Background  of PIQE
PIQE’s Mission:  To promote family involvement in a child’s educational process thereby strengthening the working partnership between the home, school and community. Our mission is built on a four point philosophy: All parents love their children and want a better future for them. Every child can learn and deserves the opportunity to attend and complete a college education. Parents and teachers need to work together to ensure the educational success of every child. For children, learning is a natural process that parents and teachers facilitate.

The Parent Institute for Quality Education (PIQE) is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to innovative educational reform by informing and motivating low-income parents to become knowledgeable about how to navigate the school system and seek the educational opportunities available for their children.

Since its inception in 1987, PIQE’s programs have evolved into a comprehensive nine-week training course taught in fourteen languages by professional facilitators at no cost to the parents.  PIQE’s classes provide parents with the tools to become advocates for their own children.  PIQE instills confidence in parents to communicate with the school and promote academic progress and social development in each of their children by helping them identify and avoid detriments to learning. The goal is to enable children to succeed in school so they can contribute to the quality of their community. Our classes stress the positive impact of family interaction, respect, and positive communication.  Parents learn to have more confidence and to understand the role that they must play in the education of their children.  An essential belief and goal of the PIQE program is high versus low expectations for their children.

Since the program started in Sherman Elementary School, October 1987, over 330,000 parents have graduated from PIQE's (9 week) parent involvement training classes from 1,200 elementary, middle and high schools in districts within San Diego, Los Angeles, Fresno, San Jose, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Monterey, Sacramento, Stanislaus, Alameda, San Francisco, and Shasta counties. PIQE modifies its curriculum to ensure that it is culturally competent, relevant and sensitive to the cultural background of all parents. In addition, approximately 50,000 parents have participated in PIQE's follow-up "coaches" program that provides one-on-one information to parents during a six-month period on how to access school services and promote the aims of PIQE for parent involvement.  PIQE seeks to:

Encourage parents in taking a participatory role in assisting their children to:

• Improve parent/child relationships.
• Have child remain in school --retention and reduce dropout rate.
• Improve student performance in school classes.
• Graduate from high school.
• Attend a college or a university.
• Earn a college diploma.

Background of the Problem
Many of the low income students in the San Diego area are the first in their families to consider attending College. Most of these students come from a different cultural background (Latino) that operates under different schooling systems. In the American system the lengthy applications, interviewing processes, financial aid paperwork is intimidating to many families. The PIQE aids these families gain the knowledge necessary to help their kids make their way to College and in helping parents stay in track with the necessary information needed to be the best counselor to their children when that time comes. PIQE also encourages parents to be proactive in analyzing different Colleges that could be potentially a perfect fit for their children.

Statistical information about national/local high school education levels[1] indicate that Latino/Hispanic students have:

• A national High School graduation rate of 68%.
• About a fifty-fifty chance of graduating High School (American Indian, Latino//Hispanic  and African American) .
• Graduation rates for students that attend schools in high poverty and racially segregated areas lag from 15 to 18 percent behind their peers.
• California High School graduation rate is 68.9%
• In San Diego City High School graduation rates is 61.3%
• Latino//Hispanic High School graduation rate nationally is 53.2%
• Latino//Hispanic High School graduation rate in California is 57%
• Latino//Hispanic High School graduation rate in San Diego City is 47%
• The national average for College enrollment among High School graduates is 61.7%
• The national average for College enrollment among Latino High School graduates is 51.7%

It is projected by the Center for Community Change (2001) that 80% of all federal prisoners and 75% of youth involved in juvenile court system are high school dropouts. Furthermore, it costs an estimated $51,000 per prisoner, per year to address their incarceration, yet the reasons why young students dropout of school are multiple and complex. The more trauma and instability an adolescent lives, the more obstacles to their education and development. It is also understood that under-skilled and undereducated youth will have difficulty maintaining a job. If a student dropouts and stays out of the workforce for very long, the consequence can last a lifetime (Center for Community Change, 2001).

The social benefits of connecting and empowering ethnically diverse and low income parents with the education of their child are many. Among the most salient is the ability of our communities to:

• reduce the 80% underachievement of K-6 grade low income students;
• increase the potential of youth to become productive members of our society;
• decrease family social dependency on community support;
• increase the self-reliance of families;
• increase the tax base of our communities;
• decrease social conflict and human disempowerment;
• increase tax revenues for community services, and
• improve the quality of life of families and communities.

Study design
This study was intended to serve as a performance evaluation for PIQE’s programs and examine its impact on student persistence and college enrollment. The main idea was to contact those parents that had graduated PIQE’s program (by taking 4 classes or more) and interview them about their children’s education, too see if they had graduated High school and enrolled in College. A random sample was pulled from PIQE’s database for the years 1997, 1998 and 1999. The sample was taken from these school years given that by this year (2004) their children would have the necessary age to have graduated from High School and hopefully having further developed their education. A random sample was pulled to focus the study on the Latino/Hispanic population that took the program in the San Diego area. PIQE plans to extend this study to other region in the future based on the success of this study as it is detailed in the section that follows.

• Contacts attempted: 700 PIQE graduate parents were called by focusing on calling those parents of which their children would have the necessary age to have graduated High School (database from 1997, 1998 and 1999).
• All contacted parents were Latino/Hispanic.
• Response Rate: 241 parents responded and were interviewed (34% response rate).
• The 241 parents interviewed had a total of 493 children of which 351 were applicable to this study (due to age) and the remaining 142 were still in elementary, middle or high schools and therefore could not be considered for the purposed of this study.