Central to turning around public education in Detroitâa city that has suffered from crushing debt, contracting student enrollment, and cratering student achievementâis reengaging the parents who had been largely cut out of district decision-making.
Thatâs the bet that Superintendent Nikolai Vitti and Assistant Superintendent of Family and Community Engagement Sharlonda Buckman have made. For Vitti and Buckman, a focus on parents is both practical and personal.
On a practical level, efforts to drive up student achievement will likely be stunted without parents, grandparents, and guardians who are engaged and working in tandem with the district toward that goal.
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On the personal level, both Vitti and Buckman were raised in the Detroit area by mothers who struggled to make ends meet and support their childrenâs schooling. They are intimately familiar with what it feels like to have a school system dismiss oneâs family.
âWe always say that parents are partners, not the problem,â said Buckman. âWe get more done and we get more right when we are working in partnership with our parents.â
Their initiatives have focused on bringing families back into the district fold by giving them a voice in how the school system goes about improving education and the resources to support their childrenâs schooling.
- Trust Parents: Barring mental health and substance abuse issues, parents want the best for their children.
- Collaboration is Key: Our work is stronger, and our thinking is refined when we work with parents as partners.
- Be Authentic: Being authentic matters. Parents know when you are checking a box versus valuing them and their children whom they entrust to us to educate.
âPeople could only watch from the outsideâ
The fortunes of Detroitâs schools have followed those of the cityâs, which has been slowly hallowed out over the past half century by the collapse of the local auto industry.
Detroitâs public schools have been under some form of state control for most of the past two decadesârun more recently by a frequently changing cast of emergency managersâto try to turn around the districtâs finances. Even so, debt continued to balloon as enrollment fell. Student outcomes were regularly among the worst in the nation. Buildings were falling into disrepair. Teachers were leaving in droves. And an audit in 2018 found the curriculum the district was using was outdated, bloated, and unaligned to the stateâs standards.
The schools were in such a poor state in 2016 that they were âirreparably damaging childrenâs futures,â to quote a lawsuit filed that year alleging that state officials had failed to provide Detroit school children with one of the most basic skillsâthe ability to read.
âPeople had always wanted to be involved, but we had not created the platforms for people to be engaged,â said Buckman. âPeople could only watch from the outside when things were not going as they should.â
In 2017, the district was placed back under the control of an elected school board, although its budget remained under state oversight until last October. Vitti and Buckman also joined the district in 2017 and set to work creating avenues for parents to be engaged and weigh-in on school and district policies.
We always say that parents are partners, not the problem. We get more done and we get more right when we are working in partnership with our parents.
They reinstated Parent Teacher Associations in every school, which were disbanded while the district was under emergency management. Bringing PTAs back, said Vitti, gave parents an important, traditional avenue to be involved in their childrenâs schools.
The district also started regularly surveying families to use their feedback to shape policy. Most recently, parent surveys were instrumental in the decision to offer an in-person schooling option through most of the pandemic. The district also recruited a dozen parents this school year to serve on a special parent task force that advises district leadership on online learning.
But empowering parents is more than giving them opportunities to talk to school and district leadership, Buckman and Vitti said. Itâs also helping develop parentsâ abilities to support and advocate for their childrenâs learningâfrom knowing what skills their preschoolers should enter kindergarten with to what to ask during parent-teacher conferences.
To help parents develop these skills, the district has established the Parent Academy, where parents can take free classes on a range of topics, not just on supporting their childrenâs education, but also on parenting, more generally, and professional development.
With classes on conflict resolution in the home, monitoring social media, building credit, and learning English, the goal is to develop the whole parent, said Vitti.
âThe Parent Academy has been a vehicle to empower parents and for the district and school to meet parents in a space where we are not talking about their kids in a negative or positive way,â said Vitti. âI think a lot of districts struggle with not having that space.â
TaMara Williams, who has three kids in the district, has taken classes on rĂŠsumĂŠ writing, preparing her youngest for kindergarten, and even a family painting class.
âIt helped me engage my high schooler with my elementary children,â she said of the painting class. âI thought that was a good program ⌠to have a little bonding time. Those extracurriculars are good.â
Williams plans to start teaching a parent support class this spring. Like regular classes, the Parent Academy has gone online during the pandemic, with the option for participants to call into the sessions if they canât log in.
While itâs important that the district invites parents in, whether itâs through PTAs, the Parent Academy, or other initiatives, Vitti and Buckman believe itâs equally important to take the lessons to parents. The district has invested heavily in teacher home visits during Vittiâs and Buckmanâs tenure, even expanding them during the pandemic.
âI hate the idea that parents have to come into the school and that there is a divide between school buildings and home,â said Vitti. âI think we have to do a better job of going to parents. I think thatâs a sign of respect, and it limits and reduces the barriers around degrees, and language, and words.â
Sixty percent of the districtâs schools are now conducting home visits, and systemwide more than 15,000 such visits were completed in the past three years.
This multipronged approach to engaging parents as part of the larger goal of improving student academic achievement is what Sonya Mays, a school board member, said she most appreciates about Vittiâs approach to his job as superintendent.
âThere are a couple of approaches to problem-solving: You can get in there and fix one-off problems, or look for a systemic solution,â she said. âHe is oriented around that second approach. He has really connected some of the barriers around student achievement to parent involvement.â
Personal experience informs their work
The driving force behind both Vittiâs and Buckmanâs focus on families is their relationships with their own mothersâneither of whom finished high school. Both had children at a young age. They felt, at worst, judged by the school system and, at best, out of place.
Vitti, whose undiagnosed dyslexia made his early education difficult, said he remembers being appalled as a young teacher in New York overhearing his coworkers disparaging the parents of struggling students. He wondered if his teachers had talked about his mother, a single parent and hairdresser, the same way.
âI think one of the reasons why [Sharlonda and I] connect is we are such staunch, uncompromising advocates for our parents,â said Vitti. âEven in a system that sometimes looks down on our parents and doesnât recognize their value and what they offer, I think we always go back to our own experience and say, âWait a minute, youâre actually talking about my mom right now.â That pushes us to push the system.â
Buckman and Vitti said they believe it would have made a big difference if their mothers could have attended a parent academy, had teachers visit them in their homes, and had better advocates in the school system.
âEvery parent I serve, I think about my mother,â said Buckman, whose mother was devoted to her children but wasnât involved in their schools and would have benefited from more outreach from the district.
Buckman was expelled from her Detroit high school as a young teenager for a fight that left another student injured. That infraction left zero options for continuing her education.
âYou are my daughter, and I love you,â Buckman said she remembers her mother telling her as the left the expulsion hearing.
But her mother didnât know how to advocate for her during the expulsion process or find alternative schooling, Buckman said. Today, Buckman matches parent volunteers with parents who want extra support during, say, an expulsion hearing or Individualized Education Program meeting.
After Buckman was expelled, a former teacher tracked her down and connected her with a community organization, which paid for a full-time tutor to work with her until she finished high school, Buckman said. Her life trajectory would have been very different without the intervention of those community members, she said.
âThatâs why Iâm in this work,â she said. âTo make sure that we are supporting every parent to support their kid.â
Family engagement works, if done right
Vitti said theyâre seeing early returns on the investment in parents.
While there are still long-standing hurdles to overcome, and the pandemic has only compounded them, there have been some modest improvements: chronic student absenteeism had dipped down over the prior year, enrollment has stabilized, and student scores on state math and reading assessments have ticked up.
By many indicators, parents are also becoming more engaged. Well over 2,000 parents now participate in PTAs. Around 6,000 parents take classes through the Parent Academy each year. Mays, the school board member, said she has also noticed more parents attending school board meetings.
Those positive outcomes are in line with what research has shown are benefits of parent engagement.
Including families as partners in the education system has broad, positive effects, said Karen Mapp, a senior lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an expert on family engagement. It can raise test scores, attendance, and graduation rates, she said, in addition to a host of nonacademic dividends, such as improving parentsâ civic engagement and their own educational attainment.
âYou wonât get where you want in your school goals if you omit the family engagement variable,â Mapp said.
But how schools engage familiesâmeaningfully and respectfully versus superficiallyâmatters and will ultimately determine whether schools reap the rewards of family engagement programs. Too often, Mapp said, teachers, as well as school and district leadership, view parents as problems, not partners.
âFamilies know the difference, and they will shy away from programs that see them as something thatâs wrong that needs to be fixed,â she said.
The pandemic has further underscored the importance of strong relationships between schools and families, said Mapp, as schools have had to rely on parents to deliver instruction.
Vitti and Buckman have leaned into the relationships theyâve built with families as the district tries to meet new challenges that have emerged because of the coronavirus and remote learning.
I hate the idea that parents have to come into the school and that there is a divide between school buildings and home. I think we have to do a better job of going to parents. I think thatâs a sign of respect, and it limits and reduces the barriers around degrees, and language, and words.â
Buckman activated the districtâs parent volunteers to launch a massive effort to track down students who had dropped off the grid during the pandemic.
Stacey Johnson was one of the volunteers. She donned her mask and a blue shirt marking her as a school district volunteer and went door-to-door, checking in on families whose children had stopped logging into their lessons. She connected those parents and students with resources, such as tech support, school counselors, and mental health hotlines, to help get them back on track.
âWhen people donât just say they have a heart for the community, but put arms and legs on that, and go out into the community and check, in these critical times, where our families are, that speaks volumes to me,â Johnson said of Buckman. âThat is a true leader.â
Vitti and Buckman have continued to tap parentsâ feedback to improve remote learning.
When the district launched a major initiative this summer to get devices to every student who needed one for remote learningâraising $20 million from the business community to purchase internet-enabled tabletsâit soon heard from parents that devices werenât enough. Families needed tech support to go along with the devices.
In response, the school system set up 13 hubs last fall where families could take broken devices for repairs or in-person tech support, in addition to the tech support hotline it already had running. Families can also pick up winter clothes at the hubs, get help with paying bills, visit with a nurse, participate in workshops on strengthening family relationships and take home a family game night pack.
Buckman and Vitti see these supports, from check-ins, to tablets, to game night packs, as the linchpin to the districtâs education reform efforts to raise academic outcomes among students.
âI focus on deposits,â said Buckman. âBecause when we do the tough stuff, people will remember the deposits.â
