This blog was first posted on Education Week鈥檚
By Sarah Tully
It鈥檚 hard enough for fluent English-speaking parents to understand complex test scores and measures used to track students鈥� progress. But what about parents who don鈥檛 speak English well and aren鈥檛 fully literate in their native languages?
A program called the is attempting to reach those parents and communicate students鈥� achievements in a simpler way: graphs and data.
The team model, also known as APTT, uses various methods at about 400 schools in a range of communities, including rural, urban and low-income. (Education Week featured the APTT model in a September 2015 story about changing parent-teacher conferences.)
Maria Paredes, who developed the model for WestEd, a San Francisco-based education research nonprofit group, said she estimates between 60 percent and 70 percent of those schools have pockets of immigrant and refugee parents with limited literacy in both their first and second languages.
The number of English-language learner families in schools continues to grow: Education Week鈥檚 recent special report on 鈥淭eaching America鈥檚 English-Language Learners鈥�stated that three out of four classrooms now have at least one English-language learner student. About 5 million children nationwide are learning English.
One part of APTT is showing parents how their students are performing with bar and line graphs. While this approach is done with all parents, this portion of the program is especially helpful to English-language learner parents, who may not know the academic words in any language, Paredes said.
Instead of 鈥渟tandards,鈥� educators show graphs with different lines for each student to show progress on 鈥渇oundational skills鈥� over time during meetings. Only parents know the lines for their own students. The presenters explain how to interpret the graphs, explaining where the students are and where they need to be at the end of the year.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a very clear visual where they are and where they are going,鈥� Paredes told Education Week. 鈥淧arents who have low literacy, with the correct modeling and instruction and mentoring, they can understand a bar graph very easily. ... They become very comfortable with it.鈥�
One school that is benefitting from this approach is Garfield Elementary School in Oakland, Calif., which was featured in .
Mothers from Burma, who are Karen-speaking refugees, participate in meetings to go over the charts, as well as learn literacy tips, even though they can鈥檛 read well. A translator assists in the process. Even if the parents can鈥檛 read books themselves, they can ask their children in their own languages what the story is about and what they learned.
鈥淚 cannot read. I cannot help them. But I can encourage them to read every day,鈥� said Paw Lay Loe, about her three children, in the EdSource story.
Paredes said by teaching the parents in a family-friendly way, the program is having success in getting more families involved.
鈥淭hese families have a lot of experience, and they have a lot of street smarts, and they figure things out,鈥� Paredes said.