What does the state know (and want to know) about parental involvement in children’s school education?

Abstract

The article poses a question about the scope of information concerning parental involvement, the collection of which results from the provisions of the educational law. The characteristics of the “Parents are school’s partners” requirement have been referred to the framework proposed by Epstein (1995). The analysis of the amendments of the Regulation demonstrates some slight changes in the approach to parental participation, limited to the four types in Epstein’s model (out of the six proposed by this researcher): parenting, communication between the school and the students’ homes, parental volunteering and decision-making participation. The changes are aimed at subtly limiting the of parents' influence, there are no attempts to extend the provisions of the Regulation to include other forms of participation. Then, based on the data collected during external evaluations in 94 schools (survey study on a non-random sample of 6676 parents and 86 group interviews with parents), a descriptive and comparative analysis of individual indicators was carried out, as well as thematic coding of fragments of the transcription of group interviews. Parents declare a relatively high level of satisfaction with the received support and decision-making participation, slightly lower with communication. These results vary depending on educational level and school type, which may be explained by the connection between involvement and child’s age and the differentiation in class allocation. The qualitative analysis shows that the decision-making participation, in most cases, does not exceed the minimum required by the educational law, and the exceptions to this rule are mostly artifactic activities.