Equity Issues in Parental and Community Involvement in Schools

Parents as First Teachers: Early Learning Programs for Ages 0–5

The home–school relationship begins when a child enters preschool or kindergarten. The underlying assumption behind the support of the first contact between the home and the school is the need for a strong educational experience to ensue. To support this, federally funded early intervention programs prescribe a set of pedagogical practices that low-income parents are to implement as early as the birth of a child. As their children’s “first teachers,” parents are expected to prepare their children for academic success from the ages of 0 to 5, a time period that is critical to cognitive growth. In the 1990s, President Clinton signed into law national education goals, Goals 2000 (U.S. Congress, 1994), which included the goal that “All children in America will start school ready to learn” (Goal 1). Although dismantled by the NCLB Act, the National Education Goals Panel (1993) provided objectives in their early childhood report that have largely influenced early childhood intervention programs today, specifically around school readiness. One key goal stated: “Every parent in the United States will be a child’s first teacher and devote time each day to helping his or her preschool child learn. To accomplish this, parents should have access to the training and support they need” (The National Education Goals section, Goal 1, Objective 2). President Bush’s early childhood education initiative Good Start, Grow Smart (U.S. Department of Education, 2002) targeted early childhood education for low-income families through improving federally funded programs such as Head Start, Title I Preschool, and Early Reading First. More recently, the Obama administration announced a $500 million Race to the Top—Early Learning Challenge as an incentive for states to improve the quality of early childhood learning programs “to reduce crime, strengthen national security, and boost U.S. competitiveness” and to “close the school readiness gap” (U.S. Department of Education, 2011). Consequently, early childhood learning programs dictate parent involvement practices for low-income families based on the expectation that (a) parents need interventions that will assist them in teaching their children in ways aligned with school and (b) education begins at birth. These practices, especially for nondominant families, are not without consequence in that they also introduce a set of cultural practices from the dominant community at the risk of subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 1999) and reductive literacy practices.

Parents as Learners: Family Literacy Programs

The Workforce Investment Act, ESEA, and the Head Start Act promote family literacy programs that are very popular (although top-down) and which are designed to address the home–school connection for districts and schools with culturally and linguistically diverse populations. In terms of their stated goals, these programs aim to mediate incongruences between home and school literacies (Caspe, 2003; Rodríguez-Brown, 2009). Most of these family literacy models target home literacy practices, such as intergenerational literacy programs (Gadsden, 1994) where parents are encouraged to read to their children or listen to their children read. Family literacy programs differ, however, in their understanding of the social, cultural, and political aspects of language and literacy use. In many cases deficit assumptions about nondominant families and their cultural practices tend to drive the purpose, design, and practices of these interventions (Valdés, 1996; Whitehouse & Colvin, 2001).

Family literacy program models thus appear to be influenced by two dominant views of literacy: (a) The decontextualized perspective that (all) families need help in gaining the necessary tools to assist their children with school and (b) the contextualized perspective that recognizes home and community knowledge and experiences (Gadsden, 1994). The first perspective subscribes to the notion that parents’ literacy practices are directly correlated with children’s motivation around literacy use, and therefore programs should work toward educating families about best school literacy practices. The second viewpoint acknowledges the power of literacy to liberate and empower children and their parents (Delgado-Gaitan, 1990; Freire, 1973), which aligns with productive, strength-building models of family literacy that we review later in the chapter. This viewpoint considers parents as bearers of knowledge, but the extent to which that knowledge is used in literacy activities or in equalizing power relations in schools is not always clear.

Parents as Partners: Partnerships, Contracts, and Compacts

The language written in the federal guidelines for implementing parent engagement programs, procedures, and practices is centered on the idea of partnering with families. The “Parents as Partners” discourse largely influences the ways in which districts and schools perceive parents and their role in their children’s education. Parent involvement provisions of Title I require that schools share information with parents on school programs, academic standards, and assessments in order for parents to be more “knowledgeable partners” (Epstein & Hollifield, 1996). One way schools attempt to partner with families is through the use of School–Family Compacts mandated by Title I to outline how families, school staff, and students will share responsibility for improved student academic achievement (U.S. Department of Education, 1996). This practice, however, still constructs a lack of parent involvement as endemic and as something that schools must address to get parents on board with their agenda, particularly on reform efforts. The notion of partnership does not always clearly communicate the kinds of interactions and relationships with families that would include “meaningful consultation, collaboration, and shared responsibility” (U.S. Department of Education, 1996). Additionally, a federal report revealed that less than one third of the states were in compliance with the use of School–Family Compacts and other Title I program components for parent involvement (Stevenson & Laster, 2008). More troublesome is the general language of the law that relegates parent responsibility to monitoring attendance, homework completion, and TV watching, which limits a parent’s role to one of surveillance, or “compliance officer or watchdog of the school system” (Mapp, 2012, p. 17). This misses the policy goal of shared responsibility and partnership. The school compacts function similarly to the Parent–School Contracts used by many charter schools, although one study documented how contracts were more a mechanism for compliance rather than inclusion, promising little beyond monitoring parents or using them as part of family selectivity criteria (Becker, Nakagawa, & Corwin, 1997).

Parents as Choosers and Consumers: School Choice

Whereas “school choice” typically refers to a somewhat marginal movement for specific educational reforms (i.e., vouchers), the notion of “parent choice” and the discourses that frame parents as choosers have been institutionalized into mainstream educational reform efforts, including NCLB (DeBray-Pelot, Lubienski, & Scott, 2007) in the form of the “opt out” option. This option enables parents to transfer their children from low performing schools and use reporting requirements designed to make parents “informed consumers.” The discourse of school choice emphasizes parents’ market-based choices between schools: public versus private school (Goldring & Phillips, 2008), school locations, choice among public schools (where available), selecting public choice options (such as vouchers/charters/magnets), and NCLB’s “opt out” option (Ben-Porath, 2009; J. T. Scott, 2005; Minow, 2010). Parents also often make choices about course placements, special education services, parenting training, language use, testing, family survival, and their own form of engagement with activities to influence their children’s school and education. All these choices are constrained by structural inequalities, but the “parent as chooser” discourse narrows the notion of involvement to an individual market-based selection between available options.

Debray-Pelot et al. (2007) identify two primary ideologies of “parent choice” movements—neoconservative and neoliberal. “Choice,” they argue, emerged out of conservative think-tanks that retain substantial liberal support through a civil rights framing. Neoconservative models are structured around ideas such as parent control and local control, whereas neoliberal ideologies are grounded in market-based principles and an emphasis on rolling back bureaucracy and creating greater freedom. There have also been progressive choice programs, such as those in Seattle, to desegregate through “controlled choice” aimed at reducing inequality between schools (Fuller & Emore, 1996; J. T. Scott, 2005). These progressive programs, which take race (among other factors) into account in placing students, have been undermined by the colorblind choice discourses espoused in the case of Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS; Dixson, 2011). As Dixson argues, “choice” discourses primarily give parents of color a forced choice in that the mechanisms of choice create a hierarchical system of inequitable distribution that harms nondominant families when that choice does not contest neighborhood segregation, racialized tracking, or inequitable resource/opportunity provisions, and existing systems of power harmful to nondominant peoples (e.g., capitalism, nationalism, patriarchy, coloniality, or Eurocentric rationality). Paradoxically, with the decision in PICS, Minow (2010) notes that the limitation on districts’ ability to use race as a means to promote integration constitutes the only restriction on parent choice programs. It is in this way that the “parent as chooser” notion is also based on and enacts a fundamentally colorblind discourse that constrains parent involvement and neglects power relations.

We have presented in this section tropes that frame parental and community involvement in education research and practice. We do so to underscore that while policies and practices of parent involvement may even change in response to educational and community movements that seek a better integration among stakeholders in education, schools and teachers remain largely the uncontested bearers of privileged knowledge. In the next section we draw attention to questions of race, class, and immigration status as a set of equity issues at the core of parent and community involvement discourses and practices. These issues are recursive and interrelated and require engagement in both local and broader social and political contexts of educational practice.

Race

Much of the literature on parent involvement that explores questions of racial inequality or disparity continues to treat race as a natural or essentialized factor (often explanatory) that attributes to racialized parents and their children negative developmental or moral characteristics (e.g., lack of involvement or caring). Although some authors have argued for separate models to determine differences across racial groups (C. E. Cooper, Crosnoe, Suizzo, & Pituch, 2010; Fan, Williams, & Wolters, 2011), the analysis of the structural and institutional characteristics (i.e., racisms) that shape parents’ and students’ experiences and involvement with schools can still be further explored. Ryan, Casas, Kelly-Vance, Ryalls, and Nero (2010) critique the tendency of much research to focus on parents as a limited construct that ignores the role of “significant others” such as siblings and the extended community, and thus negates the complexity of families. They also problematize the ways researchers impute differences to ethnicity that imply causal relationships and “operationalize” culture in problematic ways, while still ignoring the characteristics of the dominant culture. The findings of their study measuring White and Latino orientations toward school (notwithstanding the potentially essentializing comparison) contradict many dominant assumptions by asserting that Latino parents place greater value on academic achievement than do White parents. They argue that White parents place greater value on social achievement instead. They also emphasize the role of “cultural orientation,” indicating that the children of Latino parents who are more oriented toward Latino culture have stronger Spanish-language skills, whereas those who are more oriented toward White culture have stronger English-language skills. ³ They note that a focus on parent involvement as a key factor in the racial achievement gap is misguided and diverts resources and attention away from other important aspects of schools that affect student outcomes and experiences.

Williams and Sanchez (2011) point to the obstacles that poor African American families face in inner-city schools. They identify four critical factors limiting these parents’ involvement: (a) time poverty, (b) lack of access, (c) lack of financial resources, and (d) lack of awareness. Time poverty (Newman & Chin, 2003) refers to a family’s lack of time due to other commitments; access refers to illness and disability (William & Sanchez, 2011, note that poor parents are twice as likely to have difficulty with physical activity) as well as the timing of school events; finances refer to the very limited resources of some inner-city parents and the burden even seemingly incidental costs can impose; last, awareness may be impeded by traditional school-communication strategies such as sending papers home with children, which may not be effective means of communication between school and home. In this sense, what some parents of color experience as institutional barriers constitute channels of access for many White parents (Burton, Bonilla-Silva, Ray, Buckelew, & Freeman, 2010). Lareau and Horvat (1999) report on a study of school–home relations across class statuses showing how particular forms of social capital used by low-income African American parents were rejected by school personnel who dismissed critique and only accepted praise. In contrast, White parents, who began their relationships with the school from a more trusting stance (given also their less-problematic framings in the history of U.S. education) were welcomed to classrooms. Middle-class African American parents were able to negotiate their relationships with teachers by hiding concerns about racial discrimination while staying actively involved and alert. Howard and Reynolds (2008) urge us to consider the variability within middle-class African American parents; in spite of their economic position, some parents still experience racist attitudes as they advocate for their children and other parents may be reluctant to engage in the already set structures of predominantly White middle-class school settings.

Gartrell-Nadine (1995) found that African American parents were tracked into programs outside of the central operation of the school (such as African American PTAs), but the school’s central organizing bodies (the general PTA) remained part of the dominant group at school. White parents may also exert positions of dominance in parent organizing spaces (Posey, 2012). Traditional Parent Involvement Structures (TPIS), such as Back-to-School Night and the Parent Teacher Association, have been criticized as insufficient ways to engage families of color (S. Auerbach, 2009). Although there have been important research efforts to recognize parental agency (Barton et al., 2004) and nontraditional parent involvement practices, they may still fail to problematize White, middle-class behavior norms (C. W. Cooper, 2009) inherent in TPIS. It may be that precisely those forms of parental involvement that are most important to the ability of young people to maintain positive identities and negotiate school life from marginalized positions are those that contrast jarringly with schools’ expectations of parents.

Burton et el. (2010) point to literature demonstrating that many African American parents from all class backgrounds are engaged in the work of “racial socialization” (Peters, 1985), psychologically preparing their children for life in a racialized society. They note that research (citing Constantine & Blackmon, 2002; L. D. Scott, 2003, among others) has demonstrated how these practices also have a strong positive influence on students’ academic outcomes. Drawing on CRT frameworks, Reynolds (2010) points to the important role African American parents play in identifying, deflecting, clarifying, and teaching strategies to resist racism and racial microaggressions in the classroom (see also Chapman, 2007). Carter (2008) argues that collective critical race work is important for parents of color as their enhanced capacity to positively self-identify and create group attachment will enable them to more effectively contest racism in schools and nurture critical understandings in their children. C. W. Cooper (2009) has also pointed to the ways in which collective responsibility for children’s and the community’s well-being is leveraged through practices of “othermothering” (caring collectively for children) and legacies of protest in African American communities. It is also important to understand the processes through which dominant parents may socialize racially dominant students to enact and/or defend positions of racial domination such as White privilege and supremacy (Doane & Bonilla-Silva, 2003). These perspectives point to the fact that racisms are multiple and complex and that they intersect with other forms of oppressive structures (Burton et al., 2010; Collins, 1990; L. T. Smith, 1999).

Last, we address reports in the literature on the multiple forms of surveillance and discipline to which parents of color are disproportionately subjected both inside and outside of schools (Alexander, 2010; Gilmore, 2007). The impact of state systems from child protective services (CPS; Ong, 2003; Ferguson, 2001; Roberts, 2002), to the prison system (Duncan, 2000; Roberts, 2004; Romero, 2000–2001; Valdez, Fitzhorn, Matsumoto, & Emslie, 2012), to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE; Rogers, Saunders, Terriquez, & Velez, 2008) on the lives of many families of color is substantial and complex. Ferguson (2001) describes an African American mother’s despair after seeing her authority undermined when CPS intervened as she was physically disciplining her child for having run away. While not endorsing the form of discipline, Ferguson questions the ways in which schools and other state institutions may undermine parents’ discipline while simultaneously criminalizing them and their children. Ong (2003), similarly, examines the complex ways in which multiple state agencies intervene in the lives of Cambodian refugee families in a “complex mix of labeling, disciplining and regulating technologies” (p. 190) that reshapes their relationships with their children and their roles as parents. These multiple service and surveillance industries with which schools might intersect also racially constitute the relationship between parents and schools.

Class

Critical to discussions of parent and community involvement in schools is the impact of class status on academic achievement and opportunity. Anyon (2005) argues that poverty continues to be concentrated in urban centers, affecting primarily urban schools in levels dramatically similar to those in 1959, the time of the nation’s War on Poverty. Lareau (2000) details the school experiences of working-class and upper-middle-class parents to highlight the pivotal role of social class in parent involvement. She examines how school structures and practices are aligned with middle-class culture and how precisely through serving the middle-class agenda, schools privilege upper-middle-class parents who draw on their own social assets or cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1977) to secure advantages over other people’s children. The continued exclusion of the social and cultural resources of working-class parents magnifies the stratification of parent involvement practices and increases the educational inequities parent involvement policies are purportedly working to neutralize. Brantlinger’s (2003) study of middle-class families lends support to the notion that schools are shaped by intentional class dominance. Thus, social class is reproduced through the securing of advantage and privilege for one’s own children. By disregarding educational inequities affecting others, many middle-class parents come to understand school success as a consequence of their own superiority or meritocracy.

Lewis and Forman (2002) examine and compare the involvement of mostly White upper-middle-class parents at their neighborhood school to that of low-income African American and Latino parents at an alternative school in a low-income neighborhood. Drawing on their ethnographic work, they argue that social class relationships between parents and teachers were critical in structuring relationships and involvement, but not in the ways the literature would predict. They describe strained relationships between teachers and parents at the upper-middle-class school that included teachers hiding from parents and parents employing strict regulation and decision-making power over micro-details such as teacher supply budgets. They also note that teachers felt a sense of being under surveillance, judged, and disrespected. In contrast, they describe overwhelmingly positive relationships between parents and teachers at the alternative school marked by a sense of mutual interdependence, collective interest in the well-being of the children, and an open, honest, and collaborative relationship among the entire school staff as well as parents. They conclude that mutual respect was facilitated by both strong leadership and class relationships (parents being of similar or lesser social class than the teachers) at the school.

Posey (2009, 2012) examines the shifting politics of race and class as middle-class parents return their children to a neighborhood school previously attended primarily by families of color. She explores how the gentrification of the school created important opportunities including an infusion of economic resources, but also intense feelings of displacement, loss of control, and a not-entirely welcomed cultural shift for families of color. She elaborates on how White parents networked with one another to bring friends and allies into the school under the rubric of investing in the neighborhood and transforming the school—something they felt required a critical mass of (mostly White) middle-class parents. This is an important line of research examining the dynamics involving the return of White middle-class parents to urban schools, a sort of “indispensable parent” who undoes the harm of White flight and whose aim is to “save” the failing poor school. McGrath and Kuriloff’s (1999) study of a diverse suburban school district in the U.S. northeast revealed the negative impact White upper-middle-class mothers’ school involvement had on the involvement of working-class and middle-class African American mothers in the same schools. Besides differential access to schools due to class mobility, White mothers’ passive exclusion of nondominant parents from home and school associations, as well as the promotion of their own self-interests (e.g., tracking), further marginalized the African American community present in the schools. These are lucid examples of how politically powerful parents in public schools expect control over their children’s education, even at the expense of a quality education for nondominant students in the same schools. As Wells and Oakes (1996) explain, “Powerful parents demand something in return for their commitment to public education—for keeping their children in public schools, as opposed to fleeing to the private schools that many could afford” (p. 139). Affluent parents of successful students are less concerned that all children have access to a quality education and are more concerned that their own children have access to the best type of instruction, are tracked in Advanced Placement and Gifted and Talented Programs, and are recognized with strong letter grades and awards for their academic success (Kohn, 1998). This demand for differentiation (Wells & Oakes, 1996) or advocacy for tracking (McGrath & Kuriloff, 1999) is a type of parent involvement that can be detrimental to students and schools. As Casanova (1996) warns of “controlling parents,” they also deprofessionalize teachers and exacerbate the unequal treatment of all parents in schools further stratifying the involved and uninvolved parent along race and class lines.

Immigration

Despite a “generous” period toward immigrant students and their families during the civil rights period, schools have not always served well the needs of immigrant students and their families (Gándara et al., 2010). They have often demanded adherence to an educational system that ignores the knowledge base that multicultural and multilingual families bring and often fails to recognize the gravity of the decisions made by immigrant parents to border-cross (Villenas & Deyhle, 1999) and, in the case of those who are undocumented, to remain “uninvolved” in the particular ways undocumented parents are forced to remain, in order to secure educational opportunities for their children (Rogers et al., 2008). And although theories of immigration have traditionally focused on integration (Alba & Nee, 1997) and adaptation (Zhou & Banston, 1998) into U.S. society, as we have discussed, immigrants have been either excluded from schooling or forcefully Americanized, raising the social distance between family and school (Moll & Ruiz, 2002). The tendency for federal and state educational policies to stress Anglo-conformity is evident in programs such as family literacy interventions that target Latino immigrant parents (Valdés, 1996). These family literacy efforts work to socialize, if not indoctrinate, immigrant families into new linguistic and cultural ways of being. The rapid shift into mainstream culture has serious intergenerational effects. Portes and Rumbaut (1996, 2001a) report in their Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study that, although parents held high educational expectations of their children, they had to contend with a widening intergenerational gap brought about by the loss of the home language by the younger generations. Thus, the dynamics of immigration and schooling are complex and potentially subtractive and linguistically and educationally restrictive.

Offering an alternative explanation to linear theories of assimilation, Louie (2006) explores the implications of transnational frames of reference on second-generation Chinese and Dominican students, comparing their perspectives on their own educational trajectories. Her finding that Chinese students do not believe they are faring well in school whereas Dominican students believe that they are faring quite well seems “counterintuitive” in light of their actual social and economic statuses where Asian students fare economically better than Dominican students. But Louie urges us to consider the multiple frames of reference needed to push past linear theories of assimilation, given that transnational and ethnic/panethnic frames inform identity formation, education, and mobility of the immigrant second-generation. In earlier work, Louie (2005) discusses “parental sacrifices” of the first generation as reported in interviews with college students and their parents. Parents pointed out that despite having professional or higher level of education they still needed to take on service jobs to support their children. We note that this work also highlights the differential impact that immigration policies, for example H1B visa permits (those that allow temporary employment in specialty occupations), have on the educational opportunities of 1.5- (those arriving to the United States in their teens) and second-generation immigrant students.

There have been important research efforts to identify knowledge and practices in immigrant communities traditionally left out by school institutions, such as the ways families engage in complex practices of translation (Orellana, Reynolds, Dorner, & Meza, 2003; Valdés, 2003; Zentella, 1997). Notably there has been a wealth of literature addressing and expanding on the notion of engaged social networks in the funds of knowledge approach to bridging home and school contexts of immigrant families (N. González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992). This literature also reports an increased focus on parental agency in family–school connections (McClain, 2010) that bridges relationships between immigrant families and schools (Dryden-Peterson, 2010; N. González, 2005; Valenzuela, 1999).

Student perspectives of their own parents’ involvement in their education are not always found in the literature. One exception is that of Suárez-Orozco et al. (2008), who report on the results of the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Study, which indicates that immigrant youth believe that their parents have very high expectations for their academic performance. While these assessments, taken from interviews and survey questionnaires, matched parents’ reported expectations of their children’s education, the teachers in the Suárez et al. study invariably reported that immigrant parents did not care about or express an interest in their children’s education. Students also expressed that they felt that teachers or schools had high educational expectations of them (see also Valenzuela, 1999). Such wide, differing views of expected outcomes of education support the notion that there continue to be negative expectations about immigrant parents’ involvement in their children’s education, even when the children themselves witness otherwise.

Olsen (2009) considers immigrant education a contemporary battleground for U.S. ideological struggles, which she sees as shaped by concerns of “immigration, language rights, educational equity, and access for racial, cultural, and national minority groups, and also by issues relating to national security and foreign policy” (p. 818). Using as an example California’s battle over bilingual education through Proposition 227 in 1998 (a ballot initiative that required instruction to be conducted in English), Olsen (2009) highlights the role of organizing in advocating for the educational access and equity of immigrant education. She examines how a statewide coalition for English Learners (Californians Together) was able to mediate the ramifications of public policies and anti-immigrant campaigns that focus on exclusion and are based on centralized educational control. Language policies remind us of how limited parental choice is for immigrant parents who are often not eligible to vote on measures that impact the education of their own children. In this regard, the situation of undocumented families, and their involvement in schools in particular, is important to continue to emphasize. Martínez-Calderón’s (2010) study of AB 540 ⁴ students in higher education provides a nuanced view into the experiences of undocumented students and their families negotiating access to school and postsecondary education. The students in her study indicated strong parental support at home, but they also described many of the burdens placed on their parents and barriers they had to overcome. Such burdens included primarily financial duress, fear of the law (and for general safety), as well as conflicts experienced by parents trying to fit the multiple forms of accountability expected from them.

Mangual Figueroa (2011) examines the role of citizenship status among mixed-status Mexican families as they interact around schoolwork, in particular, homework. Her ethnographic study focuses on parents’ and children’s perceptions of migratory status and the challenges and opportunities afforded by their varying statuses. She discusses the ways local concerns of schools (that children do their homework and behave properly as a marker of school “citizenship”) are read by parents in a broader framework of the politics of legality in this country. ⁵ In this way Mangual Figueroa warns us of the conflation between the language of the school and the disciplinary power of the state. Moll and Ruiz (2002) have introduced the concept of educational sovereignty as an educational stance to counter what they describe as the enduring and disabling pedagogical conditions that immigrant Latino students and their families experience. They propose an educational sovereignty approach that engages the larger historical and unequal social structures underlying public education and aims to make them visible. In this way an integration of existing social and cultural resources across schools, households, and communities can bring about educational and social change that also includes immigrant students and their families as agents of this change.

Freirian School-Based Parent Organizing

Many authors working within a Freirian empowerment framework engage both a critique of mainstream parental involvement and of the notion of involvement itself (Borg & Mayo, 2001; Rocha-Schmid, 2010; Torres & Hurtado-Vivas, 2011). These authors problematize at least three aspects of parent “involvement”: (a) the school as an authoritative/disciplinary site, (b) deficit perspectives on parents and students, and (c) the divestment of the state in education and public services. The critique of the deficit implications of most “involvement” discourse argues that such programs see “parents and their children as ‘objects’ for rehabilitation” (Rocha-Schmid, 2010, p. 344; see also Borg & Mayo, 2001). Freirian authors also engage a broader critique that links community “involvement” with neoliberal political practices that attempt to shift state responsibilities onto individuals in ways that reflect the “all pervasive market ideology” in which the parent is in effect the consumer (Borg & Mayo, 2001).

We have been noting the critiques of parent involvement approaches that construct restricted parental roles that do not expand on the knowledge and experience that parents have. Torres and Hurtado-Vivas (2011) critically assess mainstream family literacy programs as, essentially, vehicles for narrow parental roles that include homework production, student surveillance, and the creation of increased burden on parents for the academic failure of their children (and their schools). Drawing on interviews with parents during family literacy projects they conducted in the colonias ⁷ of southern New Mexico and western Texas, they discuss among these burdens the fact that schools do not see parents as parents (but often as schoolteachers), the overburdening of homework, and the privileging of mainstream school literacies and knowledge. They further argue that teachers and administrators often lack the linguistic and cultural literacies to work with parents. In response, the authors propose a move toward political literacy for teachers and school personnel. Furumoto’s (2003) discussion of “critical parent involvement” bridges the boundary between family literacy, adult education, and parent organizing. The parents described in this research moved beyond traditional family literacy activities of schoolwork supervision, to include the development of a multicultural institute and brought parents into positions where they were teaching not only one another and their children, but also teachers.

There are a number of researchers concerned with parent organizing and decision making, and prominent among these scholars is Delgado-Gaitan (1993), who reports that relationships among researcher, school personnel, and parents can afford new ways of understanding Latino parent involvement in school. Delgado-Gaitan’s (1990) ethnographic study highlights the process of empowerment as experienced by traditionally marginalized families through their collective work. She examines parent participation through school and family literacy practices of 20 focal families and teacher/parent training sessions. The findings from this study, which she shared with families and school personnel, helped organize the Latino parent organization—the Comité de Padres Latinos (COPLA). Delgado-Gaitan argues that parent education programs for Spanish-speaking families need to facilitate understanding of the school system in the United States, done, of course, by regarding Latino parents as producers (and not just consumers) of critical knowledge.

Culturally relevant and empowerment models of family literacy (as opposed to top-down deficit models) strive to affirm diverse family literacy practices and encourage critical consciousness among the participants, families, and educators alike. As Reyes and Torres (2007) report, families can also influence the family literacy curriculum to make it relevant to their lived experiences and to achieve the goal of collective and transformative action that could empower them. Their description of the decolonizing family literacy educator serves as a counternarrative to traditional family literacy models and documents the ideological divide between family literacy programs that colonize families with White middle-class literacy practices and those that use Freirian (Freire, 1973) approaches to literacy that affirm diverse family literacy practices. As they argue, the decolonization of family literacy is thus a step toward reinventing the paradigm and the practices that shape the ways in which ethnically and linguistically diverse families engage with, and transform, notions of public education.

One such approach to family literacy is the Proyecto de Literatura Infantil, which is based on the notion that reading is an interactive process for the purpose of human growth (Freire, 1970). Targeting Spanish-speaking families, the program involves monthly evening meetings in which strategically chosen children books are used to prompt dialogue among families. Participants engage in four phases of creative dialogue: (a) descriptive, (b) personal interpretative, (c) critical/multicultural, and (d) creative transformation. Participants produce their own collective books where questions are posed by the parents to further dialogue. Additionally, time is spent reading and responding to stories and poetry created by parents and children in the program. Documented through ethnographic and participatory research (Ada & Zubizarreta, 2001), the premise behind the model is that parents have a wealth of knowledge, including family narratives, to share with their children and which can provide valuable resources for their emotional and social development. This project outlines possibilities for engaged participation of families in schools and does much to set the ground for the types of commitments that can develop into more organized forms of parent action.

Many Frierian approaches also engage families in parent and community organizing. An example of parent organizing is that of the La Familia initiative in the San Francisco Bay Area (Jasis & Ordóñez-Jasis, 2004–2005) where parents organized to challenge the way student math and science work were evaluated. These parents were able to influence and create access to upper track classes for historically underrepresented Latino students. The authors describe these efforts as both increasing partnership with the school and grassroots democracy. Borg and Mayo (2001) describe a parent-organizing project they codesigned with a middle-class parent at a predominately working-class school in Malta, which offers an interesting perspective on a program not located in the United States. The authors describe a “parent empowerment” project in which, through the use of group dialogue and thematic teaching led by the authors, parents articulated complaints about having little information sent from school to home, having school contained within classroom walls, and experiencing patriarchy (as a school-mom problem), prejudice, and resentment from older teachers who were replaced by parents following a previous teacher strike. The authors expressed some frustration, however, with the limitations of this form of organizing arguing that the school administrators primarily viewed parents as “helpers” and not as the more proactive “adjuncts,” and even “subjects” limiting democratic participation. This work points to the fluid nature of collaborative work that even under the best possible conditions, still must respond to local social dynamics as well as historical understandings of the role of parents in education.

Despite their explicit questioning of dominant/mainstream practices and their focus on transformative action, Freirian approaches may also have limitations. One concern is that in the efforts to treat parents as equals, Freirian approaches might elide existing (and real) power dynamics. Rocha-Schmid (2010) argues that despite their best intentions, facilitators (here we add researchers) and teachers engage in relationships of domination with parents, shaping discussions based on their own identities, ideologies, and interests. In her work, she examines the ways teacher-power is articulated through discursive techniques such as requesting attention, prompting, praising, shaping turn taking, framing agreement and disagreement, frequent interruptions, even intonation, and emphasis. While recognizing Freire and Macedo’s (1995) insistence that there is no such thing as neutral education and that all educational projects are inherently ideological and invested, Rocha-Schmid (2010) problematizes the role of facilitators in positions of power (the researcher included) that can eventually block transformative action and critique. There is a danger, she cautions, that Freirian-based family literacy programs may do a disservice to parents by deluding them into believing they are actually gaining knowledge that will empower them to engage in advocacy for their children while highly unequal power relations remain in place within the educational system. Similarly, the privileged role of the researcher needs to also be examined in terms of who stands to benefit from the researcher’s actions, especially in high-stakes circumstances (Delgado-Gaitan, 1993; Villenas, 1996).

Parent Community Organizing

The role of recent community organizing networks has been a counterbalancing force against federal mandates that place a premium on testing and school performance. But to change perceptions of parents as leaders who are engaged and concerned with the education of their children offers unique challenges. As Warren et al. (2009) note, “partnership” can become a code word for a one-way approach to supporting schools (their agendas, curricula, and mission). Recognizing the social and cultural distance between homes and schools within many low-income urban school districts, new proposals for a relational approach to parent involvement include identifying community-based organizations to serve as intermediaries between the schools and local families. Warren and colleagues examine community organizing, community development, and community service models that push past traditional involvement paradigms to develop meaningful collaborations between educational stakeholders and to bring about a shift in the culture of schools so that they are better aligned with the families they serve. While each model foregrounds the needs of the community, each has a unique focus: a community service model works to provide full-service schools that offer health services and programs outside of the school day to meet families’ most basic needs; a community development model strives to open community-based schools where the focus is on economic revitalization in the community; and a community organizing approach focuses on building parent power to push for social change in schools. In this way, schools can profit from the social capital expertise of community-based organizations and can collaborate with such organizations to develop parent leadership that is authentic and meaningful for the particular community served. One such collaborative, the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation, with a number of Alliance schools affiliated with it, represents one of the country’s largest community organizing network/collaborative today (Warren, 2011).

Hong (2011) introduces Chicago’s Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) as an example of parent involvement and community organizing. This collaborative develops parent leaders and works toward transforming neighborhood schools. LSNA offers a variety of educational programs, including the Parent Mentor Program, which strives to build parent power and leadership by offering nondominant parents the opportunity to learn about how schools operate and develop multiple ways of participating in schools. The Association is a grassroots effort to change school culture and schools conditions (e.g., overcrowded schools). Drawing on the work on ecologies of parental engagement (Barton et al., 2004), Hong proposes a three-phase framework that includes (a) induction, (b) integration, and (c) investment to explain parent participation in schools, where parent leaders become well positioned to make positive changes for the community’s schools. Hong identifies the dynamic process of parental engagement across settings, contexts, relationships, and levels, with the goals of mutual engagement, relationship building, and shared leadership and power. Hong suggests that by working on broad-based community issues (e.g., affordable housing, immigration reform, health care), community organizing groups facilitate positive home–school interactions and bring a holistic view to educational issues. Although sensitive to the ecological approach to educational transformation, it is important for us to note that there could also be limitations posed by the discourse of equal partners in what is a deeply structured system based on relations of power. We further note that organizing work is an additional burden for all families, but especially for those who are already overextended due to their marginalization in other spheres of society.

Home–School Connections: Funds of Knowledge

The funds of knowledge theoretical and pedagogical paradigm is often invoked and used by educators as a transformative practice in connecting home and school (N. González et al., 1993). In its beginnings, this participatory pedagogy project partnered teachers with a local university to study household knowledge in a largely Mexican working-class community in the U.S. Southwest in efforts to counter deficit perspectives of families and low expectations of nondominant students (Moll et al., 1992). The project’s premise rested on an understanding that only through the study of the sociopolitical, historical, and economic context of households could a static view of students’ and families’ culture be avoided, and as a consequence, the social and intellectual knowledge present in homes be recognized as viable resources to be leveraged in the classroom (Moll et al., 1992). From this perspective, families could be better positioned to have their needs addressed by the school rather than continue to subscribe to the traditional home–school paradigms that strive to quickly assimilate families into the structure and culture of schools while simultaneously stifling or subtracting student social development and academic success. We look to scholars expanding the notion of what constitutes funds of knowledge, such as Mangual Figueroa (2011), who encourages educators to validate students’ funds of knowledge beyond carpentry or farming, for example, to include other complex practices, such as border crossing or acquiring documentation papers for immigration status.

The empowerment-based approaches discussed here counteract deficit perspectives by leveraging a powerful critique of educational institutions and articulating the “power of parents” (Olivos, 2006) to become active agents, critics, and transformers of education and schools. We note, however, that these approaches are invariably mediated exchanges with a researcher, a parent trainer/leader, a facilitator, or some other institutional agent that “empowers” parents in order for them to be able to produce change. While clearly different from the historically deficit approaches outlined above, these approaches may unintentionally lend to a different deficit understanding of parents as deficient in empowerment or critical consciousness. This understanding can sometimes detract attention from the structural constraints and institutional forms that constrain parent power and shape educational inequality. It is also possible for these approaches to constitute parents as subjects within an educational system that is still dependent on both their subjugation and their labor (see also Larner, 2003). As Anna Tsing (2004) warns, while the aspiration for universalisms (such as social justice, equality, human rights) serves the needs of those who resist oppression and seek empowerment, they can also serve the needs of those in power. It is thus that this friction is a double-bind that “extends the reach of the forms of power [people] protest, even as it gives voice to their anger and hope” (Tsing, 2004, p. 9).