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Schools,
Families and Community
Synthesis Team Executive Summary
How Diverse Families, Schools, and Communities Support Children’s Successful Pathways through School
A Synthesis for Research, Practice, and Policy
Catherine R. Cooper, Gabriela Chavira,
and Dolores D. Mena
University of California, Santa Cruz
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This review considers recent advances in understanding five key questions about how diverse families, schools, and communities support children’s pathways through school:
- How can we open the K-16 academic pipeline across ethnicity, income, and geography?
- How can we sustain aspirations and expectations of students, families, and teachers?
- How can we sustain children’s math and language learning pathways through school?
- How can we link families, schools, and communities to support children’s pathways?
- How can we sustain K-16 partnerships for long-term outcomes?
This paper begins by framing the complementary nature of two major theories
— Sociocultural Theory (Tharp, 2001) and Overlapping Spheres of
Influence Theory (Epstein, 2002), along with other relevant theories across
the social sciences. Second, it aligns core concepts, measures, and strategies
for longitudinal analysis of the five questions. Research methods highlighted
in the synthesis are based on scientific standards for quantitative and
qualitative research of the National Research Council and National Institutes
of Health. Third, it synthesizes recent evidence addressing the five questions
from national databases and local samples across cultural communities.
We highlight longitudinal studies, particularly from nine of the 31 sites
of CREDE. Finally, we outline an agenda for advancing science, policy,
and practice and offer tools to link local cultural communities to national
databases and strengthen K-16 partnerships.
National concern is rising about the "academic pipeline problem,"
the attrition within each of the five major U.S. ethnic-racial groups
from childhood to college as well as large and persisting ethnic-racial
gaps. Still, researchers are turning from questions of dropout to ask
how families, schools, and communities can support diverse children’s
pathways through school. Two multi-level theories — Sociocultural
Theory (particularly Tharp’s Standard 3: Making meaning by connecting
school to students’ lives; 2002 ), and Epstein’s theory of
Overlapping Spheres (particularly the Family Involvement Typology; 2002)
— are both useful.
This paper draws on both theories to synthesize major research findings
from CREDE. At nine sites in six states — Arizona, California, Hawaii,
Kentucky, New Mexico, and Rhode Island, CREDE scholars built partnerships
spanning the academic pipeline from childhood through college. This synthesis
also draws on a comprehensive review of quantitative and qualitative studies
across the social sciences to trace research longitudinal patterns at
five levels of analysis: demographics along the K-16 pipeline; pathways
of individual students; changing relations with families, teachers, peers,
and community programs; and family-school-community partnerships.
Major Findings on the Five Questions
1) Monitoring demographics builds access through the K-16 pipeline. Research
shows effective partnerships monitor demographics along the K-16 pipeline,
including national origin, ethnicity, home languages, parents’ education,
and rural/urban location to ensure access and so communication is appropriate
to families’ literacy and languages.
2) Sustaining aspirations for education and careers bridges generations.
Families are a key factor — and possibly the most important one
— in students’ developing and sustaining educational and career
aspirations. Although this might be expected among college-educated parents,
low-income, minority, and immigrant families often inspire and help their
children set and maintain these aspirations. Thus, views of ethnic minority
and low-income parents as holding low educational goals for their children
are misleading. Many have goals of college and college-based work for
their children and work long hours to support dreams of a better life
for them. However, parents who have not attended college in the U.S. may
not know specific steps for realizing these dreams. So our task is sustain
these high hopes rather than implant them for the first time in their
minds. And for many students, extended families — not just parents
— provide support, inspiration, motivation, and practical guidance
to attend college. Of course, not all students want to go to college,
but the key is that every student has the choice.
3) Moving from pipelines to pathways builds inclusiveness. Math and language
skill trajectories are key indicators of successful academic pathways
to college and careers. Passing Algebra 1 by 9th grade is a leading indicator
of attending four-year college that researchers, policymakers, educators,
families, and youth can all track over time. The earlier students take
Algebra, the more likely it is that they will pass it. (See graph, below.)
4) In each age, ethnic, and income group, the most successful students
build stronger links across their families, schools, peers, and community
programs, who in turn support students’ pathways though school.
Evidence that families remain crucial to success through middle and high
school may surprise those who see adolescence as a time youth want autonomy.
Effective teachers find resources in cultural practices of local families,
while schools and community programs provide information about achievement
tests and grades and “college knowledge” about applications
and scholarships. Peers are the most controversial — both resources
and challenges.
5) Sustaining K-16 partnerships for long-term outcomes draws on longitudinal
data. These findings advance local and nationwide research and add K-16
developmental perspectives on both Sociocultural and Overlapping Spheres
theories of partnerships. In contrast to “deficit” views of
ethnic minority, low-income, and immigrant children, families, and their
teachers, findings map conditions under which diverse children build pathways
through school by bridging their families, schools, peers, and communities.
A National Agenda for Science, Policy, and
Practice
Bridging disciplines with multiple theoretical lenses will build greatly
needed rigor in research on partnerships by linking macro to micro —
structural factors to how youth navigate across their worlds. This research
should compare and test multi-level models of partnerships across institutions,
relationships, students, and cultural communities with local, state, and
federal partners. Such work will advance through cycles of description,
prediction, explanation, and application and by more precise aligning
of measures of families, peers, schools, community organizations, and
partnerships in science, policy, and practice.
Bridge cultural communities to link local to general. Enhancing educational
opportunities for students of diverse ethnic, racial, economic, and geographic
communities rests on customizing programs for local regions while staying
attuned to common goals. We need to map variation and change within cultural
communities as well as similarities and differences across them. And rather
than focus on families, schools, and communities in either generic or
local terms, case studies can be checked for parallels with Census and
NELS:88 to map common ground and scale up successful approaches in new
communities. More systematic mapping of variation and change in and across
communities will reveal what is unique and common among diverse youth,
families, schools, and communities.
Bridging Generations with new tools for multi-site K-16 partnerships.
Students bridge generations when they ask teachers for help with schoolwork,
give younger siblings advice about college, and move across contexts of
families, peers, schools, and communities. CREDE scholars have built innovative
partnerships among elders, youth, families, schools, and community organizations
in cultural sites across the nation. Tools for multi-site K-16 partnerships
for science, policy, and practice that link qualitative case studies and
quantitative approaches are included in the synthesis.
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