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The Circles of Influence model* was created by the Children, Youth and Family Consortium to visually illustrate the multi-layered influences underlying the issue of Educational Disparities.

Tip: Open and print the model to stimulate your own thinking and provide as a resource for parent group discussions. 

Briefly, the five circles are:

• The child: Everything children are born with and how they influence and are influenced by the world around them.
  
  
• Informal Supports: The influence of parents and parenting, siblings, peers, grandparents, extended family, neighbors, and informal mentors. It includes the quality of the relationships as well as the quality of the home environment.
  
  
• Communities: The influence of schools, faith communities, service agencies, business and communities at large. Includes access to quality resources, the physical and emotional environment, attitudes, and interaction and integration among people and institutions in geographic communities (e.g., "neighborhoods") and socio-cultural communities?
  
  
• Policy: Public and private policies. The most effective policies consider all the various influences, as well as the intended and unintended impacts on families and children.
  
  
• Society: Societal beliefs, values, norms, customs and practices, including those of media, technology and the arts.

In addition to the five circles, this model recognizes the cross cutting impact of race and ethnicity. All of the five circles, from individual children to society, are profoundly affected by race and ethnicity. It is critical that these influences be identified, acknowledged and included in developing strategies to address educational disparities.

The Circles of Influence: Educational Disparities is an attempt to systematically examine educational disparities using this ecological model. It raises questions about many different aspects of educational disparities and the achievement gap that occur in each of the circles of influence that affect children and their families.

These questions are not intended to be judgmental or prescriptive. They are intended to raise issues that research shows to have an effect on children’s ability to learn. Although children’s innate potential to learn is important, these external factors have the capacity to enhance and detract from that potential.

This framework is a work in progress. It is based on the original “ecological model” (The Ecology of Human Development) developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner in the late 1970s that is well-known to most family scholars and practitioners. The model has had many permutations and interpretations over the years, but at base level, it recognizes that each individual, as well as the family as a unit, affects and is significantly affected by interactions among a number of overlapping contexts, systems or environments. This includes systems in which the family and/or its members are directly involved, such as neighborhoods or schools, as well as systems that are more distant from direct interaction or influence, such as community, policy and society.

Readers will note the frequent use of the word “parent/s” in the Circles of Influence. The intention is that the use of the word parents refers to any adult/s who serve in a primary parental type role with the child. This maybe be one or more biological parents, adoptive parents, grandparents, guardians, foster parents, or others.

CYFC welcomes your comments. Feel free to contact them at cyfc@umn.edu.

Notes:  The information on this page is extracted from the CYFC's Spring 2008 Connections pdf of the Circles of Influence model to make it more accessible to parents. If you have trouble printing the CYFC file, try your "shrink to fit" setting.