As PTAs, family engagement is fundamental. Recent research from our friends at Learning Heroes uncovered yet another way that family engagement has made a difference in student success. Data has shown that the disruptions to schools from the pandemic had an effect on student performance. The study, the first of three on the topic, looks into whether schools with strong family engagement were able to better handle these pandemic disruptions and, if so, how they did so.

This first study aims to establish the case that schools with strong family engagement had better student outcomes with the return to in-person schooling compared to schools with weaker family engagement. The next two studies will try to figure out what family engagement policies, practices, and mindsets made a difference and to develop a way to measure the strength of family engagement.

This first study should be of special importance to Illinois PTAs, as the research used the 5Essentials survey to measure pre-pandemic family engagement (specifically, the Involved Families essential measure) and Illinois as demographically similar to the entire United States. Statistical tools were used to control for differences in school and community characteristics. Next, a variety of measures were investigated regarding how strong family engagement might have resulted in better student success, including attendance, chronic absenteeism, participation in the ELA and math parts of the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR), math and ELA achievement and growth scores from the IAR, teacher retention, and others.

Key Findings

This initial study reported several results illustrating the importance of strong family engagement:

  • Schools with stronger family engagement before the pandemic experienced better-than-expected attendance, achievement, and school climate outcomes post-pandemic.
  • For these outcomes, the importance of strong pre-pandemic family engagement was comparable to the importance of spending more time learning in-person versus remote. In fact, for similar schools, being in the top 10% in family engagement instead of the bottom 10% was associated with improvements in math and reading achievement on the IAR similar to replacing over half of the prior school year with in-person instead of remote learning.
  • The powerful relationship between family engagement and student outcomes applied to a diverse range of schools, including high- or low-income areas, elementary to high schools, and city or rural settings.
  • A school’s pre-pandemic family engagement was also related to better chronic absenteeism, attendance, and test participation outcomes in 2021-2022, while the amount of in-person learning in 2020-2021 was not.

Check out the Learning Heroes research page on this Family Engagement Impact Study. You’ll find a recorded webinar covering the study, a downloadable copy of the slide deck, a one-pager summary of the study you can easily share with your school community, and a summary article from Education Week.