Enhancing Academic Performance Through Strategic Parent-School Communication

AUTHOR: Elisabeth O'Bryon

Family engagement in learning has a powerful impact on students’ academic success. A growing literature base demonstrates that family engagement promotes wide-ranging positive student outcomes, including second language learning, motivation, and academic achievement, as well as increased on-time high school completion and lower rates of high school dropout. And the influence of families is significant, with research revealing that the home learning environment can have more than twice the effect on student learning than either parents’ education levels or socio-economic status. Critically, early parent engagement can start a positive cycle of continued family engagement over time, sustaining achievement gains and student motivation, which highlights the importance of establishing strong home-school partnership from the beginning of students’ educational journeys. ​

Parental Involvement or Family Engagement?

While the terms parental involvement and family engagement are often seen, at Family Engagement Lab, we believe that family engagement is a more inclusive and encompassing term for how parents, caregivers, and families interact with the school system to support their child’s learning. The shift from involvement to engagement represents a deeper level of partnership and collaboration between educators and families. Our approach to family engagement builds off of the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnership, which highlights how relationships between educators and parents are central to supporting student’s learning outcomes.

The Impact Parental Involvement on Academic Success

Active involvement of parents and families in children’s education is also associated with critical school-level factors that support student success. For example, recent research from Harvard, TNTP and Learning Heroes revealed that schools with strong family engagement practices had 6 percentage points less chronic absenteeism than similar schools without. Moreover, The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research identified involved families as one of five essential factors to improving school outcomes. Most strikingly, researchers noted that “a persistent weakness in even just one of the essential factors reduced the likelihood of school improvement to less than 10%,” underscoring how critical family engagement is for successful schools and positive student learning outcomes.  

Challenges in Parent-School Communication

Unfortunately, a number of challenges can make regular, meaningful two-way communication and collaboration between teachers and families difficult. For example, limited time is a barrier for both teachers and parents who have demanding schedules as well as wide-ranging responsibilities and commitments. Families’ technology access is another potential obstacle that can impede communication between school and home. Families without reliable internet access or technology devices may have difficulty staying informed and engaged. These and other obstacles such as limited teacher training in family engagement and a mismatch between teachers’ and families’ home language can prevent families from receiving the accessible, actionable, learning-focused information that they are eagerly looking for and that ultimately promotes student learning. 

Introducing FASTalk: Bridging the Communication Gap

Addressing parent-school communication challenges requires proactive efforts to understand the specific needs of families in the school community. With key information from families about communication preferences (i.e., type of information families are looking for, preferred channels of communication, preferred language, etc.), schools can establish equitable effective communication practices that can foster a culture of collaboration and partnership with families to support student success. 
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School parent communication software designed to equitably facilitate family engagement in learning can play a meaningful role in supporting schools’ and families’ efforts to partner. Indeed, we have seen this firsthand at Family Engagement Lab with our signature tool, FASTalk (Families and Schools Talk).

Features and Benefits of Using School Parent Communication Software

Districts and Schools should consider parental school communication software that takes into consideration the needs and perspectives of families, while also reducing teacher workload. Most importantly, these school parent communication software should be proven through rigorous evaluation to improve student outcomes. 

FASTalk builds partnerships between teachers and historically underserved families by sharing engaging, at-home learning activities via text messages in each family's home language. FASTalk has wide-ranging benefits for parents, teachers, and students:

Parent-specific benefits: Through regular text messages that describe what students are learning and simple ways to help – all delivered in one of 100+ home languages – FASTalk builds parents’ knowledge of at-home learning strategies and an understanding of what their child is learning at school. FASTalk also opens critical lines of communication with teachers while promoting equitable access to home learning resources. Families are also invited by SMS to share their observations about their child’s learning with the teacher to support personalized instruction in the classroom.

Teacher-specific benefits: FASTalk helps teachers share research-based content and engage diverse families in students’ learning. FASTalk is coordinated with the school’s academic calendar and supports two-way messaging with language translation. Our learning activities are written by former classroom teachers with subject matter expertise, professionally translated into each family’s home language, and scheduled in advance to save teachers time. Teachers have access to a web app and mobile app to preview the scheduled messages and send and receive their own text messages with families that are translated on the fly by Google Translate, which can help overcome language barriers that can prevent parents and teachers from engaging in regular, ongoing, two-way communication and can hinder their ability to jointly collaborate to support student success.

Student-specific benefits: Multiple quasi-experimental research studies of FASTalk have linked FASTalk to improved student academic achievement, particularly for students furthest behind their peers and for students whose parents do not share a common language with their teacher. More FASTalk students meet literacy benchmarks, achieve greater gains on literacy assessments, and demonstrate accelerated report card growth than their peers who do not. FASTalk accelerates and improves students’ literacy achievement in grades TK-K and 3-5 compared to similar non-users, especially when families use the tool more often and when parents do not share a language with their child’s teacher.

Success Stories: FASTalk in Action

A closer look at FASTalk’s implementation in New Orleans’ Morris Jeff Community School provides a powerful example of FASTalk’s impact in an urban school community. FASTalk helped 98% of families find new ways to support their child’s learning - and more! 

Hear from families and educators in Louisiana about their experiences using a learning-focused school parent communication software. With FASTalk, families are incorporating learning into the home environment - reinforcing classroom instruction through weekly curriculum-aligned tips, activities, and conversation starters.  

Importantly, FASTalk is meeting a unique need for families. A 2023 survey found that 85% of FASTalk families report that FASTalk is the only place that they receive learning-focused information and activities to support their child. And this is despite their schools using up to seven other tools to communicate with families. Parents tell us they not only “enjoy knowing what is going on” with their child but also feel “more connected” to their child, the teacher, and the school. FASTalk helps them “reiterate concepts that were presented in class in a home setting,” helping “turn everyday life into fun learning.” Teachers also report that FASTalk saves them time and breaks down common family-teacher communication barriers.

How to Implement FASTalk in your School

FASTalk is an innovative school parent communication software that makes it easy for teachers to translate classroom instruction into tips and activities families can use to prompt learning-focused conversations outside of school. We’ve found that families are ready and willing to support when they have insight into what their child is learning, how their child is progressing, and access to tips for how they can help. Engaged families lead to successful students. 

Family Engagement Lab works closely with our district partners to ensure that platform is customized to meet their curricular needs. Our dedicated customer success representatives ensure that every partnership is successful by providing support with FASTalk configuration, training for teacher-users, and implementation materials for schools. Connect with our team to learn more.