September/October 2002 | NW REPORT

Regional Needs Survey:

Family Involvement High on List

By Dave Wilson

cover, Regional Needs Assessment Publication

When the Laboratory recently asked educators across the Northwest how much effort, in a range of areas, is needed to help students to succeed at a high level, parent involvement emerged strongly as a top priority.

With more than 1,500 teachers, principals, superintendents, and local school board chairpersons responding to the Laboratory's 2002 educator needs assessment survey, parent involvement was pegged for attention by all four groups, led by more than 90 percent of teachers and 85 percent of principals in high-poverty elementary schools.

Level of poverty in schools appeared to have a particularly strong influence on how acutely educators felt the need for more effort in a number of areas. Elementary teachers from high-poverty schools rated several issues significantly higher on the "effort needed" scale than teachers from low-poverty schools. Parent involvement led the list, followed by helping students become self-directed learners, providing supports for students that extend beyond the classroom and class time, incorporating a variety of classroom practices to address the diverse learning needs of students, and communicating student academic progress to parents.

Steve Nelson, director of the Laboratory's Planning and Program Development, says the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) appears to be a significant driver of opinion in this year's survey.

"At very least, the NCLB provides a context for understanding why issues like concern about parent roles, uses of data for accountability, and improving professional development and collaboration are coming to the fore," he says. "All of them are strongly emphasized in the legislation, and educators in the region are feeling the heat. Interestingly, school safety, which is not so strongly emphasized in the NCLB as in past legislation, comes in at the bottom of priorities identified for new effort in this year's survey."

The educator survey (and a concurrent survey of the public) is one step in the Laboratory's ongoing needs assessment process, and it provides important data for strategic planning and for establishing program goals and objectives for its major contracts and grants with the U.S. Department of Education. "Survey data are combined with information from a wide range of sources, including consultations with state agencies and constituent advisory groups," Nelson says. "Just because an issue is highlighted in the surveys doesn't necessarily mean we start immediately changing program priorities, but it will cause us to begin examining implications and looking for deeper evidence that may lead to new or reorganized work. Indeed, as a result of past planning efforts, NWREL has already established a solid Child and Family Program that is dealing with the parent involvement issue on several fronts and provides a foundation for new work in this area."

The needs assessment also confirms the Laboratory's focus on serving high-poverty schools. Last year, nearly 60 percent of the 154 districts the Laboratory assisted were high-poverty districts. A full report on the needs assessment will appear in late October at the Web site, www.nwrel.org/planning/.