Developing a School-Parent Compact

A school-parent compact is an agreement developed between parents and schools "that outlines how parents, the entire school staff, and students will share the responsibility for improved student achievement and the means by which the school and parents will build and develop a partnership to help children achieve the state's high standards." The document serves as a blue-print — specific to the school — for everyone participating in a child's education. Oftentimes, a compact is signed by parents, teachers and students as a sign of commitment.

To give schools a starting point and help them sustain the momentum developed during the process of crafting the document, the Education Department — through the Partnership for Family Involvement in Education — published a handbook, A Compact For Learning.

According to the handbook, there are five key steps in compact development:

Come Together as a Team: Give teachers and parents the common language needed to be an effective team. This includes making sure everyone knows what children are expected to learn and helping the team of teachers, students and families work together toward the same goals.
Write the Compact: Establish shared responsibility for (1) student learning and high achievement; (2) effective, frequent communication between school and home; and (3) building a family-school-community partnership through volunteering and training.
Use the Compact: This three-step process addresses the all-important movement from plan to action:
1. Publicize the compact so that people know what it is and how to get involved.
2. Decide how to support the compact financially; attempt to make it part of the school's annual budget. Funding, training for teachers and staff, resources for parents and a communication system are four categories of needs that must be met in order to keep the compact alive. Possible sources of supplemental funding are parent organizations, districts, grants and financial support through community and business partnerships. Lines of communication, including a homework help line, can be managed by an interactive voice mail system, an information phone tree or a Web site.
3. Finally, put the compact to work by making it the reference point for all school activities; i.e., using it to discuss student progress during parent-teacher conferences, to explain the school's high academic standards and high expectations for all students and to help launch programs for family involvement.
Evaluate Results: Keep track of performance by charting results. Three checkpoints of progress are widely accepted as particularly critical transition periods: (1) reading well and independently by the end of third grade; (2) achieving competency in math, including algebra, at the eighth grade; and (3) being prepared academically and financially for college by the time the student is 18 years old. Three ways to chart the effects of the compact on these checkpoints are: (1) by comparing results with the starting baseline; (2) by comparing results with other schools in the area or state; and (3) by comparing results to national levels. Possible sources of data are administrative records, surveys, focus groups and school profiles.
Strengthen the Compact: Build on success by evaluating strong and weak components and learning from both. There are a number of challenges that require continuous review, such as: "Are the different partners to your compact doing the right things? Are you doing the right things? What do you do with the answers?" In order to develop solutions to the areas in need of improvement, brainstorm as a team, talk to other schools to see what's working for them and conduct a focus group with members of the school community.

The handbook is available from the Partnership for Family Involvement in Education, U.S. Department of Education, 400 Maryland Ave., SW, Washington, DC 20202-8173; Telephone 1-800-4ED-PUBS.