The author provides practical strategies for cultivating communication with Latino parents and including the Latino family in developing sustained academic improvement.

This Handbook presents current research on children and youth in ethnic minority families. It reflects the development currently taking place in the field of social sciences research to highlight the positive adaptation of minority children and youth. It offers a succinct synthesis of where the field is and where it needs to go. It brings together an international group of leading researchers, and, in view of globalization and increased migration and immigration, it addresses what aspects of children and youth growing in ethnic minority families are universal across contexts and what aspects are more context-specific. The Handbook examines the individual, family, peers, and neighborhood/policy factors that protect children and promote positive adaptation. It examines the factors that support children’s social integration, psychosocial adaptation, and external functioning. Finally, it looks at the mechanisms that explain why social adaptation occurs.

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.

Introduces prospective/in-service teachers to an anthropological framework & to research & practice base that will help them be more successful in teaching students from various immigrant cultures. Focuses on home-school communication & parent involvemen

School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only stress the importance of parental decision-making and involvement to school performance but also clarify the issues of school choice in ways that bring much-needed balance to the ongoing debate. The authors analyze what parents value in education, how much they know about schools, how well they can match what they say they want in schools with what their children get, how satisfied they are with their children's schools, and how their involvement in the schools is affected by the opportunity to choose. They discover, most notably, that low-income parents value education as much as, if not more than, high-income parents, but do not have access to the same quality of school information. This problem comes under sensitive, thorough scrutiny as do a host of other important topics, from school performance to segregation to children at risk of being left behind.

Family-school partnerships are increasingly touted as a means of improving both student and school improvement. This recognition has led to an increase in policies and initiatives that offer the following benefits: improved communication between parents and educators; home and school goals that are mutually supportive and shared; better understanding of the complexities impinging on children’s development; and pooling of family and school resources to find and implement solutions to shared goals. This is the first comprehensive review of what is known about the effects of home-school partnerships on student and school achievement. It provides a brief history of home-school partnerships, presents evidence-based practices for working with families across developmental stages, and provides an agenda for future research and policy. Key features include: provides comprehensive, cross-disciplinary coverage of theoretical issues and research concerning family-school partnerships. describes those aspects of school-family partnerships that have been adequately researched and promotes their implementation as evidence-based interventions. charts cutting-edge research agendas & methods for exploring school-family partnerships. charts the implications such research has for training, policy and practice especially regarding educational disparities. This book is appropriate for researchers, instructors, and graduate students in the following areas: school counseling, school psychology, educational psychology, school leadership, special education, and school social work. It is also appropriate for the academic libraries serving these audiences.

Providing an objective assessment of the influence of parental involvement and what aspects of parental participation can best maximize the educational outcomes of students, this volume is structured to guide readers to a thorough understanding of the history, practice, theories, and impact of parental involvement. Cutting-edge research and meta-analyses offer vital insight into how different types of students benefit from parental engagement and what types of parental involvement help the most. Unique among works on the topic, Parental Involvement and Academic Success: uses meta-analysis to enable readers to understand what the overall body of research on a given topic indicates examines research results in terms of their practical implications focuses significantly on the influence of parental involvement on minority students’ academic success Important reading for anyone involved in home-school relations/parental involvement in education, this book is highly relevant for courses devoted to or which include treatment of the topic.