Policies

For youth-serving organizations — including schools and school districts — to effectively support family and community engagement, the support of federal, state, tribal, and local policymakers is needed.¹

1. Create infrastructure for leadership: Ensure the appropriate systems are in place to develop, implement, and coordinate the key components of family and community engagement. Provide adequate staffing to support these systems. Strategically allocate funds to ensure sufficient oversight, capacity building, and quality control to support effective policies and practices.
2. Build capacity through collaboration: Seek the support of other organizations to facilitate sharing research and best practices, to coordinate family and community engagement with other initiatives, and to reduce duplication and maximize efficiency.
3. Ensure reporting, learning, and accountability: Increase the use of proactive monitoring and evaluation to ensure compliance with family and community engagement policies across the organization.

Evaluation and Measurement

As policymakers and program administrators work to enhance the quality of programs, evaluation and measurement of outcomes is increasingly important. Many issues must be addressed when developing family and community engagement measurement:²

1. Conceptual issues: These relate to the validity of the core constructs that the tool is intended to measure:
   1. Defining objective, behaviorally anchored indicators
   2. Sensitivity of indicators despite heterogeneity in the characteristics of high-quality relationships
   3. Selecting indicators that can be universally applied across diverse settings
2. Measurement issues: These focus on what decisions need to be made to collect reliable and valid data:
   1. Determining the unit of analysis
   2. Sampling decisions
   3. Timing of assessment
   4. Designing items to capture well-distributed responses
3. Logistical issues: These refer to the ease with which the measure can be administered and analyzed:
   1. Scheduling observations
   2. Gathering data without intruding upon personal interactions

Privacy Considerations

While parents expect schools and districts to put their children’s well-being first, including expectations of privacy and confidentiality and adequate protection of personal information, parents also expect openness and transparency about the data practices of schools and districts. The U.S. Department of Education encourages schools and districts to take a proactive approach in communicating with parents what student information they collect, why they collect it, how they use it, and to whom they disclose it.

Resources

Making the Connection: Sharing Information and Data While Protecting Privacy of Youth
In this webinar from the Federal Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs, presenters share information about federal efforts to encourage greater cross-system coordination, promising state-level practices around data sharing, and a successful collaborative partnership.

Privacy Technical Assistance Center
The U.S. Department of Education’s Privacy Technical Assistance Center is a “one-stop” resource for education stakeholders to learn about data privacy, confidentiality, and security practices related to student data. The website provides timely information and updated guidance through training materials and opportunities to receive direct assistance.

References