It was about 25 years ago when I read an article about a new home visit program that had started in Sacramento. It felt like a bell went off in my head. At the time, I had many questions like, where do you start, and what do you do if you haven’t done anything related to family engagement beyond the usual, low-impact stuff like parent-teacher conferences? I fretted about it for so long. I’d been thinking about things like a community walk, but when I read about Parent Teacher Home Visits, I thought: perfect. I need to find out more.

One thing led to another, and I got hooked up with Carrie Rose (former executive director of Parent Teacher Home Visits). She asked me if I would come and speak at a conference she was having in Sacramento. I said yes, but with a condition. The condition was that I wanted to go on a home visit because I’d never been on one, especially one like theirs. She obliged. Karen Mapp came with me on that trip.

Thankfully, I got to go on three home visits, which were wonderful experiences for me to be with veteran teachers who had been doing home visits for a while. I was able to see not only how a parent might experience a home visit but also how the teachers were experiencing it. They told me all sorts of things. Many teachers told me that they had been so discouraged that they were going to leave teaching. They didn’t know how to connect with families, and they didn’t feel they were getting support from anywhere. Then, they learned how to do home visits, and it changed everything.

Making Connections

From that trip, Karen and I started beating the drum about Parent Teacher Home Visits everywhere we went. I’d be speaking to a group of educators, trying to sell them on the idea of engaging families. When I’d start talking about home visits, the room would get really quiet. I knew I was on to something. I’d tell them about my own experiences in Sacramento, and then I’d start hearing the usual concerns: the union will never let us do this. How fortunate it was that I already had an answer for that because the unions backed PTHV from its very beginning, and I was fortunate enough to play a role in making that connection.

I was involved with the National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education (NCPIE). This organization was founded in 1981 and went on until 2014, when I was founding the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement. NCPIE provided professionals in the field an opportunity to share ideas through regular meetings, many of which took place at NEA’s headquarters in Washington, DC. I arranged for a meeting to discuss Parent Teacher Home Visits. Janis Hagey (a now-retired NEA analyst and family engagement champion) came, and it lit a fuse in her. From there developed a whole deeper level of engagement between PTHV and NEA.

After that, I was connected to the Flamboyan Foundation, which was expanding from Puerto Rico into Washington, DC. They were trying to figure out what they wanted to do to have a greater impact with family engagement in education and they asked for my ideas. I said, there’s no such thing as a silver bullet, but Parent Teacher Home Visits is the closest that I’ve seen. It totally changes the relationship between the school and its families. I told them about the origin story from Sacramento, and how the community organizing group went out and talked to families. Families told them, “We’d like to be able to do things with the schools, but they don’t let us in. They look down on us. There’s not much trust.” The folks at Flamboyan were all over it. They loved it from the start and that started another great partnership for PTHV. It was a big success in Washington DC, and from that partnership, PTHV launched a national evaluation study that provided the evidence base.

A Full-Circle Moment

I recently had a full-circle moment come out of that partnership as well. I live in Washington, DC, and I encouraged my daughter and her husband, and my grandchildren to come move in with us during COVID. I knew what a tough time they were having managing in their tiny apartment, so I just said come, and they did. My granddaughter is biracial and has special needs, and she goes to our local public school.

One day, my daughter got a call from the school saying they’d like to do a home visit. I didn’t even know that our local school was a part of the PTHV program, but they were. Sure enough, the teacher and her partner came. I’ve never seen my granddaughter so elated. She was just beaming. She sat on the sofa between them. She snuggled with them and listened to everything. It was such a wonderful hour with them. I never thought I’d see a home visit this way, with my granddaughter in my own house. It was absolutely beautiful. That was the bonding experience we all needed. It had been tough on my granddaughter, who was in fourth grade at the time. She had to say goodbye to her old friends, and we’d had this traumatic shutdown. From there, she blossomed. She became so much more active in school and even went out for the cheering squad.

Gathering Evidence

Building the evidence base for the effects of families on academic achievement has been my life’s work. Back in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president, I was working for the National Committee for Citizens in Education. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and all its parent involvement requirements were wiped out on the grounds that they undermined the authority of local officials. We reasoned with many people on Capitol Hill and in the administration, who were convinced there was no evidence that involving parents had anything to do with student achievement. Well, I knew there was research from my work on the War on Poverty. I wrote the first research review on parent involvement and student achievement,  The Evidence Grows. Next was Beyond the Bake Sale, which I later updated with Karen Mapp. This was a turning point because this was available on the internet and was backed by a federally funded agency. This got the word out there about the evidence for family engagement. And just recently, we published Everyone Wins! The Evidence for Family-School Partnerships & Implications for Practice. This is the fifth book in our evidence series and the first one to include Parent Teacher Home Visits because PTHV now has three evaluation studies.

What we were trying to achieve in the latest book was to collect evidence for not just how students do better, but also highlight the research on its effects on teachers, families, schools, and communities. From our experiences with home visits, we knew it changed the way teachers saw families. We knew that home visits made teachers more likely to stay in the profession. We knew teachers reported feeling more supported when they had home visit practices. They were getting valuable information from parents that they could use to motivate kids in class. Home visits help them become more effective teachers in that way.

Then we started to see the schoolwide and community impacts. We saw that communities got healthier when parents and schools were working together, and parents were able to find their voices and get support from schools. Parents were becoming leaders and organizing other parents. This engagement created a healthier civic culture. There were so many benefits; that’s how we got the title because it’s true: everyone wins.

Bringing It All Together

Over the years, we’ve interviewed numerous teachers to learn what changes after they conducted home visits. As the practice was beginning to flourish in D.C. Public Schools, we hosted a number of forums for families to learn about Parent Teacher Home Visits. I dragged some people from the U.S. Department of Education there. As a result of that, Karen was able to persuade Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to come to a school site to learn about home visits. It was at Stanton Elementary, which was at the bottom of the bottom, but with a family engagement strategy that included home visits, had improved its test scores by about 20 percent in one year! Karen began developing the Dual Capacity-Building Framework out of this work. It was phenomenal. PTHV fits perfectly with all the different pieces of the framework.

It not only gives teachers knowledge and skills, but it builds their connections. It changes the way they see parents, so it changes their cognition, and it builds their confidence. So you got the four C’s going. Most professional development is just knowledge and skills. That’s it. It doesn’t go deeper than that, and that’s why it doesn’t work. We learned you have to give teachers a transformative experience that causes them to reflect and change not only their practice, but their attitudes, their beliefs, and their mindsets. And that’s what PTHV does so beautifully, in a totally experiential, authentic way.

My hopes and dreams are that every single school district in the country does Parent Teacher Home Visits as standard practice and sees it as part of professional development and part of the way they do school. So much of what schools do is the traditional, low-impact stuff they’ve always done. Once they begin a home visit practice, it’s synergistic, and they learn there’s a whole different way that we could connect to our families. It makes all the difference.