Opinion: How Utah can increase parent involvement and access to curriculum

A lot has been said recently about parents’ rights in schools (and rightly so), but a lot less has been said about parent responsibility in schools. A key part of that parent responsibility is engagement in schools and constructive partnering with teachers, all of which has important benefits for student achievement.
Like professional educators, parents are often busy, overburdened and overwhelmed. And like the weight of new legislative demands on teachers, asking parents to do more without sufficient support is ineffective and demoralizing.
So, how can public policy boost parent engagement?
It could increase parent access to information about curriculum in ways that bolster the parent-teacher relationship. A new Sutherland Institute report looks at possible pathways for this in Utah.
Plenty of information exists about public education, and many teachers are already making efforts to offer access to parents about curriculum and assignments. Still, policy reform can push existing efforts from good to great by encouraging information on curriculum to be as accessible, digestible and understandable as possible so parents can meaningfully use it to partner in their child’s learning.
Utah has shown a commendable commitment to offering parents information about curriculum while avoiding undue mandates on teachers.
Utah is among the roughly 17 states that offer some sort of law about giving parents access to what students are learning in public classrooms. State law says that school boards must make instructional materials “readily available and accessible” for parents to review, and they must offer them yearly notice on how to access the information, including information on their website. Likewise, state law says school boards must include parents in an “open process” when approving district curriculum. Districts are using a learning management system called Canvas, which allows teachers to post key information including assignments, which parents can access.
Thanks to recent legislation, the state school board employs a Parent Liaison and Engagement Education Specialist, who helps parents navigate questions or concerns they have within the public education system. The need for such a position suggests that it’s not just the existence of information online that matters to parents, but the opportunity to make sense of it all. Without a personalized liaison for every parent, the details and implementation of existing policy are necessary for on-the-ground use by busy parents.
For instance, while the good news is that all Utah districts have a policy on parent access to or participation in what their child will be learning in school, not all policies are easy to find online. Understanding what the policies are is a key first step. Likewise, most districts — 27, to be exact — host information about curriculum directly on the district website, but the others do not appear to have it available.
Many district websites could also employ simple fixes to make information about curriculum even more user-friendly. For example, most district pages with information about curriculum have broken links, and many are not easy to find — buried more than three clicks from the homepage. Others are not organized clearly by subject and/or grade.
Updating or organizing this information on a website is a simple, non-legislative reform that could help a busy parent be efficient when searching for information about district-approved instructional material and what their child might be learning. Going further, districts or the state board could adapt information about standards into simple lists of topics for each grade, built for parents rather than practitioners to understand.
To advance the work of individual educators without overburdening them with new requirements, the Legislature could enact a program that rewards teachers who proactively make curriculum information accessible to parents in a robust way.
Teachers already doing this work would receive additional professional or financial benefits — and those who aren’t yet might be incentivized to do so. Because such a policy encourages rather than mandates improvements, it respects teacher workload and professionalism.
Hopefully, as more teachers have capacity to increase access to what they are teaching in their individual classrooms, parents have more capacity to engage in their child’s learning, assisting teachers with student outcomes and hopefully creating a virtuous cycle.
Important strides have been made in the state to help parents understand what their children are learning. With creative approaches that respect our education practitioners, we can accelerate the process of parents becoming the education partners they have the right and responsibility to be.
Christine Cooke Fairbanks is the education policy fellow for Sutherland Institute.