An investigation of the roles and functions of parent advisory councils serving Spanish-English bilingual projects funded under ESEA Title VII

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify and examine the roles and functions of parent advisory councils serving Spanish-English bilingual projects funded under ESEA Title VII. It was also the intent of this study to determine if there existed signif icant differences on the ranking of roles and functions by the participants with respect to the specified variables of: position of participant, sex, age level, education level, bilingualism and ethnicity. The roles and functions under the program areas of planning, implementation and evaluation were identified through an extensive review of the literature. Twenty-one Spanish-English bilingual projects with grades Kindergarten through eight, funded under ESEA Bilingual-Bicultural Programs 1976-1977 were randomly selected from <ul>Guide To Title VII ESEA Bilingual-Bicultural Programs 1976-1977</ul>. The participants from these bilingual projects were advisory council chairpersons, and project directors.

The research instrument developed was a questionnaire which solicited from the participants demographic information on the advisory councils and also asked participants to rank, according to primacy, roles and functions under the program areas of planning, implementation and evaluation.

The data were analyzed by the Kendall Coefficient of Concordance W and Multivariate Analysis. The .05 level of significance was chosen for both tests.

The results indicated that there existed a high degree of agreement within each group of respondents on the ranking of roles and functions. The only exception was a low degree of agreement by chairpersons ranking functions under evaluation. The results also showed that the independent variables identified made no difference on the ranking of roles and functions. The only exception was the sex variable on the ranking of roles. Male respondents ranked the roles of advisor, supporter and director first, second and third respectively, while female respondents ranked the roles of supporter, director and advisory first, second and third respectively.