Parental Involvement in Schools: Case Studies of Three High Schools in a Southeastern Metropolitan Area Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium
Parental involvement in schools is a topic that currently attracts much attention in educational debates and is one of the "Goals 2000." Research has demonstrated that involving parents in the process of educating their children provides substantial advantages the more parents are involved, the more children benefit. Most of the literature however, is quantitative in nature, seeking to explain how parental involvement correlates with parents' socioeconomic, cultural and racial background. Another strong focus in the literature is on programs that help parents get and stay involved in school. This study is intended to complement the literature, providing an in-depth analysis of the dynamic relationships between the school and parents in three high schools located in the metropolitan area of a southeastern urban center.
THE STUDY
The purpose of this study is to unearth both the degree and nature of parental involvement at three high schools. A brief survey of school personnel—distributed at faculty meetings was used as an indicator of the degree of parental involvement at each school. Furthermore, teachers and staff were asked to nominate "involved" parents as well as parents who seem to perceive barriers to school involvement. Once the surveys had been analyzed, a total number of 52 in-depth interviews lasting between 30 minutes and 2 hours were conducted with teachers, school administrators, staff, and "involved" as well as "uninvolved" parents. Fieldnotes were taken, interviews were tape recorded and transcribed verbatim. Observations of events complemented the data. The data was analyzed inductively and interpreted according to emerging themes and patterns.
FINDINGS
The following results are summarized in Table I: (see original document for graphic)
Degree and Nature of Parental Involvement
- Parental involvement differs drastically in both degree and nature not only between schools but also within schools. Two public high schools that are no more than 15 miles apart may look radically different in regard to the degree of parental involvement, as well as school-community relations generally. While a small group of vocal and visible parents may be highly engaged at one school, a majority may not be visibly engaged at all. The school where the greatest variance in parent participation was found (with a small group being extremely involved visibly and the majority being either not at all or silently involved) was Case 3 ("Rural High School"). At that particular school a highly stratified student body tracked into vocational or academic classes seems reflected by a stratified parent community, with some parents extremely involved visibly in the school while other parents are not visibly involved, or are not involved at all.
- It has to be recognized that parents may be involved in different ways, including "silent" encouragement at home of their children's educational activities.
- A high degree of parental involvement does not necessarily mean that the relationships between parents and educators are healthy, or generally perceived as productive. Suburban High serves as a good example of a school with a generally high degree of parental involvement, and yet both parents and teachers frequently described school-community relations as difficult or strained. Chavkin/Williams (1987) found that school administrators and parents may differ greatly in what they perceive to be appropriate parental involvement (for instance, parents included "shared decision making" in their definition of parental involvement, administrators did not.) Research at Suburban High shows that disagreements on what constitutes "good" parental involvement cannot only be found between administrators and parents, but also between teachers and parents, and perhaps even among parents and among teachers. An engaged and vocal parent body may be perceived by educators as invading their professional sphere. Educators complained about parents exerting excessive amounts of pressure on them as well as on the students. The parent community, on the other hand, is internally divided and finds itself struggling with educators over who is in control of the education of their children. What we see here is an example of how success is coupled with certain trade-offs. Academically, Suburban High is an extremely successful school. The highly involved parent community undoubtedly constitutes one important factor in having made this success possible. On the other hand, academic success also generates high levels of expectations on everyone, and particularly on the student body. Educators and parents have not yet been able to find productive ways of dealing with the question of how to handle and possibly reduce the pressure that necessarily goes along with high expectations, a tension that raises questions about how to mediate power and control, and how to find satisfying ways to negotiate teachers' needs to protect a recognized professional sphere with parents' interests in school affairs.
Barriers to Parental Involvement
- While most barriers to parental involvement mentioned by the literature were indeed found at the schools represented in this study (cultural, communication, resource, institutional, leadership barriers) another highly powerful barrier has to be added to this list: a deeply felt chasm between the school and the parent community. Most apparent in the case of City High, some parents seem to have given up hope that their school and urban public schools of a similar type can or will indeed provide their children with the education they need in order to be socially and economically successful. More research needs to be done regarding this theme. Just as research has shown that students' perceptions/assumptions concerning the value of education as a means of upward mobility are important determinants of students' academic motivation and performance, this study suggests that the same is true for parents.
Research for this study suggests that most parents would make serious attempts to overcome barriers resource, communication, etc. if they only believed that it was worth their efforts. Parents of City High students who are involved despite the existence of resource and communication barriers, for instance, point to the validity of this point. Likewise, the existence of deeply felt disillusionment and frustration on the part of parents who not only seem ready and capable of overcoming all sorts of barriers, but whose children are actually successful students, suggests that school-community relations at City High are plagued by deeper troubles than anything that could be overcome by mere short-term measures. On the contrary, this study reveals that we are faced with a much deeper indeed structural crisis concerning parent-school relations. Perhaps above all, parents' accounts indicate a crisis of legitimacy: schools are no longer perceived as potential harbingers of a brighter future.
- Another barrier to parental involvement that does not receive much attention in the literature concerns the fragmentation of the parent community. As the case of Suburban High illustrates, a fragmented, transient and anonymous community undercuts identification, and especially positive identification, with their school, and consequently restricts quality of parental involvement.
Enablers to Parental Involvement
- What Suburban High and City High school have in common, it seems, is that the decisive factor in shaping parental involvement is whether or not the community feels a sense of ownership over its own school. If parents possess such a sense of ownership as in the case of Suburban High they tend to make use of it; they become more highly involved and they try to get the school to do what they want it to do. Since few if any communities are completely homogenous, a high level of involvement can also easily lead to a variety of frictions and tensions among parents as well as between parents and educators. In the case of City High, on the other hand, feelings of ownership are lacking altogether. Here the problem is not so much the kind of parental involvement, or the consequences of a particular kind of parental involvement as in the case of Suburban High—than the fact that parental involvement is basically nonexistent.
But what then, possibly helps generate or alternatively stifles a sense of ownership among parents? How and why do some parents manage to "make schools their own" and to become effective advocates, which includes exerting pressure on the school to provide their children with the best possible education, while others do not? One explanation that can be derived from this study concerns the degree to which parents perceive their school to be a viable path toward economic stability and upward mobility. If they do as is the case at Suburban High parents become highly involved in school. If they do not as seems predominantly the case at City High parents generally refrain from active (or at least visible) school involvement.
RECOMMENDATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
The results suggest that any recommendations for educational practitioners and policy makers alike benefit from being context specific and concrete, taking the differences in degree and type of parental involvement—both within and among schools into account. Parent communities, for instance, are not monolithic even if parents are characterized by a similar socioeconomic and racial background. In order to foster and improve both quantity and quality of parental involvement at a given institution, school administrators are encouraged to first assess the specific strengths and weaknesses, barriers and enablers of parental involvement at their school.
Furthermore, this study suggests considering a differentiation between short-term and long-term goals to be achieved in order to improve parental involvement. Recommendations for the improvement of parental involvement have to be both short-term and long-term. Certain effective measures can be devised and implemented relatively easily and do not need to generate insurmountable organizational problems or financial burdens. Other measures, on the other hand, need to be carefully planned and will take financial resources, time, and fundamental restructuring in order to be successful. Short-term recommendations encompass such improvements as: providing a parent meeting space at school, introducing voice mail and other devices in order to facilitate school-home communication, scheduling events sensitively to parents' schedules and needs, providing transportation to parents in order to enable them to attend events, etc. Long-term recommendations pertain, for instance, to strengthening the ties between the school and the community. This includes: bringing the community into the schools as well as teachers and administrators into the community (home visits, church visits, community centers, etc.); collaboration between schools, social service agencies and churches; as well as rethinking school districts and zoning taking the important functions that schools have for their communities into account.
Maike Philipsen
The information found in this research brief has been synthesized from the following MERC publications. Copies can be purchased using the online order form on the publications page.
Fox, C. (1995, February) Parent involvement in public education: Review of literature.
Philipsen, M. (1996, January) Parental Involvement in Schools: Case studies of three high schools in a southeastern metropolitan area: Research report.
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