was a critical connection to student outcomes and strong school climate.”  

–Emily Markovich Morris, Brookings Institution 

Behr then invited Bibb Hubbard of Learning Heroes to join the conversation and share highlights from a decade of research at the organization and what that means for work on the ground and the efforts of philanthropy. Hubbard affirmed the importance of giving teachers the strategies, tools, training, and time to effectively engage with families; of investing in families and ensuring they have a seat at the table and opportunity to express their vision and needs; and of funding more research that can inform action.  

“As we are redesigning education and we have all of these opportunities with AI and different policies, we need to make sure parents are centered in those conversations as codesigners….We have new opportunities through technology to do this, but the system is still designed to keep parents and educators apart. We have to focus on what’s in front of us and what parents care most about, which is their children’s academics, their children’s life skills, and setting them up for success. This is a moment of unprecedented opportunity.” 

–Bibb Hubbard, Learning Heroes 

Behr then invited a panel of funders — Emily Garcia of Flamboyan Foundation, Ambika Kapur of Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Tarilyn Little of Carmel Hill Fund — to join the conversation. Kapur described Carnegie’s extensive previous investments in family engagement research and its efforts to strengthen the home-school connection, build parent leadership and capacity, and advance field knowledge and tools.  

“Carnegie’s role was not around a single intervention but more around helping move the field from proof to practice and then to infrastructure. I think that helped normalize family voice as an essential part of our education system. Our work is not done — that’s for sure — but that evolution has helped raise a question for all of us: How do we deepen family power, not just engagement, especially in decision-making and policy?…How do we see them as essential partners?” 

–Ambika Kapur, Carnegie Corporation of New York 

Garcia explained how Flamboyan functions in both philanthropic and programmatic spaces to help schools and systems design sustainable solutions that position families as true partners. She stressed that Flamboyan invests in sustainable change that builds the capacity of educators and education leaders to build strong relationships, communicate effectively, and partner academically with families.  

“The research and data are clear; family engagement is an academic strategy. And yet, all too often it is not funded or resourced in the same way….All too often we hear about family engagement as an add on or it’s shoved in a district’s communication office….We look for systems that are saying yes, we believe in family engagement and here’s how it shows up in our office of teaching. Here’s how we’ve actually begun to assess for mindset in our talent and culture work.” 

–Emily Garcia, Flamboyan Foundation 

Little shared how Carmel Hill is advancing family engagement as a critical component of its efforts in New York City to promote learning in the classroom, home, and community. Carmel Hill invests in research, capacity building, and direct programming around family engagement, including supporting a family ambassador approach that empowers local leaders to be messengers and advisors for families in the community and partnering with nonprofits, cultural institutions, and health care providers in order to go where families are to connect them with support.  

“We have to find a way to bring an authentic family and parent voice into our practices, into our policy, and into our funding. If we don’t, we run the risk of continuing the harmful pattern of treating families as passive receivers and not active partners. I think, as funders, if we are not getting on the ground and really listening, given the power that we as funders have, we can run the risk of powering the kind of harmful trends from the past that we are working very hard to move away from.” 

–Tarilyn Little, Carmel Hill Fund 

Throughout the conversation, the panelists returned again and again to the importance of building the capacity of pre-service and in-service educators to build strong relationships with parents and families. They referenced several entities that are leading the way in that effort, including Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Digital Promise, and NAFSCE as well as the states of Nevada and Colorado.   

“To answer the question in the chat, asking how we can get our higher education systems to build family engagement into the curriculum on the pre-service side, I think there’s got to be demand for it. School leaders have to be saying, I’m only going to hire teachers who have this skill, who have this capacity, who have this mindset.” 

–Bibb Hubbard, Learning Heroes 

If you were able to attend the session, we would love to hear your feedback! We appreciate your help in filling out the following form as we seek to learn and understand the perspectives, ideas, critiques and recommendations that better inform our key audiences.