The Need for Analytics
Family engagement is important not only to a child’s educational success; it is a catalyst for improving the health of the entire community. Stronger families improve the social fabric and strengthen society’s safety net; the lack of family support imperils the community’s future. Teacher effectiveness is compromised by the lack of family engagement. Disengaged parents make it harder for a school or district to succeed, requiring costly remedial actions that can drain budgets. Family engagement affects student performance, attendance, and behavior.
Collecting data to better understand these relationships is important. We do this through a variety of ways. Student performance is tracked through assessments and standardized tests; attendance and behavior are then correlated to performance. However, these statistics only quantify results. They may help identify targets to achieve, but they they do not provide needed information to develop processes and plans for rectifying or improving existing performance.
Missing from the current mix of quantitative understanding is gauging family engagement in the current environs. Without this measurement, the ability to identify a root cause of individual student failure and provide corrective interventions is diminished; families become a non-performing asset in the school community. In the past, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to develop this key analytic in a non-invasive, cost-effective manner.
The “Every Student Succeeds Act 0f 2015” has increased the requirements for family engagement and is the first step towards requiring the correlation of engagement to performance. These metrics are not for the district or school alone. Inherently, this effort must provide information to the family to support their children. The success of the student is impacted by the parent’s understanding of their role. Collectively, this improvement affects the school’s success and impacts its relevance in the community.
The Online Parent Understanding System
One Green Apple’s OPUS family engagement management platform provides key metrics to all constituencies in a method that they can quickly comprehend. OPUS builds and strengthens the Parent-Teacher Partnerships critical to each student’s success. With OPUS, a district or school can improve, simplify, monitor, and measure family engagement and correlate it to student performance.
Key Administrative Metrics Captured:
Percentage of Family Engagement (FE)
Comparison of Student Achievement and Attendance with FE vs. without FE
Percent of Homework Completed with FE vs. without FE
Demographic and Quartile Splits of Above
Auditable Transcripts of Parent-Teacher dialogue
Comparison of FE to Target Expectations
Metrics by Classroom, Grade, Teacher, etc.
OPUS is cost-effective.
Multiple studies state that the cost to provide what research finds to be the most effective methods for family engagement exceeds $1,200 per year per student. OPUS is designed with these stratagems in mind; however, its cost is one-hundredth of this estimate.
Typically, if OPUS helps one child out of a thousand stay in school, it pays for itself. Additional benefits, such as accurate analytics, better student performance, increased attendance, a stronger parent community, and greater trust in the system are included.
District Leadership is important.
OPUS creates transparency that provides greater efficiency and effectiveness, especially at the granular level. Parents can take a more active role in their child’s education. Initially, this change can be intimidating to an organization. Inertia and fear of the unknown can hinder the acceptance of new and constructive ideas.
Superintendents and senior educators can provide the executive sponsorship necessary to lead an effective transition. Engagement is important; studies have shown that as the number of disengaged members in a group escalates, trust in leadership declines. By actively endorsing a drive for greater family engagement, superintendents acknowledge the role of parents and in turn strengthen the entire educational community.
One Green Apple is here to help.
To help you achieve this success, One Green Apple provides consulting services to train or augment your staff in developing, configuring, and implementing your family engagement strategy platform. Together we can make a difference.
Selected Quotes on the correlation of family engagement to performance
“We have 50 years of research showing that what families do matters. Whether it’s loving school, college access, good attendance, or academic success, family engagement has positive correlations with all sorts of indicators.” - Dr. Karen L. Mapp, Ed.D.
“Across fifty different studies on parental engagement, educational researchers found a connection between family involvement and academic achievement.” – Nancy E. Hill and Diana F. Tyson
“Research shows a strong relationship between parent engagement and educational outcomes, including school attendance.” - Joyce L. Epstein, Steven B. Sheldon
“Absences Add Up: School Attendance Influences Student Success” – Alan Ginsburg, Phyllis Jordan and Hedy Chang
One Green Apple makes the transition from research to practical use cost-effective!
