About the Project
As part of our ongoing work to build family educational involvement policy and practice, HFRP is collaborating with the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) to serve as the National Coordination Center for the Parental Information and Resource Centers (PIRC) program. The national PIRC program provides federal funds to the 62 PIRCs working to promote successful parental involvement policies, programs, and activities throughout the United States and its territories. HFRP is providing technical assistance and support to the PIRCs, with a focus on evaluation strategies and approaches.
The PIRCs: Growing and Changing
More than ever before, federal, state, and school policies recognize parents as important partners in their children’s education. PIRCs play a critical and evolving role in making family involvement a reality. Beginning in 2006, PIRCs are repositioning as statewide resources, expanding on their history of providing direct services to families and schools. With leadership from the Coordination Center, PIRCs are rapidly becoming a national think tank for parental involvement, which will inform the field at large. A major component of this innovative and field-building work is a new focus on using evaluation data to understand, improve, and promote effective practice.
Our Role and Its Impact
With our collaborators at SEDL and the U.S. Department of Education, we have shaped a new evaluation approach designed both to ensure the quality of PIRC services and to generate lessons about effective practices for the field. This approach includes building collaborative relationships between program directors and external evaluators, increasing the robustness of program data, and creating a plan for using evaluation findings to improve PIRC services. As a result of this effort, all of the PIRCs are working toward collecting high-quality data on a number of legislated outcomes, including improved home–school communication and school readiness. Several PIRCs have also elected to conduct research studies that use robust methods to examine the effectiveness of specific parental involvement approaches.
Emerging Results
Through intensive work with all of the PIRCs, the technical assistance team has witnessed a shift in PIRC directors’ perspective about evaluation toward an understanding of the critical role of data for program quality and sustainability. Many PIRCs have increased the quality of their evaluation methods and measures, and several PIRCs are considering adding a quasi-experimental or experimental study to their evaluation portfolio. The PIRCs are becoming incubators of innovation, whose evaluation and research studies will not only inform PIRC services, but make an important contribution to the field and to parents and educators across the country.
PIRC Team
- Heather Weiss is Senior Advisor to the National PIRC Coordination Center
- Suzanne Bouffard is Senior Research Analyst for the National PIRC Coordination Center
- Helen Westmoreland is Research Analyst for the National PIRC Coordination Center
- Priscilla Little is Senior Evaluation Advisor for the National PIRC Coordination Center