Improving Your Child's Education

A Guide for African American Parents. An informed and engaged parent is a powerful parent.

Excerpted from: https://education.ti.com/sites/US/downloads/pdf/imprvgeduAfrAm_FINAL_web.pdf

All children are entitled to a solid education in the United States. There’s a good reason for this: For generations, education has been the most reliable path to a better life. A good education offers a better quality of life, including access to good jobs and careers. Getting a good education is even more important today than in the past as more and more opportunities require strong reading and math skills. Ensuring that every child gets a solid education will go a long way toward fulfilling America’s promise of equal opportunity for all.

The African-American community has long recognized the central importance of education. That’s why African Americans have fought so hard for educational opportunity throughout this country’s history. More than 50 years ago, African Americans won the right to equal access in the public schools. But the struggle for educational excellence and equity did not end with the victory in Brown v. Board of Education. There is still a lot of work to be done to ensure that African-American children get the best education from our public schools. Schools serving African-American children often lack the money, qualified teachers, textbooks, and other instructional materials needed to serve their students. Even when African-American students attend “better” schools, they often are not given the best teachers, not assigned to the most challenging courses and not educated to their full potential.

To make sure African-American children get the education they need and deserve, parents must get more involved. You have the right, indeed the responsibility, to go to your child’s school and ask questions — schools are public institutions and belong to us all. In this guide, we offer a number of suggestions to help you better advocate for the education of your children. We also offer information that can be turned into powerful tools for you to exercise your rights as an involved African-American parent.

What African-American parents can do?

African-American parents can do a lot to help their own child’s performance as well as working with teachers, administrators and other parents to help improve their child’s school. First, African-American parents need to know what their rights are regarding their child’s education. But there are other things that they can do at home to help their child succeed.

Know your rights!

There’s no question that parents can be an important force in accelerating school improvement. The federal law called No Child Left Behind can help African

American parents become stronger advocates, but the law won’t meet its full potential for improving schools without parent and community groups organizing and pushing to make sure that policies are implemented according to the intent of the law. When African-

American parents combine facts with their passion to improve their child’s education, they become a powerful force. No Child Left Behind provides data that African-American parents can use to evaluate the academic progress of their children. Each school district is required to develop an effective process for encouraging parental involvement

Using No Child Left Behind to help your child

This powerful new law guarantees many rights to African-American parents, including:

1. Clear, honest information about your child and your child’s school, district and state:

• You have the right to know how your child is performing in mathematics and reading/language arts, and any specific needs your child may have.

• You have the right to know how your school is doing overall in comparison to the state academic standards and whether it is meeting annual state goals for student learning, called “Adequate Yearly Progress” or AYP.

• You have the right to information about your school’s performance with groups of students, including African-American students. If any of these groups is not making Adequate Yearly Progress, the school must focus on making sure they will.

• You have the right to know if your child is being taught by a teacher who is not fully qualified. Do not hesitate to ask your school principal about the qualifications of your child’s teachers.

2. Options to obtain better educational opportunities or services for your child:

• NCLB provides funds for some students to transfer to higher-performing schools or get tutoring to raise their academic achievement. Ask your school principal whether NCLB gives your child the right to transfer or receive after-school tutoring. Remember: Parents do not have to pay for this service – the school district receives federal funds for this purpose.

• If you ask, the school must have regular meetings with you to discuss your concerns about your child’s education.

Remember, when parents are involved in the education of their children, children do better in school. Experience shows that most school systems and schools won’t change the way they do business without outside help and pressure. No Child Left Behind provides some leverage for parents and advocates. Schools and school districts benefit when parents are informed advocates.

Understanding the facts: Basics of data for parents

As you can see from the NCLB information above, schools will produce lots of data that provides facts about school performance. Understanding how well students are learning is an important part of being able to help your school become better. But it is only part of the picture. African-American parents need to know whether their children are getting enough help and support from their school. The first thing we need to emphasize is that you should not be intimidated by data. Data is just a fancy word for “information.” You do not have to be a statistician or a math expert to understand your school’s data. Most of it is very simple and easy to comprehend.

The federal law provides a lot of the basic information, but it is not all of the data you’ll need. You also need to know whether:

• African-American students are being placed in the high-level classes that will help them develop the skills they need.

• African-American students are being disproportionately suspended or placed in special-education programs.

• Your district is receiving its fair share of education dollars.

• Other schools in your area are succeeding with students like yours.

A clear, accurate, and thorough picture, one based on the data, is the only way to communicate the truth about our schools, the truth about who’s learning—and who’s not being given the opportunity to learn. Knowing the truth is the only way we can begin to improve. This work won’t be easy, but it needs to be done. African-American children deserve good schools.

The facts you uncover may be difficult, even painful, for people to hear. It may reveal significant differences in achievement and opportunity between students of different races and income levels. It may challenge people’s long-held notions about what’s going on in their schools, and force people to recognize and admit that sometimes schools have not served African-American students very well. It may even lead some people, those who haven’t heard all the facts, to incorrectly place the responsibility for the achievement gap on low-income and minority students, rather than on the schools and districts that have failed to give them what they need to be successful. But until your community confronts and understands these facts, you cannot move forward and improve your schools.

This task is doable

Schools have it in their power to educate all children to high standards, and it is their responsibility to do so. Indeed, every day a large number of schools in the United States prove that this can be done. It takes hard work, focus and dedication, but schools that have persistent achievement gaps can and must change their practices.

If you don’t think your school is doing enough for African-American students, this guide has described things you can do, beginning with examining the data. Armed with the facts, African- American parents and schools can work together to:

• Change attitudes about why some children are not meeting standards;

• Change policies to make sure that all school systems are 100% focused on getting 100% of their students to high standards; and

• Change practices within schools to make sure that all African-American children are given a fair opportunity to learn.

Most institutions are reluctant to change on their own. But public schools are your schools. African-American parents, community leaders and you have the power to change them.

What Parents Can Do

Helping your child

• Talk to your child. Communication is important to understand what your child has to say about his or her education, teacher, homework, and school and to show that his or her education is important.

• Monitor your child’s homework. As a parent you do not necessarily have to understand or be able to explain all the assignments that your children receive, but you can monitor your child to make sure they are really working and understanding the homework.

• Look for the following warning signs in homework assignments that might indicate that your child is not being challenged in school: Your child has read few books in his or her English class. Your child is in 8th grade and the major project is to do a collage for class. Your child finishes his or her homework very quickly.

• Read to your child or have your child read to you.

• Know your child’s teachers and find out their qualifications and experience.

• Know what is expected of your child in each class and whether your child is meeting these expectations. Become familiar with your child’s schedule, know and understand the course requirements necessary to advance to the next grade level and to graduation, if applicable. • Make sure your children are in the most challenging classes that will prepare them to succeed in college and work.

• Ask for or acquire on your own a copy of the state academic standards for each subject, use them to make sure you know what your child is expected to learn in school.

• Ask for a syllabus or outline of the work your child will receive during the year.

Work with other parents to help your child’s school

• There is power in numbers. Talk to other parents about the education your children are receiving. Exchange ideas, information, and concerns about your schools.

• Find out how students are placed in certain classes and work toward getting all African-American students placed in high-level classes.

• Find out how the district assigns teachers and work toward making sure all teachers are highly qualified. Ask the school superintendent and school board members what’s being done to get your school more qualified and experienced teachers.

• Use data, such as test score results, to understand how well your schools are performing with African-American students.

• Ask to see school improvement plans. Is the school district doing enough to help your schools improve achievement? You have the right to sit at the decision-making table; ask to be one of the parent representatives on the school-improvement team.