Join the Movement!



Make a gift to Project Appleseed! Become an advocate for parents and families engaged in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness in America’s public schools.
Click here!
A New Foundation for Parent Involvement


By Kevin Walker,
President & Founder, Project Appleseed

We need a new foundation for parental involvement in public schools.  Nearly everything in public education is measured except the level of parent and family involvement.  What are the metrics?  How many schools can report the number of volunteers or volunteer hours in a year?  How much does volunteerism affect the school budget?  Do you know how much social capital your schools raise and leverage?   America needs effective and quantifiable parent involvement and I want you to consider joining our movement.  Organized parental involvement can turnaround failing schools while sustaining and enhancing schools that are succeeding.
"As I travel the country and visit schools, I have been struck by how almost everyone pays lip service to parent and family involvement, but few seriously apply themselves to making it happen. Why is this?  So much progress has been made in recent years in other areas of school reform - reductions in class size, establishment of challenging academic standards, increase in after-school reading and math programs - why not in parent and family involvement?", wrote Bob Chase, past president of the National Education Association (NEA), in his book the New Public School Parent.  " The research evidence is beyond dispute. When schools work together with families to support learning, very good things happen: student attitudes, attendance, homework, and report cards improve."
According to President Barack Obama, "Responsibility for our children's education must begin at home".  In his February address to Congress, President Obama asserted the supremacy of parental involvement in public schools:

"These education policies will open the doors of opportunity for our children. But it is up to us to ensure they walk through them. In the end, there is no program or policy that can substitute for a parent -- for a mother or father who will attend those parent/teacher conferences, or help with homework, or turn off the TV, put away the video games, read to their child.  I speak to you not just as a President, but as a father, when I say that responsibility for our children's education must begin at home. That is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. That's an American issue."

Not enough has been written about the 91% factor: that 91% of a child's time from birth to age 18 is spent outside the school and that the role a parent plays is critical in any systemic plan to improve education outcomes.  Even less has been written about the total lack of adequate resources to support and educate parents about recognizing and seeking quality at the local level.   America's beloved parent groups are in decline, disorganized and need help.  The National PTA once boasted more than 12 million members in the late 1960s; today membership is down below 5.5 million.  To make matters worse, there is no state or national PTO out there for the thousands of local groups.  A PTO is only one group of parents, involved in one particular school.  They generally do not have national standards nor do they provide access to a larger network.  Given these realities, how do we organize more parents?

Like Johnny Appleseed of folklore, Project Appleseed is our name for the nonprofit campaign to spread the seeds of school improvement across America.  Our purpose is to systematically organize parents, grandparents and caring adults at the grassroots level, seed by seed, parent by parent, in states and local school districts, to mobilize community support for public school improvement.

Parental involvement works and it's time to start actually applying ourselves to making it happen by engaging families.  The core of Project Appleseed's national award winning campaign is our Title I learning compact called the Parental Involvement Pledge.  By signing the Pledge, parents agree to "take personal responsibility" for their children's education. We ask parents, grandparents and caring adults, to spend at least five hours each semester assisting at school, and fifteen minutes reading with their child each evening.  This is how we can effectively leverage tax payer dollars into new social capital. We must organize millions of new parent and family volunteers each school year.  U.S. Department of Education research (Prospects Study 1993) demonstrates that schools that use learning compacts like the Parental Involvement Pledge have higher student achievement than those that don't use them.

 This is a challenging time for our nation's schools. It is important that we tell America's parents that the school reform wagon train will not make it to the frontier if we leave uninvolved parents behind by the side of the trail. We must constantly reach out to extend and enlarge the family of involved parents. Lifting them up into the wagon train along the way - leaving no parent behind. 

Nationwide, if every public school student had at least one family member volunteer ten hours, the minimum dollar benefit to children and schools would be $17 billion in volunteer capacity - more than the $14 billion Congress approved in Title I stimulus funds.  A 10 percent increase in parental participation (a form of social capital) would increase academic achievement far more than a 10 percent increase in school spending. This is not an argument against school budget increases, but an argument for paying attention to social capital.  

Learning compacts like the Parental Involvement Pledge, that produce social capital, are the key to parental involvement success.  The Pledge can mean the difference between a goal and real change. It is time to take the parental involvement goals in Title I and give them the support they need to transform our schools.  We want to share with you the Six Slices of Parental Involvement.  This PowerPoint presentation has highlights of the best available research on parental involvement in America.  Also included is Project Appleseed's vision on how pledges and learning compacts can increase and organize parental involvement in Title I schools and all schools. 

Real education reform in this country cannot take place without an effective and organized parent constituency. If we fail to make systematic efforts to address how we get parents back into the life of schools, we are clearly fighting an uphill battle with some very unpleasant long-term consequences for this country.

Kevin Walker is a national award winning community organizer and public policy professional and has 30 years of local, state and national experience. His leadership has twice placed him in the Top Ten People In American Education during the last decade of the 20th century.  He is the parent of four public school graduates and the founder of Project Appleseed.  Click here for a Parent's Journal audio interview.

About Us
Project Appleseed is a major educational resource and advocate for parents and families engaged in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness in America’s public schools.  We are a catalyst in the implementation of effective, research based, model parent and community involvement programs that increase social capital, improves the lives of families and revitalizes schools and communities across the United States.   In 1994 our leadership advised the Clinton Administration, on the original parental involvement provisions of Section 1118 of the reauthorization of Title I.  Please contact Project Appleseed should you have questions about organizing parental involvement in America’s public schools.