By Megan Colburn, Marketing Lead, Khan Academy Kids and mom to two elementary school kids
Open almost any district strategic plan, and family engagement is in there. Open the calendar, and you’ll usually find the same three things: a fall open house, a monthly newsletter, and a parent portal (for which no one remembers their password).
I’ve been on both sides of this one. I run marketing for Khan Academy Kids, and I’m a parent of two elementary school kids. I still can’t tell you what came home in the folder last week.
Family engagement is one of the better-studied questions in education, which is good news if you’re holding a budget. The research is consistent that engagement matters. It’s also clear that the kind of engagement you build matters more than how much of it you do. Some of the most common tactics turn out to be the weakest ones.
Knowing which type of family engagement to fund is worth real money. Below is what the evidence says, six tactics to follow as a result of the evidence, and a look at how one district put a plan together.
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What the research says about family engagement
Four findings are worth knowing before you fund anything. The first provides a clear reason for why family engagement earns its place on most strategic plans, while the other three might change what you actually build.
1. The association with achievement is large, and it holds across groups
A 2005 meta-analysis by William Jeynes in Urban Education looked at 41 studies of urban elementary students and found that parental involvement overall was associated with academic outcomes by roughly 0.7 to 0.75 of a standard deviation, which is a large effect by education research standards. These findings were also true across racial groups and for both boys and girls.
This is why family engagement never falls off a strategic plan. The association isn’t seriously in dispute; these are correlational findings. Families who are highly involved differ from families who aren’t involved in other ways too, and a meta-analysis can’t separate those.
2. When schools set out to build engagement, the gains are smaller
Finding 1 looked at families who were already involved. That’s a different scenario than looking at what happens when a school sets out to increase involvement. The second scenario is the one you’d actually be funding.
A second Jeynes meta-analysis, published in Urban Education in 2012, looked at 51 studies of parental-involvement programs running from PreK through 12th grade. Those programs were associated with higher achievement by about 0.3 of a standard deviation. For pre-elementary and elementary students, the figure was around 0.29. In rough terms, 0.3 is the size of the shift that would move a typical student from the middle of the class to somewhere around the 62nd percentile if it landed evenly on every student, which it never does.
Set your expectations with the program number, not the bigger one. The 0.7 figure describes families who were already engaged. It doesn’t tell you what a new initiative will produce. When you see a large-effect size attached to a program, it’s worth asking which questions the underlying study asked—previously engaged families or starting from scratch. Moving 0.3 is a solid result, and it’s worth presenting to your board as one.
3. The type of engagement matters more than the amount
The largest synthesis in this area covers 448 studies and more than 480,000 families. It was published in Psychological Bulletin in 2019 by Barger, Kim, Kuncel, and Pomerantz. The correlations with academic adjustment ran from .13 to .23, which is modest but consistent across a very large body of research, and they held up over time. Social and emotional adjustment showed positive associations too. The authors specifically highlighted the value of involvement outside the homework context.
If your family-engagement plan is mostly “help your child with homework,” you’re leaning on the weakest thing available. Talking with a child about school and showing up to school events were positively associated with academic adjustment. If you’ve ever wondered why the reading log never seemed to do much, this is part of the answer. That should reshape what goes in the folder.
4. The real constraint is capacity, on both sides of the relationship
The Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships starts from a blunt premise: family-engagement initiatives underperform largely because neither educators nor families have been given the capacity to partner. It was developed by Karen Mapp with Paul Kuttner and published by SEDL in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education in 2013. Mapp released an updated Version 2 with Eyal Bergman in 2019.
Training your teachers to run a family night is half the job. The other half is building families’ confidence and knowledge, and almost nobody funds that half. If you run publicly funded PreK, the Office of Head Start’s Parent, Family, and Community Engagement Framework is the parallel structure, this is your first step.
Six tactics to follow as a result of the evidence
Most of the tactics below can be achieved by simple changes in habit, with very little impact on your budget.
1. Pick one channel and one send day.
Consistency is key. Choose a single communication platform, send on the same day every week, and send in each families’ home languages with a live-translation option for direct teacher contact. Then, resist the urge to add a variety of communication channels.
A predictable rhythm does two jobs. Families learn when to look, and teachers get a deadline that keeps the habit alive past September.
2. Show families the teaching, not just the assignment.
Have you heard a parent quip, “They don’t teach math like when I was in school.” Teach methods have changed, and parents also need a bit of education in order to provide real support at home. A short video from the teacher showing how a skill was taught that day lets a parent use the same language and the same strategy at the kitchen table.
This is the dual-capacity idea in its cheapest possible form. Most families want to help. What stops them is the worry that they’ll teach the subject incorrectly and confuse their kid.
3. Ask families to talk about school instead of just supervising homework.
Ask a second-grader how their day at school was, and the answer will likely sound something like “good” or “fine.” Broad, open-ended questions can sometimes feel too big for a child, especially after a full day of learning.
Send home two or three conversation prompts tied to the week’s learning. What did you build today? What was hard? Who did you sit with at lunch? Make these prompts part of the weekly message, not a separate initiative.
Our school recently introduced us to the Abound Parenting app, which sends these prompts right to parents’ phones along with daily notifications.
This one comes straight out of the Barger meta-analysis. Discussion about school showed positive associations with academic adjustment, while the weakest evidence had to do with homework. Conversation prompts cost nothing and they work in any home language and at any reading level, without a need for a device.
4. Rank what you send home.
Most days, my kids come home with a folder overflowing with homework, artwork, and PTA announcements. Somewhere in there, there are updates from their teachers or the school. On a good day, those updates land in a pile on the kitchen table, where they’ll inevitably be discovered weeks later.
If a take-home folder holds five things, designate which one matters most, and mark the rest as optional. Some districts do this with a nightly bag; a sticky note works too.
Faced with an ambiguous pile, the safest thing a family can do is pay attention to none of it. Completion drops. Ranking the work respects a family’s time and raises the odds that the thing that matters most gets done.
5. Give families an at-home tool the child will open on their own.
Will it survive a Tuesday night? That’s the real test for anything you send home. The tools that hold up are the ones a young child will open without an adult prompting them to do so. This enables a teacher to assign practice aligned to what the class is actually working on.
Khan Academy Kids is one example, and I’ll be upfront that I work on it. Khan Academy Kids is free, ad-free, and built by a nonprofit. It’s geared toward children ages two to eight and has more than 4,000 standards-aligned activities across literacy, math, and social-emotional learning, plus a library of 400+ read-aloud eBooks. Teachers assign activities that match classroom instruction, so families aren’t guessing what to practice.
In our house, we use Khan Academy Kids as a 15-minute transition between school and home while Mom and Dad are finishing their workdays. It’s consistent and easy for the kids to use independently, and I know they won’t see any ads or content they shouldn’t see.
A tool a child opens voluntarily moves the enforcement burden off the parent, which is the single biggest reason take-home work stalls. Tell teachers what quality means here: active learning, not passive consumption.
6. Ask about access before you design the plan.
Survey every family during the first week of school. Three questions are enough:
- Do you have reliable internet and a device a child can use at home?
- In what language should we communicate?
- Who is with your child at homework time, and when does that time period occur?
A digital home extension plan fails silently in households without reliable internet. Asking first is what lets you offer a print alternative before a family falls behind, and it makes your engagement plan defensible on equity grounds when someone asks.
One district’s version: School City of Hobart, Indiana
In a 2025 edWeb session with Khan Academy Kids, leaders from School City of Hobart, a district of roughly 4,000 PreK through 5th-grade students in Northwest Indiana, walked through how these pieces fit together in one place.
A few things stood out:
- They start before kindergarten. Hobart contacts families starting at their kid’s birth, so families build a relationship with the district years before kindergarten registration.
- They rank what goes home. In kindergarten, a nightly “learning luggage” bag goes home. It carries the activities that are the priority for that night, plus extra practice for families who have time.
- They show the teaching. Most teachers post daily videos to Canvas to demonstrate how they taught a skill that day, so a parent can watch the model before practicing at home. Khan Academy Kids assignments follow what the class is already working on.
- They celebrate loudly. Principals make the rounds to celebrate students who hit milestones. Students earn charms for their backpacks. Kindergarteners color in progress toward goals they set themselves. And the superintendent emails staff when good data comes in.
- They ask about access. Kindergarten families are surveyed at the start of the year to ask what technology they have at home. Written communication is translated into families’ home language, a language line gives teachers live interpretation, and a library card push at the beginning of the year signs kindergarteners up to check out books.
One line from that session has stuck with me. It’s from Sarah Gutierrez, who leads Hobart’s Early Learning Center:
“Relationships are key. We’re in this together for the child.”
Hobart doesn’t have the same resources you don’t have. They work within the constraints you’d recognize, including mixed technology access at home and teachers who already have a full plate. What’s different is that the work is specific and it’s owned at every level, from the superintendent on down the line.
How to measure family engagement without a research partner
You don’t need a study to know whether this is working. You need one instructional measure you already collect and the discipline to segment it.
- Pick a diagnostic you already administer two or three times a year.
- Name the specific engagement behavior you’re trying to build, whether that’s weekly activity completion, app-usage minutes, or conversation-prompt participation.
- Compare students’ growth, from those who often exhibit these types of behaviors to those who don’t.
- Look at the results in the spring and acknowledge any correlations, not as evidence that any one single program caused the difference.
Hobart did a version of this with their iReady benchmark data, comparing students with higher Khan Academy Kids usage against students with lower usage. Their leaders describe the result as encouraging. That’s a district correlation, not a controlled study. Higher-usage students may differ in other ways, and you should say that out loud when you present it.
A hedged internal correlation still beats an attendance count in a budget conversation because it’s tied to learning. The research above tells you what to expect. If a program moves 0.3 of a standard deviation, you’re in the range the literature would predict for a well-run initiative.
Frequently asked questions
Does family engagement actually improve student outcomes?
Yes, though the size of the effect depends on what you measure. Meta-analyses find a strong association between overall parental involvement and elementary achievement, but those are correlational. Studies of actual involvement programs find more modest effects, around 0.3 of a standard deviation. The largest synthesis to date, covering 448 studies and more than 480,000 families, found small positive associations with academic, social, and emotional adjustment that persisted over time.
What kinds of family engagement work best in early elementary?
Consistent two-way communication, conversations about school at home, and short activities tied to what the class is learning. Research points toward involvement outside the homework context being more valuable than homework supervision, which is where many district plans concentrate their effort. Building families’ confidence matters as much as building teachers’ skills.
What are home extension activities?
Home extension activities are short, targeted tasks that are sent home and continue the specific skill being taught in class. They work best when they’re ranked by priority rather than piled, when optional extras are labeled as optional, and when families are shown the method the teacher used rather than only being told what to practice.
How should districts communicate with families in early elementary?
Choose one platform and send any communication on the same day each week, in families’ home languages, and with a live-translation option for direct teacher contact. A predictable rhythm teaches families when to look and gives teachers a deadline that sustains the habit. More channels usually means less reach.
What at-home learning tools work for PreK to 2nd grade?
The tools that hold up are the ones a young child will open without an adult enforcing it, as well as those that let a teacher assign practice aligned to classroom instruction. Khan Academy Kids is a free, ad-free app for kids ages two to eight. It has more than 4,000 standards-aligned activities in literacy, math, and social-emotional learning, plus 400+ read-aloud eBooks. Districts looking for a web-based teacher dashboard, cross-classroom and district-level reporting, and implementation support can add Khan Academy Kids for Schools starting at $5 per student.
What is the Dual Capacity-Building Framework?
It’s a family-engagement framework developed by Karen Mapp with Paul Kuttner, published by SEDL in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education in 2013. It was updated to Version 2 by Mapp and Eyal Bergman in 2019. Its central argument is that family-school partnerships fail when neither educators nor families have been given the capacity to partner, so effective programs have to build both.
How do you measure family engagement in a way administrators can use?
Segment an instructional measure you already collect, such as a two-or-three-times-a-year diagnostic, by the specific engagement behavior you’re building, then compare growth. This produces a correlation rather than a causal finding, which is worth stating plainly. It’s still far more useful in a budget conversation than event attendance because it’s tied to learning.
The evidence does something better than tell you family engagement works. It tells you which parts carry the weight: weekly communication, conversation at home, ranked activities, and a tool a child will open on their own. Three out of four of those things cost nothing.
Most of what works here is small. That’s the part I didn’t expect when I started digging into the research.
Khan Academy Kids is free for families and teachers, and it doesn’t have any ads. If you’re building a home extension plan for PreK through 2nd grade, teachers can start assigning this week. We also built a version for multi-school rollout when you need it.
Explore Khan Academy Kids for Schools
- Download the free Khan Academy Kids app.
- Publicly funded programs with PreK classrooms and 200+ students can get Khan Academy Kids for Schools for free for the 2026–27 and 2027–28 school years. Check your eligibility.
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