Parents and Teachers Working Together to Support Third-Grade Achievement: Parents as Learning Partners (PLP) Findings

The Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project (LAAMP), in an effort to have schools work more collaboratively with parents surrounding academic issues, granted funds matched by the Weingart Foundation to 29 schools in three School Families in Los Angeles County to focus on three primary areas in which parents and teachers can work together to support children’s academic progress: communication, parenting, and learning at home. This effort is entitled Parents as Learning Partners (PLP). The PLP initiative recognizes that when parents and teachers share common responsibility and expectations, assist each other in providing learning experiences, and establish two-way communication, students will develop better work habits toward attendance, homework, behavior, and achievement. This report describes goals and context of the Parents as Learning Partners (PLP) evaluation as well as provides an overview of third-grade classrooms both in the schools in which PLP is operating and in similar schools selected as comparison schools. Specifically, this report describes parent involvement goals of the schools; student, teacher, and classroom characteristics; professional development activities and voicemail usage of teachers; teacher-interactions with their students’ parents including communication patterns and parent involvement at the school and in the classroom; barriers to parent participation, particularly surrounding parent education workshops; access, usage, and satisfaction with parent education and other school services; parents’ habits and structure at home regarding reading and homework; and the behavior and achievement of third graders. Furthermore, the report summarizes the findings and concludes with the limitations of the PLP program and programmatic recommendations.