Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report - S20

LESSON LEARNED
received in public schools there.
But things went south fast. When her
daughter received an A on a slapdash essay,
and defiantly conveyed a guidance counselor’s
comment that “not everyone is cut out for
college,” Brooks—who worked in information
technology then—came to the school to talk
with the principal. His secretary first ignored,
then insulted her, Brooks says.
“I was livid,” Brooks recalls. The principal
respectfully asked Brooks why she was so
upset, saying, “ ‘I work for you. How can we
make this right?’ ” He explained his challenges
with the teaching staff and enlisted Brooks’
help, asking that she demand better, and be
present at the school.
Brooks volunteered the following day, then
the next—quickly deciding to leave her fulltime job so she could devote even more time
to the schools.
Brooks has never looked back. She started
a family center in her daughter’s high school
where parents can meet to network and seek
resources. She also helped organize parents
when the school lost accreditation and, four
years later, shared in the pride as the school
graduated an entire class of students. “Every
single one had a college-admission letter or was
going into the [military] service,” she says.

Organizing Parents
She went on to become the founding director of the Boston Parents Organizing Network,
which began as a community-based group advocating to avert school budget cuts and establish a strong office of family and community
engagement. Brooks spent five years in the
network and later was appointed to the school
board. Superintendent Carol Johnson recruited
Brooks for her current position in 2008.
“As an organizer—that’s how I do this work.
I’m always looking for connections. That’s the
key. When the district lays out its priorities,
every single one of my colleagues has a piece
of that work, including me,” says Brooks. “I do
an analysis: How can I support their work and
connect our work?”
For example, this year the district’s priority is literacy. Her office conducted a parent
and child writing club, which turned out to
be a successful pilot, with 15 families meeting to improve their 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders’
performance as writers on open-response assignments. Over eight sessions, parents and
children worked on projects together. Eventually, parents became writing coaches for their
children.
This laser focus on broader districtwide
goals means Boston has avoided the pitfalls
of similar family-related offices in many other
districts, where schools become caught up in
what experts call “random acts of family engagement,” says Karen L. Mapp, a lecturer at
the Harvard Graduate School of Education and
the director of its education policy and management program. “In Boston public schools, we
really see that family engagement is a strategy
toward whole-school improvement,” Mapp says.
Brooks’ first step when taking her position
was to define “family and student engagement”
as the work of everybody in the district: administrators, teachers, support staff, custodians,
and bus drivers.
The school system adopted the National pta’s
six standards for family-school partnerships,
and measures schools and teachers against
them. “We measure ourselves to those standards, too,” Brooks explains.
Early on, Brooks confronted another issue.
“We know the folks in the district really believe
family and student engagement is critically important. One of the assumptions you make is
that, if you believe in it, you’ll go out and do it.
That was wrong,” she says.
So Brooks began to focus on a new area: capacity building. For her shrinking staff, that

S20 |

meant training them to do more
with less, deepen their knowledge
base, focus on strategies rather than
events, and leverage instructional
shifts to influence educational practice. For parents, she says, the goal
was to “build confidence in their own
ability to navigate the school system,
advocate for their children, partner
with their teachers to support student learning”—helping them to
become what Rudy Crew, a former
schools chief in the New York City
and Miami-Dade County, Fla., districts, calls “demand parents.”

Saturday ‘Universities’
One way Brooks’ office attempts
to do that is through Parent University, launched in her first year on the
job. Parents choose classes in three
intensive Saturday “universities”
throughout the year. Topics include
what children should know at different grade levels, their brain development, how to deal with adolescents,
how to navigate the school system to
advocate for your child, healthy cooking, and how to use a computer. Those
programs have more than doubled in
attendance since they began. In addition, parents attend satellite sessions in a range of subject areas, from
English-as-a-second-language instruction to completing their own high school
education or getting a ged. Funding for
Parent University primarily comes from
the district’s Title I funds.
In her second year, Brooks’ team created
grade-level guides for student learning in
conjunction with the curriculum and instruction office. The guides instruct parents
about what their students should be learning as they progress through school. Aligned
with the Common Core State Standards, those
guides have been translated into a number of
languages.
In 2011, Brooks’ office launched professional
development to help educators think about
family engagement in new ways. Plans are also
in the works to award “Family Friendly School
Certification” to schools that excel or progress
in their efforts to engage families.
A backdrop to the accomplishments of
Brooks and her office are the budget cuts that
caused the size of her staff to drop from 23
when she was hired in 2008 to 13 today, and
shrank her budget to its current level of $2.9
million.
They were “a curse because we’re limited in
what we can do, and a blessing because [they]
really forced us to focus and prioritize,” she
says.
Brooks’ work has gained a national reputation, partially thanks to her position as
a founding member of the District Leaders
Network on Family and Community Engagement, a 50-member peer network that brings
together district leaders from across the country to meet in Washington at the Institute for
Educational Leadership.
Michael Sarbanes, the executive director
of the office of engagement for the Baltimore
public schools, is one of the district leaders who
have worked closely with Brooks through the
network. “What I think has been extraordinary
about how Michele has come at the work is a
combination of her deep experience working
with parents, coupled with an understanding
of the leverage points around academic achievement within the school system, and then how to
link those up,” he says.
Brooks’ ultimate goal is to create sufficient
capacity so that her office will be unnecessary.
“If we’ve done our job right, we will not have a
job,” she says. n

LEADERS TO LEARN FROM www.edweek.org/go/leaders-report
EDUCATION WEEK • February 6, 2013

“Listen, the best
teaching strategy
for leveling out bad
behaviors is having
really engaged
classrooms. If you’re
really excited about
what you’re doing in a
classroom, you’re not
getting into trouble.”

SCHOOL CLIMATE

Patricia
A. Ciccone
RETIRED SUPERINTENDENT
Connecticut Technical High School System
BY JACLYN ZUBRZYCKI

http://www.edweek.org/go/leaders-report

Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report

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