It’s no secret that children excel in school when their parents actively participate in their education. Tennessee educators have decided to give parents more incentive to be supportive. To persuade parents to get more involved, lawmakers signed the approval for parents to grade themselves with a report card and another law will create parent contracts that give them step-by-step guidelines for helping their children. While a few other states are considering similar systems, only a few have passed laws creating evaluations or contracts that put helping with homework or attending teacher conferences into writing, according to the Associated Press.

“It’s a proven fact that family engagement equals students’ success,” said James Martinez, spokesman for the National Parent Teacher Association. “It’s one of the key ingredients to education reform, to turning around schools, to improving our country’s children’s knowledge base compared to the rest of the world.” In the two struggling Tennessee schools where the program will pilot, parents will get their self-evaluation forms while their children are in kindergarten all the way up through third grade.