Equity Issues in Parental and Community Involvement in Schools: What Teacher Educators Need to Know

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DOI: 10.3102/0091732X12459718
2013 37: 149REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN EDUCATION
Patricia Baquedano-López, Rebecca Anne Alexander and Sera J. Hernandez
Teacher Educators Need to Know
Equity Issues in Parental and Community Involvement in Schools : What
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Chapter 5
Equity Issues in Parental and Community
Involvement in Schools: What Teacher
Educators Need to Know
Patricia Baquedano-LóPez
reBecca anne aLexander
Sera J. Hernandez
University of California, Berkeley
In this chapter, we examine the literature on parental involvement highlighting
the equity issues that it raises in educational practice. Like so many educators and
researchers, we are concerned with approaches to parental involvement that con-
struct restricted roles for parents in the education of their children. These
approaches often miss the multiple ways nondominant parents participate in their
children’s education because they do not correspond to normative understandings
of parental involvement in schools (Barton, Drake, Perez, St. Louis, & George,
2004). Moreover, these framings restrict the ways in which parents from nondomi-
nant backgrounds can be productive social actors who can shape and influence
schools and other social institutions. A great deal of general educational policy on
parent involvement draws on Epstein’s (1992, 1995) theory and typologies where a
set of overlapping spheres of influence locate the student among three major con-
texts—the family, the school, and the community—which operate optimally when
their goals, missions, and responsibilities overlap. Epstein’s (1992) Six Types of
Involvement framework provides a variety of practices of partnership, including the
following strategies for involvement: assisting with parenting, communicating with
parents, organizing volunteering activities for parents, involving parents in learning
at home activities (such as homework), including parents in decision making, and
collaborating with community. This perspective, however, can foster individualistic
and school-centric approaches (see Warren, Hong, Rubin, & Uy, 2009). We argue
149
Review of Research in Education
March 2013, Vol. 37, pp. 149-182
DOI: 10.3102/0091732X12459718
© 2013 AERA. http://rre.aera.net
Review of Research in EducationBaquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in Parental and Community Involve-
ment in Schools: What Teacher Educators Need to Know
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150 Review of Research in Education, 37
that this is even more problematic when school goals are largely based on White and
middle-class values and expectations. Others question the model’s inattention to
power relations between educational stakeholders, which often position parents as
passive or complacent, and call for an expansion of the notion of involvement
(S. Auerbach, 2007; Barton et al., 2004; Fine, 1993; Galindo & Medina, 2009).
We argue that although conceptually useful, these typologies still reflect a restricted
vision of partnership centered on the school’s agenda. We note that these typologies
do not engage the intersections of race, class, and immigration, which are relevant
to the experiences of many parents from nondominant backgrounds. Our view of
parent involvement considers parents as agents who can intervene and advocate on
behalf of their children, and who can make adaptations and resist barriers to educa-
tion (see also Hidalgo, 1998). Our review of the literature indicates that parental
participation in schools is strongly shaped by perceptions of parents’ background
and of the roles expected of them by school administrators and teachers and by the
organizations (whether local or federal) that fund family literacy and parent involve-
ment programs (S. Auerbach, 2002; Barton et al., 2004; Vincent, 2001). To be sure,
these perceptions affect all parents, but the negative equity outcomes of these beliefs
and practices particularly affect parents from nondominant backgrounds. Moreover,
deficit approaches about students and families who are not from the dominant
majority have constructed them as lacking and in need of support (see Valencia,
1991, 2011), reinforcing a view of dependency on school goals. We hope that the
literature we review in this chapter helps expand notions of parent involvement and
of parents from nondominant groups as productive and engaged participants in
communities and schools.
We begin our chapter with a brief historical overview of approaches to parent involve-
ment and the ways in which neodeficit discourses on parents permeate current education
reform efforts. Next, we address how inequities related to race, class, and immigration
shape and are shaped by parent involvement programs, practices, and ideologies.
Finally, we discuss empowerment approaches to parental involvement and how these are
situated in a broader decolonial struggle for transformative praxis that reframes deficit
approaches to parents from nondominant backgrounds.
THE DISCOURSE ON PARENTS: DEFICIT, PROBLEMS,
AND REMEDIES
U.S. policy has continuously regulated the parent–school relationship through a
normalizing perspective based on middle-class values backed by a century of devel-
opmental science focusing on family settings exemplifying those values (Kainz &
Aikens, 2007). This normalized view of family does not take into account the com-
plexity of family arrangements and their economic organization, which often nega-
tively affect parents of color (Collins, 1990). The first policy effort that explicitly
considered the need for children to be educated away from the home environment
was the Civilization Fund Act of 1819, a policy created to provide opportunities for
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 151
the “improvement” of Native Americans through education and assimilation into
the mainstream of society. This led to the creation of boarding schools in the late
1800s located away from reservations (and from the perceived negative influence
of the home) where students were forced to learn English and were discouraged
from speaking their home languages (Spring, 2001). Much has also been written on
the “Americanization” programs at the turn of the 20th century aimed to inculcate
Mexican immigrants with the values of American society (see G. González, 1997).
These programs, spurred by perceptions of the “Mexican problem” and the passing
of the Home Teacher Act of 1915, placed teachers into the students’ homes who
could then directly instruct parents, and explicitly mothers, on a wide range of prac-
tices, from personal hygiene to principles of American governance and citizenship
(G. Sánchez, 1984).
The development of parental involvement as a remedy for “problem” minority
populations (and for women in particular) was evident at a much broader scale in
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Secretary of Labor D. P. Moynihan’s
report on the African American family argued that in the face of male job loss, the
structure of African American families would disintegrate, leading to unemployment
and poverty, a cycle of welfare dependency, and the proliferation of single-mother
households (Moynihan, 1965). This report turned national attention to the locus of
families, and of families of color more specifically, where the perceived gaps in the
country’s economic stability were to be found. To remediate this situation, a set of
federally funded programs were developed, including the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, and its provision for Head Start and Title I pro-
grams. The establishment of Head Start programs, which led to the transition of
young children from poor families into federally sponsored day care centers, like
many of these early social programs of the Johnson era, highlighted the earlier mes-
sage underlying the institution of boarding schools for Native American children and
youth; that the home (and by extension the minority parent) was not effective to
ensure the well-being of children.
These earlier deficit framings of minority parents, coupled with the documen-
tation of the academic performance of minority children through national testing
and achievement reports, contributed to neoconservative discourses of a “crisis” in
public education (Berliner & Biddle, 1995). This crisis has been framed as a failure
of American schools to prepare students to successfully compete internationally as
reported in A Nation at Risk, a White House document released in 1983 during
the Reagan administration that compared standardized test results to achievement
results from previous decades. Although some argued the decline was an indication
of our failing schools, the report by Coleman (1991) commissioned by the U.S.
Department of Education blamed the loss of parents’ interest in the education of
their children, which he traced to mothers who were leaving the home and join-
ing the labor force. These yearnings for the imagined golden years of the nation,
where merit-based rewards, good schools, and the nuclear family were at the core
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152 Review of Research in Education, 37
of American values, have influenced many efforts to homogenize diverse student
populations in the late 1980s and 1990s through policies and measures such as the
elimination of bilingual education and the perceived unfair advantages of affirmative
action programs (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Alvarez, 2000; see also Gándara &
Contreras, 2009). This rhetoric has also shaped the context in which the Title I provi-
sions of the ESEA have been expanded with a new language of partnership between
parents and schools (Mapp, 2012); yet these new “partnerships” continue to frame
parents as problems.
The 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act under
the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 attempted to bridge homes and
schools through a variety of mechanisms that aimed to partner with families and
communities. This piece of legislation suggested that schools were not doing enough
to outreach and engage parents from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
Thus, a core position of federal education policy is that the engagement of parents
and families in their children’s education has the transformative potential to affect
students’ academic achievement beyond any other type of education reform. This
shift in the policy discourse from parent involvement to family engagement illus-
trates, at least in its rhetoric, an expanded view of the family’s role in education
(Mapp, 2012). But when parent involvement is positioned as a necessary condition
of academic success, it becomes a “common sense” notion (Kainz & Aikens, 2007)
that shifts a critical lens away from the social injustices affecting families of color
to the perception that parents are uninvolved and, as such, do not deserve quality
schooling (Nakagawa, 2000). Within this frame, the essence of the problem resides
not in the structure of schools but in the ways in which parents fail at their responsi-
bility to educate their children.
In what follows we identify and discuss a set of tropes that define schools’ rela-
tionships to parents and which we think are illustrative of the unresolved tensions
created by unequal distribution of resources and structural power relations among
educational stakeholders. These tropes construct particular roles that also correspond
to a set of educational approaches that advance a tone of deficit, urgency, and remedy
when they involve parents of nondominant students. We think that an examination
of these tropes could be useful for teachers and other professionals to critically assess
the goals of programs and initiatives and the effects that they might have in creating
inclusive or dismissive roles for parents. Although “antideficit rhetoric” is common-
place in contemporary parent involvement program models (e.g., the ubiquitous use
of a discourse of “strengths”), E. Auerbach (1995) warns that this shift may operate as
a neodeficit ideology in which even “strength-based” program models could continue
to function within a deficit framework.
Briefly, the trope of “Parents as Problems” can be traced to government policies
that aim to protect students and aid teachers in having the most control in the edu-
cation of young students. The trope of “Parents as First Teachers,” while seemingly
benign in its recognition of the claim that parents are the preeminent socializing
agents in a child’s life, presents pedagogical substitutions aimed at deemphasizing
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 153
parental roles through the expansion of normative practices into the home. The dis-
course of “Parents as Learners” challenges parents’ knowledge base and community
wisdom by constructing the image of stultified adults in need of guidance (this is a
discourse that appears frequently in discussions of immigrant parents who are speak-
ers of languages other than English). In the wake of the educational reform move-
ments of the late 1990s, the theme of “Parents as Partners” became popular and was
reinforced through Title I modifications. We also discuss the “Parents as Choosers
and Consumers” trope, which is tied to reform efforts that support school choice. We
discuss each of these tropes below and the programs that construct and support them.
Parents as First Teachers: Early Learning Programs for Ages 0–5
The home–school relationship begins when a child enters preschool or kinder-
garten. 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 peda-
gogical 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 edu-
cation 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 inter-
vention 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 child-
hood education for low-income families through improving federally funded pro-
grams 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 child-
hood 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 par-
ent 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.
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154 Review of Research in Education, 37
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 par-
ents 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 contextual-
ized 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 engage-
ment 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 involve-
ment 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
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 155
that would include “meaningful consultation, collaboration, and shared responsibil-
ity” (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 “compli-
ance 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 main-
stream 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 selec-
tion 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 par-
ent control and local control, whereas neoliberal ideologies are grounded in mar-
ket-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 inequal-
ity between schools (Fuller & Emore, 1996; J. T. Scott, 2005). These progressive
programs, which take race (among other factors) into account in placing students,
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156 Review of Research in Education, 37
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 educa-
tional and community movements that seek a better integration among stakeholders
in education, schools and teachers remain largely the uncontested bearers of privi-
leged 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 educa-
tional practice.
KEY EQUITY ISSUES IN PARENT AND COMMUNITY
INVOLVEMENT: RACE, CLASS, AND IMMIGRATION
Despite the creation of policies that have generated varying mechanisms to incor-
porate nondominant students and their families in our public school system, deep
inequities persist that are reflected in educational achievement data of nondominant
students. As Ladson-Billings (2006) has reminded us, the achievement gap is not
the cause of inequalities in our society; instead, we must recognize the history of our
country, which ensured through slavery and policies of exclusion the advancement
of some but left far too many students of color and their families in economically
disadvantaged positions. As Ladson-Billings notes, to seriously begin to understand
today’s achievement gap, we must tally the educational debt we owe to those left
behind by economic disparities and racial oppression. We must also understand how
such inequality is maintained in the present. As we explained in the previous section,
policies that carry a deficit approach toward nondominant parents still construct
them as unfit for parental roles. Although there are a number of factors that coalesce
around the discourse and practice of parental and community involvement in the
education of nondominant students in schools, in this chapter we consider race,
class, and immigration the three equity issues that have the most impact in constructing
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 157
relations among educational stakeholders and parents from nondominant groups.1
First, we address the ways in which race continues to shape inequities in parent
involvement. To accomplish this we draw on research that advances critical race per-
spectives (Darder & Torres, 2004; Goldberg, 2002; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995),
which elaborate on the idea that race is a social construct and a system of social
control of resources, access, and power that has real effects on people and institutions
(Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Omi & Winant, 1994).2 We next discuss class as a major deter-
minant of educational opportunity and social capital. Finally, we examine the ways
that the immigration statuses of parents (and students) from nondominant back-
grounds influence parent and community involvement in schools.
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 devel-
opmental 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 aca-
demic 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
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158 Review of Research in Education, 37
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 tradi-
tional 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 class-
rooms. Middle-class African American parents were able to negotiate their relation-
ships 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 dom-
inance 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 frame-
works, Reynolds (2010) points to the important role African American parents play
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 159
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 understand-
ings 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 stu-
dents 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 endors-
ing the form of discipline, Ferguson questions the ways in which schools and other
state institutions may undermine parents’ discipline while simultaneously criminal-
izing 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 primar-
ily 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,
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160 Review of Research in Education, 37
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 educa-
tional 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 disre-
garding 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 rela-
tionships 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, col-
lective interest in the well-being of the children, and an open, honest, and collab-
orative 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 impor-
tant opportunities including an infusion of economic resources, but also intense feel-
ings 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 neigh-
borhood 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 dif-
ferential access to schools due to class mobility, White mothers’ passive exclusion of
nondominant parents from home and school associations, as well as the promotion
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 161
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 pow-
erful 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 “con-
trolling 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 adher-
ence 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 oppor-
tunities for their children (Rogers et al., 2008). And although theories of immigra-
tion 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 cul-
ture 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 widen-
ing 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.
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162 Review of Research in Education, 37
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 educa-
tional 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 con-
sider the multiple frames of reference needed to push past linear theories of assimila-
tion, 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 profes-
sional 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 immi-
gration policies, for example H1B visa permits (those that allow temporary employ-
ment 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 litera-
ture 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 con-
nections (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, lan-
guage rights, educational equity, and access for racial, cultural, and national minority
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 163
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 mea-
sures 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 5404 students in
higher education provides a nuanced view into the experiences of undocumented
students and their families negotiating access to school and postsecondary educa-
tion. 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 educa-
tional sovereignty as an educational stance to counter what they describe as the endur-
ing 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.
EMPOWERMENT APPROACHES TO PARENTAL
AND COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
In this section, we discuss research that addresses the pervasive deficit framings of
parental involvement, especially as it concerns the educational experiences of non-
dominant students. We include in this section a discussion of three different approaches
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164 Review of Research in Education, 37
to empowerment in parent involvement: (a) Freirian (Freire, 1970, 1973) school-
based parent organizing, (b) parent community organizing, and (c) home–
school connections models based on the funds of knowledge approach. We con-
sider these approaches to be foundational for understanding conceptual shifts in the
literature on parental involvement. We also discuss possible limitations of each of
these approaches. We hope to advance in this way critical debate on the discourse of
empowerment.6 Finally we examine decolonial approaches to parent and community
involvement in education research and practice, and we discuss how we might move
closer to new framings of parent involvement.
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 par-
ents have. Torres and Hurtado-Vivas (2011) critically assess mainstream family literacy
programs as, essentially, vehicles for narrow parental roles that include homework pro-
duction, student surveillance, and the creation of increased burden on parents for the
academic failure of their children (and their schools). Drawing on interviews with par-
ents during family literacy projects they conducted in the colonias7 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 home-
work, 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 lit-
eracy for teachers and school personnel. Furumoto’s (2003) discussion of “critical par-
ent 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 deci-
sion making, and prominent among these scholars is Delgado-Gaitan (1993), who
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 165
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 par-
ent 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 encour-
age critical consciousness among the participants, families, and educators alike. As
Reyes and Torres (2007) report, families can also influence the family literacy cur-
riculum 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 lit-
eracy 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 trans-
formation. 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 orga-
nizing. 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
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166 Review of Research in Education, 37
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 under-
represented 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 perspec-
tive 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 infor-
mation sent from school to home, having school contained within classroom walls,
and experiencing patriarchy (as a school-mom problem), prejudice, and resent-
ment 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” limit-
ing 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 relation-
ships of domination with parents, shaping discussions based on their own identities,
ideologies, and interests. In her work, she examines the ways teacher-power is articu-
lated 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) insis-
tence 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 believ-
ing 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.
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 167
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 pro-
posals 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 commu-
nity 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 authen-
tic 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 col-
laborative 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 nondomi-
nant parents the opportunity to learn about how schools operate and develop mul-
tiple 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) invest-
ment 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 orga-
nizing 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
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168 Review of Research in Education, 37
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 proj-
ect 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 stu-
dents (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 recog-
nized 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 documen-
tation papers for immigration status.
The empowerment-based approaches discussed here counteract deficit perspec-
tives 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 pro-
duce 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 understand-
ing 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).
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 169
TOWARD DECOLONIZING PRACTICE IN PARENT INVOLVEMENT
We have been referring to change that is brought about when there are explicit
actions, whether by researchers, teachers, or parents, to engage a decolonial
approach in the relationship between school administrators, teachers, and parents.
A decolonial approach seeks to challenge the foundations of Eurocentric thinking
that support an agenda of modernity and development (Mignolo, 2010)8 as this
implies that nondominant communities cannot be autonomous or sovereign. As
we have been pointing out, educational practices are not free of dominant, White,
Eurocentric thinking. Our educational system has been built on a European legacy
that to this date returns to a history that redeems colonial practices and promotes
success through notions of excellence based on Western values such as individually
earned merit, which assumes a level playing field. As we discussed at the start of this
chapter, our educational system also reflects a neoliberal approach to education that
is built on a “crisis of education” that is still attributed to communities of color. The
educational system is thus complicit in resisting change that would destabilize a rela-
tion that endorses a “civilizing function” (Césaire, 1956/2010; Spring, 2001). This
civilizing function reinforces ideologies of what is considered best for nondominant
students and their families and delivers an education that fits them. This approach
denies other forms of knowledge and above all, parents’ and students’ autonomy in
decision making. This is precisely what a decolonial approach to education seeks
to redefine as education researchers have been arguing (see Cruz, 2001; Delgado
Bernal, 1998; Grande, 2004; Spring, 2001; Tuck, 2009; Villenas, 1996, among oth-
ers). It seeks to redress imbalances and exclusionary actions toward students and
parents from nondominant communities.
Fundamentally, a decolonial approach to parent involvement recognizes the need
for a change in the economic structures that limit parents’ participation and deci-
sion making on behalf of their children (see also Lareau, 2000). As such, educational
reform efforts operating from a decolonial perspective must also seek to identify the
location and redistribution of economic wealth. Above all, decolonizing approaches
to parental inclusion in schools by necessity must point out and end all forms of
epistemic, psychological, and physical violence as are experienced through silenc-
ing, linguicisms, segregation, tracking, and the dehumanizing effects of the stunted
academic potentials of youth of color. This work needs to identify and address deeply
seated inequities that require social change processes rather than simply trust unilat-
eral policy. This approach also brings forth, importantly, a humanizing project in the
creation of new thinking and of knowledgeable subjects (Fanon, 1963). For educa-
tors, researchers, and practitioners alike, decolonization involves an open question-
ing of practices that are complicit in the perpetuation of a state of ghettoization and
colonization (Paperson, 2010), which works to homogenize through the imposition
of dominant knowledge (with its corollaries of exclusion) on curricula and com-
monsense pedagogical practice (see also Apple & King, 1983; Dewey, 1916/1944;
Freire, 1970).
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170 Review of Research in Education, 37
In the remainder of this section, we take as one example of how decolonizing
practices might work—a set of Latino parent interventions that promote local or
home culture in school activities as part of a project of recentering Latino cultural
practices in schools. These interventions may take place within school-based parental
programs, such as the one documented by Galindo and Medina (2009). In this study,
the authors report on the ways a group of Mexican mothers in a parent education and
involvement program appropriated the program’s developmental assets to outreach to
other members of the school and community (and particularly other Latino parents)
through what the authors called the performance of a collective self that centered on
cultural expression including translation activities for and by parents and the estab-
lishment of a program of art and dance that embodied important historical legacies of
the community. The authors explain such actions as the “invisible strategies” that par-
ents mobilize and which can be understood as counternarratives to the discourse on
disinterest and disengagement of Latino parents. Similarly, Espinoza-Herold (2007)
writes about local knowledge and the cultural legacy of linguistic repertoires effec-
tively used as cultural resources of the home that enrich school-based knowledge (see
also C. Sánchez, Plata, Grosso, & Leird, 2010). Examples of cultural appropriation
are also evident in learning outside of schools such as those described in Baquedano-
López (1997, 2004), who documents Spanish-based religious education classes for
primarily Mexican immigrant children and English mainstream classes at Catholic
parishes in California. In addition to holding instruction in the home language,
teachers, who were in their majority also parents or relatives of children attending
these classes, consistently influenced and changed the standard Roman-mandated
curriculum. They engaged a liberation theology approach that incorporated Mexican
secular events and historical facts of sociopolitical circumstance. These parent-teachers
also organized with other religious and community groups for improving their chil-
dren’s access to education especially around bilingual education in public schools.
In an example of parents and families fighting cultural exclusion, Dyrness (2009,
2011) draws on her 3-year participatory research project to discuss the ways in
which a group of parents established a new school with a social justice focus during
the recent small-school reform movement in northern California. Dyrness describes
parents’ responses to silencing practices from school officials as key curricular and
enrollment decisions began to take place. As she explains, cultural exclusion carried
out by teachers against parents and families can rest on notions such as race, class,
sex, language, immigrant status, country of origin, and neighborhood of residence.
Couched in discourses of social justice and equity in policymaking, school adminis-
trators failed to realize that their actions were enacting agendas that were racist and
exclusionary. Although at first parents began to be vocal about decision making,
they realized that this further marginalized some parents, even through concrete
actions such as not including their children in the school they had helped establish.
It was not until a participatory research group was formed (which included Dyrness)
that a research-based critique of the school administration generated a reposition-
ing of parents as key stakeholders at the school. In addition to a change in roles
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 171
that parents effectively achieved, the research-based knowledge generated by parents
served to counter the established primacy of school-based knowledge and decision
making. Dyrness notes that the marginalizing actions by progressive White teachers
and administrators are prevalent in an “era of good intentions.”
There have also been efforts to recognize parents, families, and communities as
having knowledge that can offset the traditional school–home relationship. These
efforts include the work on funds of knowledge that identifies and engages
knowledge sustained by community networks (Moll et al., 1992), which we have
discussed in previous sections of this chapter; the implementation of culturally
relevant approaches to education (Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1994, 1995;
C. D. Lee, 1995, 2001); and culturally-based approaches to curricular content, for
example, in science learning in the early grades (García & Baquedano-López, 2007;
O. Lee & Fradd, 1998). There have also been as well important proactive ways of
redefining immigrant students and their families’ linguistic and cultural legacies as
well as the intellectual labor and cultural brokering they do across social institu-
tions (Farr, 2004, 2006; Guerra, 1998; Orellana, 2009; Valdés, 2003; Zentella,
1997). Such work advances a transformational shift that is necessary to recon-
ceive the location of knowledge and of thinking as heterogeneous and multiple
(Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2009).
While this chapter has focused primarily on parental involvement in school, we
recognize that this is not the only site where decolonization processes can take place.
There are other sectors in society that are already engaging decolonizing practices and
which overlap with schools. Rogers and Terriquez (2009) remind us of the role of
organized labor in creating organized power for educational reform, and more impor-
tant, to counter disabling discourses about parents. They identify these discourses as
the cultural logics that shape how people make sense of schooling. Drawing on focus
groups interviews with residents and on interviews with labor and civic leaders in Los
Angeles, the authors discuss the logic of scarcity, the logic of merit, and the logic of
deficits. The three perspectives make it difficult to understand the ways inequality has
more to do with policies and social/economic structures rather than with the char-
acteristics of individual children and their families (especially immigrant families).
In other words, these “logics” preclude the possibility of collective reframing of the
issues at the bottom of educational opportunity, that is, its political economy. As the
authors note, while enough support exists among union members, especially those
with young children and those living near major schools, some of the challenges
considered in engaging the low-wage service sector unions in educational reform are
related to prioritizing educational issues when there are a myriad of competing inter-
ests, including those of teacher unions.
Efforts at grassroots mobilization have done much to counter negative percep-
tion of parents in schools. The case of the Oakland Small Schools movement is
an example of reform oriented, parent-driven actions that challenged the district
and state interventions and reorganized them (Lashaw, 2008; Yang, 2004). Fuentes
(2009/2010) writes about parent mobilization across racial lines. In the study she
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172 Review of Research in Education, 37
carried out, such mobilization first began with individuals organizing within their
separate communities and then extending efforts to the large community through
three organizing efforts: Parents of Children of African Descent, Berkeley Organizing
Congregations for Action, and the Coalition for Equity and Excellence in our
Schools. Fuentes examines how the three parent groups, all from nondominant com-
munities, put into practice the notion of learning power in their quest for educational
justice. In this way they became more effective organizers by acting on and building
their understanding of the social, political, and economic factors underlying school
conditions. She reports on four main lessons learned from the parent-initiated com-
munity organizing: (a) the importance of positionality, (b) the role of adult allies in
youth-led projects, (c) the creation of safe spaces, and (d) the building of trust and
relationships. Fuentes (2005) has also noted that a key step in parent organizing
around schools is the need for parents and organizations to partner with each other
first, before they can partner with schools. She describes how parents had to con-
tend, and in effect, tactically strategize with, the perceptions and discourses around
each of the organizations and their members. These perceptions framed one group
of parents as angry and too political and another as church-going and nice. These
stood in opposition to White parents who were, in a dynamic of racial triangulation,
considered nonpolitical and neutral concerned parents. By publicly diffusing their
actions as coming from “just parents,” the parent organizers were able to co-opt a
passive term and come together to work toward transformation.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
We began this chapter with a brief historical synopsis of approaches to parent
involvement. We discussed the ways in which neodeficit discourses on parents per-
meate current education reform efforts and generally construct parents as problems.
We argued that the tropes of Parents as First Teachers, Parents as Learners, Parents
as Partners, and Parents as Choosers and Consumers find their counterpart in gov-
ernment policies on education and reflect deeply held beliefs about parental roles;
these roles are restrictive for parents from nondominant groups but may provide an
advantage to White middle-class parents. In this regard, there is a need to broaden
the nuclear family model to include communities of support that include family
members and community resources. We also discussed the ways in which inequities
in parent involvement programs and practices in schools are related to race, class,
and immigration. Typical parental involvement practices often marginalize lower-
income and racial minority parents while creating pathways of access for White and
middle-class parents. The important forms of education, socialization, and advocacy
that nondominant parents do engage in are often not only disregarded but sometimes
met with hostility by school leaders who interpret them as threatening or too critical.
Families’ lives are deeply shaped by racial, class, and migrant inequality but schools
often fail to acknowledge or understand this, and thus participate in these inequali-
ties, embracing deficit perspectives instead.
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Baquedano-López et al.: Equity Issues in School Involvement 173
In the final sections of our chapter, we examined empowerment approaches
to parental involvement that are addressing more directly the question of power
between school leadership and parent involvement. We discussed the ways in which
community involvement efforts counterbalance federal mandates that disadvan-
tage nondominant students, such as testing and school performance indices. These
approaches rearticulate the agency of parents as critics and transformers of education
to redress economic and other power imbalances that continue to exclude them and
their families. We hope that teacher educators find our critique of neoliberal prac-
tices useful as they work to elevate the educational achievement of students from
nondominant backgrounds. Teachers in particular need to understand the limits of
policy efforts to foster parent involvement in school. They also need to be aware of
the intersecting dimensions of race, class, and immigration, which are relevant to the
educational experiences of many nondominant students. Last, teachers need to be
aware of the limits and possibilities of empowerment approaches to parental educa-
tion. Teachers can make visible and use the knowledge (and power) that parents bring
to their interactions with school personnel. They can make imagined possibilities of
equity a reality, but they can only do so with a different understanding of the power
relationships between parents and schools.
We turn to Motha (2010) as we close this chapter and reintroduce the concept
of sovereignty. In an insightful analysis of White South African writer Antjie Krog’s
(2010) book, Begging to be Black, Motha examines one of the book’s central themes:
Is it possible for Whites to become something other than White in post-apartheid
times? In a complex work of literary nonfiction, Krog writes about the possibility of
White South Africans decentering the dominant stance to stop seeing with the eyes of
colonial legacy and thus engage the necessary processes of un-homing and re-homing
and to seek interconnectedness with others. Motha calls for the need to disrupt the
sovereign “I” (whether from imperial rule or indigenous right) as a move away from
anticolonial longing and toward a postcolonial becoming that enacts not only a post-
colonial voice but also a postcolonial listening. To extend Motha’s and Krog’s ideas to
the topic that concerns us here, given that many parental involvement approaches in
U.S. schools continue to operate from a sovereign “I,” what would it take to correct
this stance and adjust to the pressing demands of decolonization? We hope that the
work that we reviewed here points us toward trajectories of change as we redefine the
parameters of engagement with parents and communities in our schools.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Irenka D. Pareto, Linn Posey-Maddox, Susan Woolley,
and members of the Laboratory for the Study of Interaction and Discourse in
Educational Research (L-SIDER) at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education
for helpful comments and intellectual exchange. We thank Mark Warren, Christian
Faltis, and an anonymous RRE reviewer for their insights and suggestions. Any errors
remaining are our own.
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174 Review of Research in Education, 37
NOTES
1We are mindful of the intersecting dimension of gender and sexuality in the experience of
students and parents from nondominant groups. The review of this work is beyond the scope
of this chapter, but the reader is directed to Cruz (2001), McCready (2004), and Woolley
(2010). Similarly, disability studies address the persistent barriers that families with children
with disabilities experience in social institutions, including schools (Artiles, 2011; R. Smith &
Erevelles, 2004; Trainor, 2010).
2See also Delgado and Stefancic (2001) for an introductory text to Critical Race Theory
(CRT).
3Of interest, longitudinal studies of immigrant families to the United States note similar
language trends; see Portes and Rumbaut (2001b) and Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, and
Todorova (2008).
4California Assembly Bill 540 allows students who can prove they were residents in
California during their high school education to pay in-state college tuition costs.
5We also note Bloemraad and Trost’s (2008) study of political mobilization of mixed-status
families that highlights the ways different generations within the home use multiple symbolic
and material resources for making sense of social institutions.
6For an excellent discussion of empowerment, the reader is directed to Wright (2010). In
particular chapter 6, titled “Real Utopias I: Social Empowerment and the State.”
7The term refers to rural, unincorporated settlements.
8Also of interest is Maldonado-Torres’s (2011) introduction to the special issue on the
decolonial turn in Transmodernities: Journal of the Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-
Hispanic World.
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