Family, Communities and Peers

Family

Suggested Reading Carnegie Corporation of New York. “Reengaging Families with Their Adolescent Children.” Great Transitions: Preparing Adolescents for a New Century. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2005. (3) 1 May 2006. “Why Johnny (Still) Can’t Read: Creative Educators Push to Boast Adolescent Literacy,” Edutopia. (February 2006) Volume 2, Issue 1. San Francisco, CA: The George Lucas Educational Foundation. Anne McGrath. A New Read on Teen Literacy. US News and World Report. February 28, 2005. Anne Grosso de Leon. “America’s Literacy Challenge: Teaching Adolescents to Read to Learn.” Carnegie Results. Summer 2005. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2005 The Next Chapter. Arlington, VA: National School Board Association, 2006

If any literacy — elementary or adolescent — initiative is to succeed, it is mission critical that it focus not only the students being directly educated, but also their parents and communities.

Children and adolescents typically model their own behavior on that of their parents and community-members, so if they see family- or community-members reading; succeeding by virtue of reading and complex thinking; or valuing school, literacy, higher education, and the opportunities that can be opened by complex reasoning, they are far more likely to value “reading to learn.”

In fact, a recent Time Magazine/SRBI Poll reported that over half of all high school graduates attribute their graduation from high school to their family’s involvement and encouragement: About one quarter (26%) attribute it to their parents’ or family’s involvement and encouragement. About one quarter (26%) believe both their parents’ or family’s encouragement and their own desire to succeed or go to college contributed.¹

The 2005 Carnegie Corporation report, Great Transitions: Preparing Adolescents for a New Century, builds on this finding by stating that:

“Parents who want their children to do well in school must remain involved in their education through the middle and high school years. Although more schools are recognizing the importance of such involvement, their numbers are still small. If further progress is to be made, there must be more widespread, meaningful change in the attitudes and practices of teachers and principals. Parents who do participate in the school feel useful, develop confidence in their relations with school staff, and are more likely to attend school activities, which signal to young adolescents the importance of education. ”²

It is particularly important that schools work to involve parents in low-income areas where “poverty puts additional pressure on adolescent students to seek jobs to help support their family and thus their time for and attention to school work may be limited,”³ and neighborhoods with lots of first-generation American families, where parents with “limited English proficiency, low levels of formal education, and...weak literacy skills in their native language”⁴ may make parents uncertain about how to help their children succeed in the American educational system. In these neighborhoods,

“schools can act as family resource centers where parents can meet to learn about normal changes during adolescence and take advantage of educational offerings in computer literacy, employment counseling, English-as-a-second-language, health promotion, and citizenship. Schools, moreover, can inform parents about programs and students' progress on a regular basis; they can provide specific suggestions for ways that parents can assist with homework and other learning activities; and they can involve parents as volunteers in schools and include them in school governance committees.”⁵

One example of an organization that is working to make family involvement in schools a reality is The National Center for Family Literacy.

Grantee Spotlight The National Center for Family Literacy The National Center for Family Literacy (www.famlit.org) seeks to promote family literacy in the following ways: Provide leadership for literacy development in families. Promote policies at the national and state level to support literacy development in families. Create and support systems that will help develop and sustain family literacy programs. Design, develop and demonstrate new family literacy practices that address the needs of families in a changing social, demographic, economic and political landscape. Deliver high-quality, dynamic, research-based professional development that includes training, technical assistance, and materials. Identify and disseminate research to expand the knowledge base of family literacy.6 The National Center for Family Literacy received a 2004 grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York to “develop a plan for designing and testing programs and strategies that engage parents in the literacy development of their adolescent and pre-adolescent children.

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