Research Center

You want to improve parents’ satisfaction with your schools.

What should you do?

What does the research say about what you need to do to satisfy parents? Who’s doing great work, and what are they doing?

When we present survey results, audience members often ask, “What can we do to get better?”

We went straight to the source to learn more: the schools that are doing the best on the most important metrics.

Over the past two months, we’ve shared what works for staff and students based on research and on-the-ground examples from district leaders. This month, it’s parents.

In an increasingly competitive educational landscape, ensuring that parents are satisfied with their children’s education is crucial for districts to maintain enrollment, funding, and programming.  

Fortunately for schools, the elements parents look for are very similar to the things that students and staff want, as well.[1] Parents want to know that they can trust their schools to provide rigorous academics and safe environments. Most of all, parents want to feel invited as partners in their child’s growth at school.

High Expectations and Safety

The New Glarus School District is a standout on many of the parent survey metrics that most closely align with overall satisfaction. Among them is “The school has high expectations for my child.” This item tracks the perceived quality of a child’s education, and the research literature echoes our own survey results: the more rigorous parents perceive a district to be, the more satisfied parents are.[2]

New Glarus Superintendent Jennifer Thayer notes the care they take to be “really clear about what curriculum we use, what the standards are we focus on,” including regular communications when they were piloting and developing new curricula in recent years.

“We share, ‘Here’s the curriculum we use, here’s exactly what’s taught to your child,’ so parents I think know exactly what’s expected in that regard,” Thayer said. “It’s not a secret.”

Attending to safety measures in and around schools also pays dividends. New Glarus scores extremely well on the “My child feels safe at school” metric. Thayer believes that’s a mix of physical safety improvements like additional doors for people to enter the school and communication when they are doing drills.

“Especially at the elementary level, before we’ll ever do a drill, we’ll inform the parents, ‘We’re going to do this, here’s how it’s at your child’s level,’” she said.

Personal Relationships and Parental Involvement

For Tomahawk School District superintendent Wendell Quesinberry, face-to-face meetings with parents are a key ingredient in building trust and community—over and above interacting via apps, emails, or texts. And this reflects a longstanding research consensus that parental involvement improves just about every outcome one might care about.[3]

“The two easiest forms of communication that we have right now are also, in my opinion, the absolute worst forms of communication, especially when two people don’t know and understand (each other) very well; that’s email and text messaging,” Quesinberry said. “If we don’t have consistent and frequent opportunities for face-to-face communication, relationships are not going to get built very well.”

His district, like many, is making efforts to open their doors to families and community members. Tomahawk saw a 3.5% increase in its School Perceptions parent survey score from 2022-23 to 2023-24 on “The school provides opportunities for parental involvement.”

Quisenberry said they have found success when events are about families supporting their kids and their activities at school but have found lower attendance with speakers talking about bullying, parenting skills, or other informational events. Parents often want to help, not simply to be informed, the research suggests.[4]

“We’re focused on growing in this area and having more showcase nights. How can we get our doors open and get families in this building to meet our teachers, to meet our administrators, to meet our paraprofessionals, and our other staff members?” he said. “To see how clean our environment is, how organized our environment is, how it’s branded to try to ensure that kids are in an environment that they’re proud.”

Open and Honest Communication

Safety, academic rigor, and proactive invitations are all important to parental satisfaction levels. But clarity, honesty, and openness in communication is also vital to keeping parents on board.[5]

In some cases, a district encounters bad news. At that point, honesty is more important than ever. That’s what Hastings Public Schools Superintendent Tammy Champa found when she began there and implemented a parent satisfaction survey. The results were not as strong as what she saw in some key student areas.

“The biggest thing is just about transparency and really being truthful and forthcoming about that,” Champa said. “Radical acceptance.”

In fact, she appreciated the data because it created a baseline for making improvements. Without data to illustrate effectiveness, she said, just saying you’re making improvements isn’t useful.

Improvement is exactly what her district saw from 2023-24 to 2024-25, when every index on our parent satisfaction survey improved – including “Educational Excellence” by more than 5%.

Specifically, data allowed her to understand that safety and security was a significant concern. From there, she explained the district’s plan to improve it, and now can show how they followed through. That follow-through creates “trust with the district.”

“The biggest thing is for people to make sure they know we’re listening,” she said.