Building Connections with Parents

Abstract

HUCKLEBERRY Finn, exasperated with the elders around him, declares at one point that he never wants to be civilized. That episode came to mind as I pulled out a couple of press releases from the avalanche sent by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to tell everyone how much money the feds are giving out. The ones I picked up had to do with grants to black and Hispanic groups to increase parent involvement, especially in the choice provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. There was some chagrin among the architects of the choice components that not as many low-income parents demanded to choose different schools this fall as they had expected. If parents just knew more about the law, ED reasoned, then they would exercise their right to move their children to another school. The problem is that the approach chosen by ED is about as unfounded as everything else directed at increasing parent involvement over the past 30 years. Joyce Epstein of Johns Hopkins University, who has probably done more research on parent involvement than anyone else, contends that the rhetoric considerably exceeds any payoff from various interventions. But that is not because of a lack of effort. The War on Poverty of the 1960s influenced the decentralization of schools and insisted that poor parents and communities should have the power to make changes in their schools. A recent article by James Traub in the New York Times Magazine called this activism, exemplified by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy in New York City, an eventual tragedy because it led to scandalous management of schools and ever-declining academic performance of students. The state legislature this year gave control to the mayor of New York City and, in effect, ended decentralization. The next wave of federal strategies designed to increase parent involvement focused on creating more school-like behavior at home. This approach took the form of such formal programs as Parents As Teachers or informal efforts to encourage parents to read books at home, support homework, and play educational games. Soon afterward, attention turned to the literacy levels of poor parents. Improving family literacy became another weapon in the arsenal of ways to corral families and get them to support the aims of schooling. Now, the newest intervention is parental choice. All of these efforts probably have some merit. None, however, has made any serious attempt to understand the phenomenon of parental support for the goals of schools or the matter of what school factors will earn parental commitment. Everything being done -- from innocuous newsletters, to the Local School Councils in places like Chicago, to parent centers, and even to vouchers -- depends on assumptions only partially supported by any research or deep knowledge about what makes family/school connections meaningful. In many ways, parent involvement is already privatized, as Henry Levin and C. R. Belfield of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, assert. Family circumstances have a very large influence on educational outcomes, greater even than the impacts of differences between schools. Other researchers support this contention, noting that for better- educated, wealthier families, the schools serve to reinforce their own values and efforts. Families with lower income and less education, on the other hand, often believe that it is up to the schools to educate their children. They do not see the families' role as putting pressure on the schools. Many teachers would agree that it may be easier to deal with silence from parents than with pushy, demanding, well-educated parents who believe they are just as capable of making professional teaching judgments as teachers themselves. …