The Family Backpack Project: Sounds Good But Where's the Data?

Last year, in Language Arts, Deborah Rowe and Jeanne Gilliam Fain shared findings on their Family Backpack Project.  At 249 urban students (48% African American, 35% Latino, 8% Middle Eastern, 7% European American, and 1% African) the program is large, especially so considering that, by design, it enlists not only students but their families as well.  The goal of the project is to promote school-home connections in a way that honors diversity.  The program divides the school year into six one-month units, and once during each unit a backpack is sent home with each student.  The backpack contains two books which are relevant to the unit, audio recordings of the books in English and in the student's home language, translations of the books into the student's home language, and an open-ended response journal to be completed by the student and family.

The program enlists a broad range of research to support it practices, including the 2008 article by Roberts referenced in a previous blog post, seeming to synthesize all the current trends around multiculturalism in the classroom today.

For all its research though, and for all the theoretical frameworks it attempts to employ, their assessments of the program are surprisingly sparse.  The bulk of the data seems to come from end-of-year survey responses.  The authors claim very encouraging feedback despite the fact that less than a third of families actually bothered to respond.  The low response rate suggests two things to me.  First, it implies a low degree of average engagement for the typical family.  Second, for those families who were sufficiently engaged and enthusiastic to have responded, the general tone of the response is likely to skew toward the positive.  Taking these responses as indicative of the general sentiment among all participating families seems very imprudent to me.  Adding to that the fact that, in general, good research looks at what people actually do and not simply what they claim to do on surveys, the findings discussed in this article seem very dubious indeed.

On a marginally brighter note, the family reader response journals indicated a slightly broader spectrum of participation.  Two thirds of families responded at least once in their journals (keeping in mind that there were six total opportunities to respond).  19% of all families responded once.  17% responded twice.  10% responded three times, 11% four times,  6% five times, and 4% responded all six times.  I am not sure whether to feel encouraged by these figures.  If I consider that two thirds responded in some way that sounds somewhat encouraging, but conversely, if I consider the fact that less than a third responded half the time I am not so encouraged.  When I consider that only 4% participated fully I am downright discouraged.  One piece of information which could have helped me make sense of these figures was the general trend of participation, that is, were families losing interest in reading at home over the course of the school year, or was the program picking up steam so that finally, by the end of the year, two thirds of families were participating?  The fact that this key piece of information is so conspicuously absent along with the fact that the authors seems a little overeager to present the program in a (dare I say “unrealistically”) positive light leads me to believe that the more unfortunate of the two trends was the case.