Tarnishing a Silver Bullet?

It's become sort of a truism in education that parent involvement is critical to student achievement--But what does that mean when a parent works two jobs to make ends meet, doesn't speak English well-enough to communicate with school officials, or has little or no formal education herself? That's the question Joseph Berger asks in an NYT article about the obstacles to parent involvement for Latino immigrant families in Newburgh, N.Y. It's not that these parents don't care about their kids' education. Many of them came here in part to give their children a better life and have high aspirations for them, but lack skills and resources to give them the educational supports schools that serve middle-class students often take for granted.

Cultural perspectives about the roles of educators and parents are also an issue, notes researcher Pedro Noguera. "In many Latin American countries there’s a tendency to defer to authorities in school, an assumption that educators know what they’re doing.” Affluent white parents often monitor children's progress closely and don't hesitate to advocate with school authorities on their children's behalf. But “many immigrants parents don’t understand that this is a role they need to play,” instead defering to educators as experts. This is also true for working-class and poor parents more generally, as sociologist Annette Lareau demonstrates in her book Unequal Childhoods. The conflict between schools' expectation that parents should act like affluent and middle-class parents do, and lower-class parents' own views on what appropriate parental involvement means, can create tension between parents and schools, further pushing parents away and leading students to view school as an alien culture hostile to their own. No one denies that parents are incredibly important, but it's unrealistic to expect low-income parents to start acting like more affluent parents. Parent involvement isn't a silver bullet.