Steven Lorch is the founding and current Head of School of the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan (New York). Previously, Dr. Lorch was at the Hartman High School in Jerusalem, Mount Scopus Memorial College in Melbourne (Australia), and the Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy (formerly Akiba Hebrew Academy) in suburban Philadelphia.
Steven Lorch uses parent feedback surveys to help improve his school’s performance.
The Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan has a long tradition of conducting parent surveys. We’re in our 19th year, and last spring we completed our 18th annual survey of parent satisfaction. Here’s why.
Theory
Three recent scholarly articles identified six distinct rationales for conducting parent surveys:
1. Together with surveys of teachers and students, surveys of parents enable school leaders to understand school climate (Schueler et al., 2014; Gulla and Jorgenson, 2014). Gaining an accurate picture of school climate is important because it is associated with student outcomes, including academic achievement, attendance, and discipline problems; enrollment; and school improvement (Schueler et al., 2014).
2. Parent perceptions indirectly influence student outcomes by (a) shaping students’ perceptions of school climate, and hence their achievement; (b) promoting or discouraging parent involvement, which is associated with student outcomes; and (c) affecting enrollment and retention (ibid.)
3. Parent surveys enable school leaders to determine whether parent perceptions of school climate change over time, and whether different groups of parents – for example, parents of children in different grades – have similar or different views (ibid.; Held, 2013).
4. Parent surveys help school leaders identify areas for improvement and undertake school improvement efforts based on data (Held, 2013; Gulla and Jorgenson, 2014).
5. Once interventions have been attempted, parent surveys enable school leaders to assess whether parent perceptions have improved or not (Schueler et al., 2014).
6. Finally, by correlating parent survey responses and enrollment and retention data, school leaders can determine the relationship between parent perceptions of school climate and their enrollment decisions (ibid.).
All in all, parent surveys are a promising strategy for both assessing and promoting school success.
On the other hand, parent surveys are not a panacea. In particular, if they are not well designed, they can lead schools astray. For example, education writer, expert, and gadfly Alfie Kohn has argued that many school surveys employ leading questions, and he is particularly wary of questions that contain hidden assumptions that the educational status quo is the only alternative (Kohn, 2011). Well-intentioned parent surveys can also turn into “venting mechanisms, particularly if they are anonymous and include qualitative, open-ended responses” (Gulla and Jorgenson, 2014). This can lead to the paradoxical outcome that a broad-based attempt to gather data in order to give voice to large numbers of parents is overshadowed by a small but vocal minority whose strongly articulated views are given disproportionate weight in interpreting the results. Finally, if the survey attracts a low response rate, the validity of the results may be insufficient to draw valid inferences (ibid.).
On balance, the data generated by a well designed parent survey can contribute significantly to a school’s understanding of its reality and its planning for, and assessment of, improvement efforts.
Practice
When Schechter Manhattan began surveying parents in its first year, it was with the intention of identifying areas for improvement. In my first report to the school community on the results of the survey, I wrote: “These data constitute an invaluable resource for the various bodies of the Board and the staff that are responsible for reviewing, evaluating, and working towards continuously fine-tuning the school’s program” (Lorch, 2000).
Over the years, other benefits of parent surveys have become more apparent, even as additional sources of data have emerged alongside parent surveys, as they also enable the school’s leadership to assess the program and select high-priority areas for improvement. Among these other data sources are surveys of faculty, students, and alumni, deliberations of the school’s Education Committee, the decennial accreditation process (both the self-study and the visiting committee’s report), the quadrennial strategic planning process (including the consultant’s input), professional development working groups and individual staff members’ goal setting, and analysis of standards-based and standardized test scores. Parent feedback is still extremely valuable, but it is now contextualized in ways it could not be when, in the school’s early years, it was one of the few sources of data used for school assessment and improvement.
In our current thinking, the parent feedback cycle helps us achieve five goals:
- Partnering with parents
- Tracking broad trends in parent satisfaction over the years
- Accountability to the community
- Evaluating the school program
- Generating innovative ideas and promising initiatives
There is more to each of these benefits than meets the eye.
Partnering with parents
We subscribe to the view that parents and teachers both have important insights into children, and the expertise of each is essential to supporting children and maximizing their learning. Parents have an overview of their children, both in the range of their experiences in and out of school and in observing changes in them over time, that teachers lack, while teachers understand children in the context of other children in the class grouping and can contextualize the child’s learning within their professional expertise in learning theory and subject matter. By sharing their unique perspectives with each other and listening to each other, teachers and parents both improve in their ability to provide the structures and supports that children need to thrive (Lawrence- Lightfoot, 2003).
We view our position as lying in the middle of the spectrum of school attitudes toward parents, between schools whose educators discourage parental involvement, whether overtly or subtly, because it threatens their professional prerogative, and schools that empower parents by inviting them into the classroom to participate in the educational process and sharing educational decision-making authority with them. Schechter Manhattan parents know that their children’s teachers value their perspectives because the teachers initiate contact with them often throughout the year, even when they don’t have particular information to communicate, in order to learn more about the child and just to stay in touch. They also invite and welcome parent-initiated contact and incorporate the information that parents share in their understanding of the child and their plans for meeting his or her needs. Our longstanding commitment to eliciting parent feedback in an annual survey, analyzing the results, and incorporating our findings in our planning for the following year reflects this more general approach to parent partnership and is understood by parents in light of it.
Tracking broad trends in parent satisfaction
In addition to a survey providing a snapshot of parent perceptions in the days or weeks during which it was conducted, it can also reveal changes from one year to the next, or even longer-term trends over several years, or many. The key to a school’s ability to use a survey for this purpose is the consistency of the questions from year to year. Schechter Manhattan’s parent survey has changed very little over the years. From the outset, it has consisted of three sections – a series of questions about parents’ satisfaction with the school and its program, a series of questions about the degree to which parents are pleased by their child(ren)’s progress in a number of academic areas – both on a five-point Likert scale – and a series of open-ended questions inviting narrative responses. In its first three years, when the school was young and the parent body small, it was administered as interviews; for the past 15 years, it has been a written – and, more recently, an online – survey.
Of the 43 questions that currently comprise the survey, 37 are identical to those that appeared in the very first survey. One question, about research skills, was rephrased as “inquiry skills.” When technology was added as an academic area, a question was added about it. A question about financial matters was split into two: 1) financial administration, and 2) tuition and tuition setting. Finally, over the years, three questions have been added in an attempt to capture parents’ overall satisfaction:
- I have confidence that, after 8th grade, my child will be able to attend a high school that is right for him/her.
- I have confidence that my child is being prepared for the high school education s/he’ll receive after graduating from Schechter Manhattan.
- How likely are you to recommend Schechter Manhattan to a friend?
The stability of the parent survey over many years has enhanced its utility, both as a trend tracker and as a whole.
Accountability to the community
When parents enroll their child in a Jewish day school, they enter into what they and the school intend and hope will be a long-term relationship – four years, or nine, or thirteen, or more, depending on the grades offered and the number of children in the family. Maintaining and strengthening parents’ confidence and, with it, their commitment to re-enrolling their child(ren) year after year, is the key to enrollment stability and growth, and a continuous process. One of the factors that promote parent confidence, alongside others such as the school’s reputation, their child’s interactions, and theirs, with teachers and other staff, and their perception of their child’s progress, is the school’s accountability.
Jewish day schools, like many other public and non-profit institutions, are expected to be answerable to their constituencies and, in particular, to the parents of their students. Accountability entails publicly reporting key actions and outcomes and taking responsibility for them. Parent surveys, and the reporting of their results, are one of many accountability tools available to schools. (Others include financial reports, state-of-the-school presentations, curriculum guides, outplacement statistics, and standardized test scores.)
Schechter Manhattan’s annual parent survey promotes accountability, not once, but three times each year. Each May, parents are invited to share their feedback by clicking the link to the survey, completing it, and submitting it. In June, the results of the survey are reported in detail, with in-depth analysis, in the school newsletter. And over the summer, plans for incorporating key findings from the parent survey in the coming year’s program are featured prominently in the summer information packet. Because of these multiple touches, the parent survey is a particularly effective way to reinforce the message that the school is not only accountable for the education it provides, but that it also takes parents’ views very seriously.
Evaluating the school program
Schools have more accurate indicators of educational quality and program effectiveness than parent perceptions, for example, measures of students’ progress on formative assessments over time, teachers’ close observations of student performance on challenging academic tasks, and supervisors’, mentors’, and coaches’ careful observations of teaching practice. But while parent surveys aren’t the most objective gauge or the best reflection of schools’ effectiveness, they are an indispensable and nearly irreplaceable measure of one critical contributing factor to school quality: parent confidence in the school program, which, in turn, is correlated with sustained enrollment, parent involvement, and student perceptions and performance.
The parent survey at Schechter Manhattan has served the school well over the years, focusing the attention of staff on programs and subject areas in which parent confidence was relatively low. For example, there was a time, ten years ago, when satisfaction with home-school communication was a lagging indicator, receiving an overall rating of 3.6 on a scale of 1 to 5. This provided clear evidence that action needed to be taken to improve communication, and several enhancements were identified and implemented. By the following year, satisfaction had risen to 3.9, still on the low end but no longer an outlier, and by the year after that, homeschool communication was rated 4.2, comfortably in the mid-range.
Similarly, at different times over the years, the parent survey has revealed relatively weak parent confidence in such areas as facilities, parent education, science, and children’s physical development. In each case, a plan was developed and put in place to ameliorate that area, and parent satisfaction, as reflected in parent survey results, improved.
Generating innovative ideas and promising initiatives
Parent surveys can sometimes be fertile sources of ideas for school improvement. Once data have been compiled and analyzed for areas of relatively high and low parent confidence, school leaders should not be so quick to set the surveys aside. Some parents include in their narrative comments promising suggestions that address not only their own areas of concern, but also those of other parents. Mining qualitative responses to open-ended survey questions in this way is not the same as identifying concerns based on narrative responses and does not give disproportionate weight to vocal parents. Rather, by determining areas of relative strength and weakness based solely on quantitative data and then using narrative feedback to seek promising interventions, a school can enjoy the best of both types of survey tools: the confidence in the representativeness of the findings that quantitative data provide, and the ability to benefit from individual respondents’ helpful ideas that qualitative responses make possible.
At Schechter Manhattan, ideas proposed by parents in recent years that were translated into specific initiatives included revamping the Algebra I curriculum in eighth grade to increase the likelihood that graduates would place into honors math classes in ninth grade; expanding communication during the kindergarten year as parents transition from preschool to school; and examining the progression from grade to grade of the different steps of the scientific method that students experience and master; to mention just a few.
However, more often the ideas and plans for specific initiatives to address parental concerns or lack of confidence have come out of the summer administrative retreat, an annual review and planning process in which the parent survey results are examined and priorities for the coming year are set. In addition to the parent survey, other data are considered, including leadership team reflections, faculty and student surveys, a review of previous years’ priorities, Education Committee deliberations, and accreditation visiting team recommendations. Recent initiatives and innovations that have been developed in this forum to address parent concerns that surfaced in the survey include technology enhancements, parent ambassador programs, a school musical, and a streamlined process for financial aid assessment.
Conclusion
Everyone believes that parents and teachers should be allies and partners. After all, they are both engaged in the important and precious work of raising, guiding, and teaching our children. But more often than not, parents and teachers feel estranged from and suspicious of each other. Their relationship tends to be competitive and adversarial rather than collaborative and empathic. Their encounters feel embattled rather than peaceful and productive. (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2003)
Every Jewish day school educator I know bears scars from previous interactions with parents. Not all parents – far from it – but even the occasional contentious communication with an unreasonable parent looms large in the educator’s memory. Some readers may wonder whether offering parents an official forum for complaints and suggestions is wise.
However, parent surveys can also support educators in confrontations with difficult parents. Survey data are a resource that makes it possible to point out to parents that their educational ideas are not shared by other parents. Remember: parents have special insight into their own children, and those insights can make a valuable contribution to the school’s understanding of students’ individual strengths, interests, and needs, but as a rule, they have no special insight into how children, including their own children, learn; educators do.
Parent surveys reveal valuable information about a school’s impact that cannot be gathered in any other way. They also enhance school improvement efforts and build parent confidence in the school’s accountability and transparency. Jewish day school leaders who elicit parents’ opinions annually are doing themselves and their students a great service.
References
Gulla, J. & Jorgenson, O. (2014). Measuring our success: How to gauge the “Value Added” by an independent school education.” Independent School Magazine (73) 3.
Held, D. (2013). Learning from parent voices: How to turn positive perception into enrollment growth. Boston: Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education.
Kohn, A. (2011). What parents aren’t asked in school surveys – and why. The Washington Post. May 23, 2011.
Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. (2003). The essential conversation. New York: Ballantine Books.
Lorch, S. (2000) “How’re we doin’?” Daf Kesher (4) 35 (June 8, 2000), 2-4.
Schueler, B. E., Capotosto, L., Bahena, S., McIntyre. J., and Gehlbach, H. (2014). Measuring parent perceptions of school climate. Psychological Assessment (26) 1, 314-320.
PARENT SURVEY FAQs
Q: How long should a parent survey be?
A: Long enough to elicit useful information; short enough not to discourage participation. If the purpose of the survey is to assess school climate in general, a seven-item scale such as the one developed by Schueler et al. (2014) may suffice. To obtain more detailed information, a more extensive survey is needed. Schechter Manhattan’s consists of 38 multiple-choice questions and 5 optional open-ended questions and can be completed in less than 10 minutes.
Q: How frequently should it be given?
A: Annually. Though some consultants recommend two or even three administrations per year, we discovered at Schechter Manhattan that the response rate suffered when parents were asked to complete more than one survey a year.
Q: What is considered an acceptable response rate?
A: It depends on school size and the level of confidence in the non-randomness of your results that you want. The standard for publication-worthy social science research is 70%. For an internal school survey, 50% should be the minimum target. Since the Schechter Manhattan survey went digital, the response rate has ranged from 41% to 81% (last year, it was 68%).
Q: Should we develop our own survey or use the one offered by PEJE and Measuring Success?
A: If you’re first considering a parent survey, and especially if your school lacks expertise in survey construction and analysis, the PEJE/Measuring Success Jewish Day School Parent Survey would be a good choice, especially because it provides comparison data to other schools. Schechter Manhattan opted for its own survey because we didn’t want to lose the longitudinal comparison data we’d collected for over 10 years before the Measuring Success survey came into existence.
Q: How should the survey results be used?
A: Time should be set aside for school leaders – professional and lay – to review the data and understand their implications. The key findings from the survey should be incorporated in the school’s annual planning cycle, the Head of School’s annual performance objectives, and the administrative team’s annual agenda.
Q: Should we publicize the results? What if they’re bad?
A: How to report your results to your parent body and wider school community is an important internal marketing decision. Ideally the results should be reported in the first year, but if your marketing team decides to disclose only general information and not specific outcomes, by the second year there should be enough improvement in some items to publicize the results in some detail. Remember: administering a parent survey and reporting its results is in itself a confidence builder, almost irrespective of the actual results.