Joyce Epstein's School-Family-Community Partnership Model

Research recognizes parent involvement as an important factor in the quality of a child's education. Joyce Epstein's School-Family-Community Partnership Model is an influential model in parent involvement research. The model redefines the relationship between schools, families, and communities as one of overlapping spheres of influence that share a concern about the success of the child. As a framework for increasing parental participation in education, the model recognizes six types of educational involvement and encourages schools to develop activities that engage schools, families, and communities within the six types. The model has been influential in shaping social policy regarding parent involvement in education.

Overview

Parent involvement is recognized as a significant factor in improving the quality of a child's education. Because of its importance, understanding how parents help their children and how schools can encourage greater parent involvement have been important research aims in education and sociology. In the late 1980s, Joyce Epstein proposed the School-Family-Community-Partnership Model (Partnership Model), which soon became influential in parent involvement research. The model has two main components.

Spheres & Interactions

The first depicts the partnership of schools, families, and communities as overlapping spheres. The spheres represent that schools, families, and communities each have a stake and influence in the education of a child. The overlap of the spheres represents that the interests and influences of the stakeholders in a child's education are mutual. Two factors influence the degree of overlap of the spheres: time and experience. That is, time in schools, the age of the child, and the experiences of the child in the family and in school can influence the degree to which schools, families, and communities have mutual interests and influences on the child. For example, typically, parents are more involved in school when their children are young. Thus, the Partnership Model would depict a greater overlap of parents and schools for a first grader than for a high school student.

The second Component of the Partnership Model illustrates the interpersonal relationships and patterns of influence that are most important in a child's education. According to the model, there are two types of interactions: those within organizations and those between organizations. Additionally, there are various levels of interactions. Standard organizational interactions occur between families and schools. This kind of interaction includes communication in the form of newsletters and reports about the school's activities and performance. These can be both in hard copy and digital. Specific, individual interactions are those between parents and teachers. Notes home from the teacher, conversations at a parent-teacher conference, and emails fall into this category. At the center of this half of the model is the child, who interacts with schools and the family. The child is both changed by the interactions and produces a change in others.

The key concept that underlies both parts of the Partnership Model is that all stakeholders in a child's education have mutual interests and influences. The primary shared interest is a caring concern that the child be successful. Additionally, the model suggests that stakeholders' shared interests and influences can be promoted by the policies, actions, beliefs, attitudes, and values of the stakeholders. While this might seem like common sense, the model differs from earlier theories on school-family relationships. In particular, the Partnership Model revises earlier conceptualizations that viewed families and schools as existing in separate spheres, which entailed that they have separate responsibilities. It also revises conceptions of the school-family relationship as one that must be sequential. In a sequential relationship, parents are expected to have more of a role than schools, and vice versa, in certain periods of a child's life. While the Partnership Model acknowledges that schools and families often do have more or less influence at certain ages, the model also suggests that the overlap between families and schools can be increased with a concerted effort by one or more of the stakeholders.

Another important aspect of overlapping spheres of influence is that schools and families share similar characteristics. Epstein uses the terms "school-like families" and "family-like schools" to explain the behaviors of families and schools that believe in each other's importance. In school-like families, parents encourage, support, and develop their children's academic skills. They may assist with homework or introduce educational activities as part of their regular family schedule. Similarly, they may use time in the same manner as the school or reward their children for accomplishments. These families teach their children to view school activities as part of the normal and natural rhythm of everyday life. Family-like schools, in a similar manner, take on the attitudes and characteristics of a caring family. Like families, they may individualize attention to meet the unique needs of each child. This could mean changing the standards or rules based on individual circumstances. It can also mean striving to create more open and reciprocal relationships between teachers and students. The Partnership Model emphasizes the shared attributes of schools and families. It also suggests that behaviors and attitudes of schools and families can increase the degree of overlap between schools and families, resulting in many benefits for students.

Six Types of Involvement

One of the goals of partnership research has been to identify the actions that schools, families, and communities engage in when they focus on student learning. Six general types of involvement have been identified:

• Type 1—Parenting: Parenting includes all the activities that parents engage in to raise happy, healthy children who become capable students. Unlike teachers, whose influence on a child is relatively limited, parents maintain a life-long commitment to their children. Activities that support this type of involvement provide information to parents about their child's development, health, safety, or home conditions that can support student learning.
• Type 2—Communicating: Families and schools communicate with each other in multiple ways. Schools send home notes, flyers, electronic newsletters, and emails about important events and activities. Parents give teachers information about their child's health and educational history. A school website is an additional mode of communication with parents and families. For example, parents may subscribe to dynamic calendar updates using iCal or RSS feeds; others simply check the website calendar regularly.

From a positive involvement perspective, communication must be two-way—from schools to parents and from parents to schools—to be most effective.

• Type 3—Volunteering—There are three basic ways that individuals volunteer in education. First, they may volunteer in the school or classroom by helping teachers and administrators as tutors or assistants. Second, they may volunteer for the school; for instance, fundraising for an event or promoting a school in the community. Finally, they may volunteer as a member of an audience, attending school programs or performances.
• Type 4—Learning at Home—When parents help their children with homework or take them to a museum, they are participating in type 4 involvement. These activities produce a school-like family and encourage parents to interact with the school curriculum. Activities to encourage learning at home provide parents with information on what children are doing in the classroom and how to help them with homework. Learning at home took on new definitions during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools switched to remote learning. This is a completely different dimension of learning at home when compared to Joyce’s description of supplemental activities.
• Type 5—Decision-making: Parents participate in school decision-making when they become part of school governance committees or join organizations, such as the parent/teachers association. Other decision-making activities include taking on leadership roles that involve disseminating information to other parents by serving on a committee or organizing an event or fundraiser.
• Type 6—Collaborating with the Community: School-community collaborations involve finding ways to share and/or transfer resources between the school and local area businesses; nonprofits; civic, religious, and cultural organizations; and other groups. The benefits of community collaborations can go two ways. Community resources can be used to help schools, families, and students, and communities may benefit from the activities of these same groups and individuals.

Although categorized into six types, more often than not, the boundaries between types are amorphous. One activity may fall within several categories. For instance, a school play may require parent volunteers to help with costumes (type 3); students may practice their lines at home (type 4); and community sponsors may provide funds for building a set (type 6). While each of the six types of involvement supports student achievement and success, some types have a greater impact on short-term achievement goals than others. For example, in the type 4 category, research has indicated that parents' involvement in literacy activities at home has a direct impact on students' reading skills and performance. During the COVID-19 pandemic when students were forced to learn remotely, the level of parent involvement in learning from home drastically influenced the rate of success a student experienced. Thus, in establishing partnership programs, schools are encouraged to link partnership practices to specific achievement outcomes.

Further Insights

Challenges

The organization of involvement into six categories provides a framework for schools that hope to increase family-school interactions. Teachers and schools can use the framework to encourage and support parents in becoming active participants in their children's education. Yet each of the involvement types presents challenges to schools as well. Providing information to all families, for instance, and not just those who have the time and motivation to seek it, is sometimes difficult. Barriers to effective communication can include differences between the school's and parents' socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as differences in race, ethnicity, language, and/or work schedules. Lack of access to technology can also provide a barrier to communication.

The Partnership Model emphasizes that the school must take responsibility for overcoming these challenges. When schools do not make an effort, research has indicated that many parents remain outside the school system. This is especially true for middle and high schools, in less affluent communities, and in school communities where families live far from the school and work outside the home. However, research has also shown that a sustained and coordinated effort by schools to increase parent involvement can be successful and have positive results. Beneficial effects occur from elementary through high school and include higher achievement, better attendance, more course credits earned, and more responsible preparation for class.

To overcome the challenges, the Partnership Model includes a number of "redefinitions" of traditional school-related concepts. These new definitions are designed to expand the concepts of involvement to be more diverse and inclusive. For instance, according to Epstein, "volunteers", which is a term traditionally used to describe individuals who enter the school and assist teachers and/or administrators, is redefined to "mean anyone who supports school programs and students' activities in any way, any place, and at any time—not just during the school day at the school building." The new definition encourages teachers to view parents who assist with homework or who attend a school performance as volunteers. Similarly, community members who speak in support of the schools or conduct off-campus fundraisers are defined as volunteers. By re-crafting the idea of what is considered volunteering, the school promotes an awareness and understanding of how parents and community members support schools and students. This, in turn, encourages teachers to find more ways to reach out to families and engage them in volunteer activities.

Implementing the Partnership Model requires a coordinated effort. At the Johns Hopkins Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships (for which Epstein began serving as director in 1996), researchers have identified the most effective partnership programs as those which receive local school, district, and state support. Furthermore, successful programs have been found to incorporate eight essential elements. These are

• Leadership,
• Teamwork,
• Action plans,
• Implementation of plans,
• Funding,
• Collegial support,
• Evaluation, and
• Networking.

In particular, principal support has been found to greatly influence the quality of partnership programs. In schools with a high principal turnover, less support for partnership programs has typically meant lower quality and less effective programs. In contrast, schools that enjoyed high levels of principal and district support reported improvements in the quality of their programs year over year. Effective district support includes activities that provide information about partnerships, technical assistance, and funding for implementing partnership plans, discussions with principals about partnership programs, and help conducting evaluations. Additionally, results of a 2011 study by Epstein, Galindo, and Sheldon showed that principals' support for family and community involvement and schools' reports of district assistance "contribute significantly to schools' basic program implementation and to advanced outreach to involve all families in their children's education."

National Network of Partnership Schools

To provide the technical assistance needed for the development of strong partnership programs, one of the initiatives of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships has been the National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS). The NNPS requires that members commit to establishing a partnership program using the Partnership Model. Each school must establish an "Action Team for Partnership." This team is composed of six to twelve members, including the school principal, two to three teachers, a parent, an officer of the parent-teachers association, two students (if a high school), and members from the community at large. The action team is charged with creating a welcoming school climate for families and spawning partnerships that support student achievement. Using the framework of the six types of involvement, the team develops a one-year action plan. The plan can focus on school improvement goals or on increasing the six types of involvement. The team works to implement the partnership program and then evaluates the results and makes recommendations for improvement.

A variety of practices have been recognized for their ability to build school and family partnerships. One of these is the Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork (TIPS) program. With TIPS, teachers create interactive homework that requires the student to talk to someone at home about an interesting topic. For example, TIPS math homework asks students to explain a skill to a parent or to apply a math concept to a real-life problem. Research on TIPS has shown that parents and students enjoy the activities; the program increases student completion of homework, creates better attitudes about school, and improves students' school performance.

Each year, the NNPS highlights other successful programs with awards and recognition in an annual publication. Brooklyn City Schools was recognized in 2022. Brooklyn City Schools represents a community with diverse cultures, languages, and family structures. This can be an obstacle, but also an asset. Through its preschool concert, Brooklyn City Schools' goal was to increase family engagement through learning activities. During its spring concert, preschool students sang nursery rhymes that showed skills in literacy and math. Following the concert, students and their families were invited to participate in activity stations. This effort involved the coordination of families, students, and teachers.

Discourse

The impact of research on parent involvement and school-family-community partnerships has been widespread. Federal policies and programs, such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and Head Start, recognized its importance by incorporating parent involvement within their mandates. For instance, for the first time in the history of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, aka NCLB), it mandated in 2001 that schools develop parental involvement policies. Guidelines for those policies were included in Section 1118. The impact of the Partnership Model could be seen in the language that organizations, schools, and agencies used to discuss parent involvement. "Partnership" and the six types of involvement were clearly referred to in numerous documents, such as the performance standards for Head Start. These standards required that staff work with parents "to develop family partnership agreements that identify goals, responsibilities, and timetables and strategies for achieving these goals." As part of these agreements, Head Start was mandated to provide programs to assist parents in building parenting skills (Type 1), provided opportunities for volunteering (Type 3), involved parents in program decision-making (Type 5), and ensured that parents received access to health and community services (Type 6). The spread of the language of the Partnership Model across a broad spectrum of school and public documents indicated that public support for the model was widespread and the model was replacing older concepts of parental involvement.

Though NCLB was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, the success of this implementation remained evident, and many schools maintained official policies around family and community engagement. In 2018, the federal government began aiding local and state agencies in the implementation of successful family engagement programs by providing grants to a selection of organizations offering training and technical support for these efforts.

Public support for parent involvement in education has been widespread for a long time. In the introduction to her book School, Family, and Community Partnerships, Epstein writes,

No topic about school improvement has created

more rhetoric than parent involvement. Everyone

says that it is important. In study after

study, teachers, parents, administrators,

and even students from preschool through high

school say that parental involvement benefits students,

improves schools, assists teachers, and

strengthens families.

However, unlike this blank endorsement of parent involvement, Epstein has offered a cautionary note against the belief that all parental involvement leads to beneficial results. Instead, she has emphasized that different types of involvement have different short-term results, and the quality of implementation of any program impacts its effectiveness. Thus, in developing partnership programs, schools must consider carefully their desired outcomes and craft programs that will engage families, communities, and schools in productive activities designed to meet specific goals.

What makes the Partnership Model different and important is its emphasis on a multifaceted, multidimensional approach to school-family-community relationships. In conceiving these relationships as existing as a set of overlapping spheres, the model highlights that each of the stakeholders in a child's education has a role to play and that these roles are often similar to the roles of other stakeholders. By working together and engaging in the six types of educational involvement, stakeholders can create partnerships that support short-term and long-term student success.

Terms & Concepts

Action Team: The action team is often a committee of a school improvement team. It includes six to twelve members chosen from the school and community.

Action Plan: An action plan is developed as the first step to implementing a partnership program in a school.

Family-like Schools: Family-like schools are schools that treat their students as a family would treat its children. Often, these schools provide increased attention to the student.

Head Start: A federal grant program begun in 1964 to promote healthy development in children ages three to five from low-income families. The program provides health and nutrition services as well as early education.

No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB): The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001 was dubbed the No Child Left Behind Act by George W. Bush. The act provided federal funding for schools.

School-like Families: School-like families are families that engage their children in academic-related activities within the home.

Bibliography

Brooklyn City Schools integrated preschool. (2022). National Network of Partnership Schools. Retrieved June 2, 2023, from https://nnps.jhucsos.com/old-brooklyn-horizon-education-center

Epstein, J. L. (2005). Developing and sustaining research-based programs of school family and community partnerships: Summary of five years of research. The Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University. Retrieved May 14, 2009, from

Epstein, J. L., Galindo, C. L., & Sheldon, S.B. (2011). Levels of leadership: effects of district and school leaders on the quality of school programs of family and community involvement. Educational Administration Quarterly, 47, 462-495. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete.

Epstein, J. L., & Sheldon, S. B. (2023). School, family, and community partnerships: Preparing educators and improving schools (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Hutchins, D. J., Sheldon, S. B., & Epstein, J. L. (2009, January). Special report: 2008 school update data. National Network of Partnership Schools. Retrieved May 14, 2009, from

Myers, A. (2021, Nov. 16). 25 years of school and family connections. JHU Hub. Retrieved June 2, 2023, from https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/11/16/building-school-and-family-connections

Piper, T. (2012). Using school websites to support parent engagement. Leadership, 42, 36-38. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete.

Sanders, M. G. (2012). Sustaining programs of school, family, and community partnerships: a qualitative longitudinal study of two districts. Educational Policy, 26, 845-869. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete.

School model - planning and implementing. (2024). National Network of Partnership Schools. Retrieved June 2, 2023, from https://nnps.jhucsos.com/nnps-model/school-model

Schumacher, R. (2003, May). Family support and parent involvement in Head Start: What do Head Start program performance standards require? Center for Law and Social Policy. Retrieved May 14, 2009, from

Seale, C. (2021, Jan. 11). Parent involvement has always mattered. Will the COVID-19 pandemic finally make this the new normal in K-12 education? Forbes. Retrieved June 2, 2023, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinseale/2020/05/19/parent-involvement-has-always-mattered-will-the-covid-19-pandemic-finally-make-this-the-new-normal-in-k-12-education/?sh=78593c575e46?

TIPS. (2023). Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships. Retrieved June 2, 2023, from https://www.sfcp.jhucsos.com/tips

Vance, N. (2005). The reproduction of an ideology of partnership within the educational discourse of colorado's elementary schools. Unpublished master's thesis, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado.

Suggested Reading

Epstein, J. L., Sanders, M. G., Sheldon, S. B., et al. (2018). School, family, and community partnerships: Your handbook for action (4th edition). Corwin Press.

Epstein, J. L. & Sheldon, S. B. (2006). Moving forward: Ideas for research on school, family, and community partnerships. In C. F. Conrad & R. Serlin (Eds.) SAGE handbook for research in education: Engaging ideas and enriching inquiry (pp. 117-137). Sage Publications.

Sanders, M. G. (2005). Building school-community partnerships: Collaboration for student Success. Corwin Press.