In April 2020, Learning Heroes fielded PARENTS 2020, a nationally representative survey of parents and guardians (sample size of 3600+), designed to better understand how families are supporting their children’s academic development during school closures due to COVID-19. Insights from this survey build off of five years of parent research, and highlight the unique challenges faced by parents and guardians during this unprecedented moment in time.

Since 2016, we’ve worked to give parents an accurate picture of their children’s development and achievement, yet we see through the trends in our data that gains have been modest and place-based. To truly serve all students, and underserved students in particular, it is time to strengthen and create systemic communications that knit families and schools together, centered around delivering an accurate and holistic view of student progress. We believe the trends in this report point to an urgency for collective action to help ensure parents have access to what they deserve – an opportunity to most effectively support their children’s education.

For four years in a row, Learning Heroes data has revealed a disconnect between parent perceptions of their child’s achievement and actual student performance. This disconnect has a significant impact on how parents engage with teachers and schools. Parents 2019 goes even further, for the first time, delving into perceptions and attitudes of parents of high school students. As the stakes get higher, how do parents of older children perceive their child’s achievement, and how does this perception shape their attitudes and involvement in their children’s education? Parents 2019 offers important insights from high school teachers and parents of K-12 children that can help shape and fuel our collective work. Contact us for more information about the research.

Building on previous Learning Heroes research, we delved into why nine in ten K-8 parents believe their child is on grade level, despite the fact that teachers report less than a third of their students show up prepared for grade level work.  Parents deserve to know if their child is performing at grade level, so they can best advocate for their child's success in school. This report includes a deep segmentation of parents nationally with children in grades 3-8 to be more responsive to various parenting styles.  It also includes our first-ever nationally representative survey of grades 3-8 public school teachers. We found that providing parents a little information about their child's and school's achievement goes a long way in giving parents a more accurate picture of their child's progress. Contact us for more information about the research and/or the Puzzle to Plan Family Worksheet pilot tool.

Research shows that children’s social, emotional, cognitive, and academic development are deeply intertwined, like the strands of a rope, and come together to create successful adults. To help educators and community leaders understand how parents feel and talk about the development of these skills in their children, and the role they see for schools and after-school settings, Learning Heroes conducted a series of 10 focus groups and a nationwide survey of more than 2,000 parents who have children in K-8 public schools and used parents’ insights to create resources that educators can use to explore this topic further. The Developing Life Skills in Children: Roadmap for Communicating with Parents focuses on the parents of elementary and middle school students because this is when parents are first likely to be introduced to these concepts by schools. Developing Life Skills has been published in the Journal for Higher Education Theory and Practice, a publication of North American Business Press.