Parents Involvement In Education

The Government of the United States of America in their Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) defines parental involvement as the participation of parents in regular, two-way, and meaningful communication involving student academic learning and other school activities including: Assisting their child's learning; Being actively involved in their child's education at school; Serving as full partners in their child's education and being included, as appropriate, in decision-making and on advisory committees to assist in the education of their child (Dookie, 2013). However, no such definition has been put forward by The Ministry of Education in Maldives. Therefore parents are not aware whether their involvement level would matter in children's …show more content…
Jacqui Quinn-Leandro issued a press release on June 6, 2012 in which she declared “without a support structure at home, a child is more likely to perform poorly in school and demonstrate deviant behavior”. In addition she attributed an escalation of drugs, violence and deviant behavior to a lack of parental involvement and as such urged parents to become more involved in the educational experiences of their children as a means of not only mitigating these behaviors but as a means to overall success. Education Sector Strategic Plan of the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the GORTT (p. 11-12) This “Strategic Plan” is the first official document that identifies Parental Indifference/Lack of Involvement as one of the major challenges and issues impacting the quality of and access to education today. In order to address this issue the following propositions were put forward: Develop community-based programs to deepen parental involvement in the learning process and the development of schools and Conduct research to ascertain the issues and challenges confronting parents. The identification of parental indifference/lack of involvement as a contemporary challenge that impacts on the quality of education concretizes the general idea that inconsistent and steadily declining levels of parental involvement is an issue that has fraught the teaching fraternity in Trinidad for countless years.
Several researchers have proposed different models of parental involvement which can be utilized and adapted to add some structure to efforts to allay this dilemma of lack of parental involvement and thereby increase positive outcomes for students. The model described by (Dookie, 2013) will be used as the conceptual framework to guide this