Publications for Parents: Family Involvement in Education

Clearinghouse on Reading

	A Compact for Reading Guide is a user-friendly handbook for developing and implementing school/family/community Compacts that emphasize reading improvement.
	The School-Home Links Reading Kit is a companion to A Compact for Reading. School-Home Links Reading Kit contains four booklets of research-based reading activities in English and Spanish for children in kindergarten through third grade. Each booklet includes 100 activities that families can use at home and tutors can use in before and after school programs to help children increase their reading skills and achievement.
	After-School Programs: Keeping Children Safe and Smart provides an overview of the research, best practices, and resources that support afterschool learning opportunities for all students.
	America Goes Back to School: Partners' Activity Kit This Partners' Activity Guide can help stimulate thinking and discussion about how we can all work together to improve our schools. It was designed for schools, communities, and partners who are participating in the "America Goes Back to School" effort.
	Be Family Friendly: It's Good Business! explains how your business can support family involvement in education and benefit. Suggestions include giving employees flextime, offering a job-sharing option, improving child care options, and supporting your local schools.
	Better Education is Everybody's Business! contains a set of viewgraphs that can be used for professional development programs focusing on family involvement in education. It includes research, examples, tips, and resources for schools, community organizations, employers, and faith-based groups.
	A Business Guide to Support Employee and Family Involvement in Education provides business leaders with information about policies and practices that promote employee and family involvement in education.
	Prepared by the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, A Call to Commitment: Fathers' Involvement in Children's Learning provides educators, Head Start programs, and other early childhood providers with information, strategies, and tools to inform, promote, and celebrate the increased participation of fathers in learning.
	A Compact for Learning: An Action Handbook for Family-School- Community Partnerships can help teams of school staff, teachers , parents, and others develop and use a compact that outlines the shared responsibilities of school partners for children's learning. The guidebook and its activity sheets engage partners in a continuous improvement process to build and strengthen partnerships for learning.
	Community Update - This monthly newsletter contains lots of valuable information -- examples of what communities across the country are doing to improve schools; listings of resources, services, publications, and upcoming events; and summaries of the latest research in education. Search current or back issues online or become one of over 200,000 subscribers.
	Conference Highlights -- A New Understanding of Parent Involvement: Family/Work/School
	The Corporate Imperative: A Business Guide for Implementing Strategic Education Partnerships - A guide designed for businesses to assess their company's current business-education partnerships and determine the extent to which they are linked to key business and school objectives.
	The Corporate Imperative: Results and Benefits of Business Involvement in Education explores how businesses can create strategic education alliances that meet business objectives and promote systemic education change. It focuses upon how businesses can play a key role in ensuring that all students receive a high-quality, world-class education, saving corporations millions of dollars in future training costs and helping students become better prepared to meet the challenges of the workplace environment.
	Employers, Families and Education With examples and illustrations, this publication demonstrates the need for family involvement in education and ways in which companies can better develop family-friendly workplaces.
	Family Involvement in Children's Education: Successful Local Approaches Intended to assist educators, parents, and policy makers as they develop and nurture school-family partnerships, this idea book identifies and describes successful strategies used by 20 local Title I programs that have overcome barriers to parent involvement.
	Family Involvement in Education: A National Portrait Showcasing findings from a new analysis of data, this publication provides parents with a checklist to assess their own issues of family involvement. This is a great resource for both families and educators interested in bridging the gap between home and school.
	Fathers Matter! Involving Fathers in Children's Learning is a kit developed for educators and other professionals who are working to increase family involvement in education. The kit, which includes overheads, speaker's notes, and other resources, outlines strategies for involving fathers in children's learning at home, at school, and in the community.
	Fathers' Involvement in Their Children's Schools This report by the National Center for Education Statistics discusses the extent to which resident and nonresident fathers are involved in their children's schools and examines the influence of their involvement on student achievement.
	Finding Common Ground: How Faith Communities Support Children's Learning provides guidelines for religious expression in public schools which school districts should use to develop their own district policy.
	The Formula for Success: A Business Leader's Guide to Supporting Math and Science Achievement Find out how employers can play a part in improving America's math and science achievements while bettering the skills of tomorrow's workforce.
	Get Involved! How Parents and Families Can Help Their Children Do Better in School outlines the steps you can take to improve your children's education--steps such as reading together, using the television wisely, scheduling homework time, using community resources, and many others.
	Getting Ready for College Early This guidebook will help you and your children understand the steps you need to take during the middle school and junior high school years to get ready for college. The Spanish version of this document is also available.
	Information for Families and Community Members This brochure provides steps for both families and communities members to help children read well and independently by the third grade, to meet high math and science standards, and to prepare for college and careers while they are still young. This publication is available in English and Spanish.
	Investing in Partnerships for Student Success: A Basic Tool for Community Stakeholders to Guide Educational Partnership Development and Management - A guide designed for collaborative use by a broad-range of community stakeholder groups to support a continuous improvement process for partnership planning, development, and implementation of local educational partnerships.
	An Invitation to Your Community: Building Community Partnerships for Learning
	Join Together for Kids: How Communities Can Support Family Involvement in Education lists a number of options for supporting family involvement in education, such as teaching parenting skills, providing mentoring programs, offering summer learning programs, and much more!
	Keeping Schools Open as Community Learning Centers: Extending Learning in a Safe, Drug-Free Environment Before and After School Learn how schools and community-based organizations can begin the process of keeping schools open for children and families beyond the traditional school hours to provide access to valuable education resources in a building free of violence and drugs.
	New Skills for New Schools (1997) The 65-page report, New Skills for New Schools, examines reasons for -- and the status of -- teacher preparation in family involvement. It also provides a framework that illustrates various kinds of teacher training for family involvement. Unlike other family involvement typologies, this framework focuses not on actual family involvement activities carried out in schools, but on the attitudes, skills & knowledge teachers need to work effectively with parents.
	Parent Involvement in Children's Education: Efforts by Public Elementary Schools This report by the National Center for Education Statistics provides interesting and informative statistics on the extent to which schools and families reach out to one another.
	The Partnership for Family Involvement in Education: Who We Are and What We Do Partner organizations, alliances and individuals are developing and implementing effective family involvement practices in education. They are encouraging mutual responsibility at home and at school and throughout the community to give students a better education and start in life. Examples of partners' efforts, resources, and information are included in this publication.
	Preparing Your Child for College It's never too late to think about college -- both the benefits of a college education and the ways to put college within reach academically and financially. Throughout their school years, students make academic and extra-curricular decisions that affect whether they will be eligible to enter college. This resource book is designed to help you with the process of preparing for higher education.
	Questions Parents Ask About Schools This easy-to-read question and answer booklet discusses teachers' expectations and student workload at each grade level, how parents can help their children succeed in the classroom, safety issues in schools, steps for college preparation, and much more. Available in English and Spanish.
	Reaching all Families and Creating Family-Friendly Schools Learn about school outreach strategies to get all families involved in their children's education.
	*READ WRITE * NOW! Series** Materials in both English and Spanish are available to help children build their reading skills outside of school, especially during the summer months.
	Safe & Smart: Making After-School Hours Work for Kids is a report, jointly authored by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, that highlights research evidence on the potential of after-school programs to increase the safety of children, reduce their risk-taking, and improve learning. Find out more about the evidence of success for after-school activities, key components of high-quality programs and effective program practices, and how communities are meeting their local needs for after-school activities. An updated version of this publication, Working for Families and Children: Safe and Smart After-School Programs , is now available in MS Word and portable document format.
	Strong Families, Strong Schools This report summarizes 30 years of research showing that greater family involvement in children's learning is crucial to student achievement in school and in life.
	Summer Home Learning Recipes To help parents become better teachers, we've compiled fun and engaging learning activities they can try with their children during the summer months. Our four different brochures are age and grade appropriate and offer great new ideas for developing math, reading, and science skills!
	Team Up for Kids! How Schools Can Support Family Involvement in Education suggests that schools encourage parents to participate in school improvement efforts, give teachers the tools to reach out to families, and use technology to link parents to the classroom.
	Using Technology to Strengthen Employee and Family Involvement in Education shows how technology tools can be used to support, facilitate, and guide the process of strengthening employee and family involvement in education. This publication provides some answers to these questions through a variety of research, survey data, and case studies about corporate experiences.