What We Talk About When We Talk About Parent Involvement

Everyone seems to think that parent involvement is important to improving public education. No one in the education policy mainstream opposes parental involvement, at least not openly. More and better parental involvement is kind of like the pony of public education reform. But what do we actually mean when we talk about parental involvement?

I would posit that there are three different things we talk about when we talk about parental involvement:

First is the traditional, education establishment-endorsed brand of parent involvement: showing up at parent teacher conferences, helping little Madison with her homework, volunteering at the bake sale, etc. This is, I think what most educators are talking about when they bemoan a lack of parent involvement or argue that greater parental involvement is critical to improving student achievement. This kind of parent involvement makes it easier for teachers to do their jobs. From the school system's perspective, it's also fairly innocuous. Parents do what the educational professionals want them to do; they don't rock the boat, or challenge the system, or demand additional things for their kids.

But this is not the only kind of parental involvement. Two other types of parent involvement focus less on what the parent can do for the child and the school, and more on how parents can get schools to provide the services they need for their children:

A second kind of parent involvement is activism: Parents work, either collectively or individually, to demand that schools provide something different or better for their children. There's a lot of variation here: It's everything from the pushy middle-class parents jockeying to make sure their child has the right first grade teacher, to the community activists organizing to demand smaller class sizes or better school facilities--the kind of work groups like PICO and ACORN engage in, and Steve Barr is teaching parents in LA. This type of activism on behalf of children can be either a zero sum--or even negative--game (the savviest or most connected parents get their kids in the best teacher's class, so less advantaged kids miss out), or it can be a net positive if it results in large scale changes that impact all kids in a community--including those whose parents didn't participate in advocacy. Understandably, schools and the people who work in them are a lot less favorably disposed to this kind of parental involvement, because it creates hassels for them and sometimes negative publicity.

A third approach to parent involvement is choice. Rather than advocating to get the school or system they're in to change, parents move their children to another school or system that they believe will do a better job of meeting their needs. In contrast to activism, which can be a long, drawn out process with no guarantee of getting the desired result, choice seems like it might be a relatively efficient mechanism for parents to get the educational services they want--but not if all the choices available are lousy or parents can't find accurate information to make a choice. Skeptics argue that choice will have the same zero-sum or collectively negative impacts as the worst types of parent activism. Boosters argue that market forces will spur improvement across all public schools. This type of parent involvement is newer, more controversial, and less available to many parents than the other types, and there is a lot we still don't know about it.

I don't mean to demean the contributions of the first type of parental involvement. God knows I wouldn't have gotten much of anywhere if my parents hadn't pushed and supported me in school. But I think when we look past the squishy-fuzziness of praising the first type of homework, and the cruel scapegoating of disadvantaged parents who for whatever reason haven't been able to do as much of it, then we'll find parent involvement is a much more complicated and prickly concept, one that offers plenty to oppose, but also, if wielded properly, has a lot more potential to improve public education.