Parent involvement in education? A Foucauldian discourse analysis of school newsletters

Shauna Kingston

doi:10.1177/17577438211011623

Abstract

The Ontario Ministry of Education ( 2010 ) puts forth parent involvement as a solution for underachievement and as a resource for building better schools. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of school newsletters reveals that efforts to engage parents also function as a neoliberal strategy designed to govern parents. Using Foucault’s theory of governmentality, I show how the newsletters compel parents to invest in their children’s schooling and judge their value as parents in relation to their ability to produce good neoliberal citizens. I discuss how the newsletters depict ‘good’ parents as those who: (1) do not offer input into schooling; (2) make education a parenting priority and (3) raise good neoliberal citizens. The newsletters represent a strategy for cultivating neoliberal parents who do not ask more from schools and instead demand more of themselves in terms of preparing their children for school and for life. Problems with this approach are that: it asks parents to take up their children’s schooling in ways that push out other family priorities and it shuts down potential collaborations between parents and schools that could challenge neoliberal subjecthood. I call for reformulating discourses of ‘good’ involvement in ways that allow for more equal parent–school partnerships.

Highlights

The Ontario Ministry of Education (2010) puts forth parent involvement as a solution for underachievement and as a resource for building better schools
Parent engagement feels more like receiving instruction than participating, and while I continue to attempt to engage with the school, I have come to understand that parent involvement is imbued with what Michel Foucault (1977) calls disciplinary power, or circulating forms of discipline that teach parents their role and place in their children’s education
I have examined school newsletters to reveal the types of involvement promoted by schools and kinds of parents they attempt to produce

Summary

Introduction

The Ontario Ministry of Education (2010) puts forth parent involvement as a solution for underachievement and as a resource for building better schools. The Ontario Ministry of Education (2016: n.p.) advises that being involved in your child’s education gives them ‘an important head start in school and in life’, citing such benefits as ‘more positive attitudes about school’, ‘fewer behavioural problems’ and ‘more success with homework’ This orientation to parent engagement is described as ‘involvement for achievement’ and suggests that our school system’s shortcomings can be resolved by mobilizing the appropriate participation of parents (Antony-Newman, 2019: 146). Schooling, and efforts to involve parents in it, aim to shape students into ‘good’ neoliberal subjects (Crozier, 1998; Dahlstedt, 2009; Jezierski and Wall, 2019)

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Conclusion