Parents promise to read with their children. Kids promise to read on their own. NPR’s Anya Kamenetz writes about Springboard Collaborative, which runs after-school and summer programs for struggling readers and their parents.
In addition to coaching for teachers and classes for kids, “once each week, a family member — mom, dad, grandma, an older sibling — attends an hourlong workshop to help learn and practice the strategies students are learning in class,” she writes.
“Parent engagement is the beating heart of our programs,” says founder Alejandro Gibes de Gac.
Yet most parent-engagement efforts from schools, he argues, are lightweight, marginal — a fundraiser here, a game night there. He says few programs directly share teaching strategies from the classroom for a core subject.
Springboard gives books, tablets and backpacks full of school supplies as incentives for completing the whole program, writes Kamenetz. “When the program follows up six months later, the evaluations show that families are still reading together more than before.”
The son of a Chilean playwright and a teacher born in Puerto Rico, Gibes de Gac, came with his family to the U.S. as a kindergartener. After Harvard, he took a Teach for America job in Philadelphia.
“I was teaching in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. I saw myself in my students. I saw my parents in their parents.
“It was more than just our shared language and complexion,” he explains. “It was the look! My students’ parents looked at their children with all the love, commitment and potential that any parent sees in their child. And yet my school and our system approached low-income parents as liabilities rather than assets.”
He said that the school system often treated his parents as “pushy immigrants with bad English.” Instead, he says, parents are “the single greatest underutilized resource to helping children who are struggling.”
To prove that families like his own could be powerful partners in learning, he held his first Springboard workshop eight years ago at the school where he taught in Philadelphia.
Springboard partners with elementary schools. Teachers visit students’ homes to ask parents and children to take a reading pledge. “The parent promises the child, ‘Here’s how much and how often I’m going to read with you together.’ ” And the child, in turn, promises to read on his or her own.
As it plans to expand, Springboard has tested which parts of the program are critical. It’s found that the free tablet and backpack “don’t seem to make much difference in the program’s success,” writes Kamenetz. “The key instead is the promise that parents make to their children.”