The Hechinger Report just published an article by the leaders of the “school reform” group Stand For Children. It’s titled We’re not doing enough to engage parents, even though it improves achievement.

It actually has a fair amount of good “stuff” in it, including briefly discussing the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project.

Unfortunately, though, the article misses the essence of parent engagement. It focuses only on teachers and schools “doing to” parents — nothing on “working with.”

The essence of parent engagement is listening, and that does not seem to be present in the Stand For Children Model.

You can read more about the role of listening here….