Education Advisory

WHY IS THERE RESISTANCE TO MEANINGFUL PARENT INVOLVEMENT?

Resistance to meaningful parent involvement in schools is very wide-spread. This is so despite long-standing conclusive proof that parent involvement is beneficial both to individual students and overall school performance.

Barriers

1) school system unwillingness to have to parent involvement

2) existing parent groups conveying the impression of involvement;

3) natural shyness of parents and their feeling that they are “interfering”.
With respect to NO. 2 there are Plenty of suggestions in this guide which will help parent groups become more meaningfully involved in the educational quality matters in the school. As for the shyness of parents this can be overcome with the development of suitable opportunities for parents to be involved and with the recognition that parent involvement is a necessity, not an ‘interference’ in achieving educational goals.

With regard to No. 1, school system unwillingness, some of the following analyses will help us understand, and perhaps deal with, this unfortunate situation. (Unfortunate, because it is still the rare experience in North America where a school has a high level of meaningful parent involvement.)
1. Education used to be Part of a community process, with participation of such diverse “teachers” as churches, family, apprenticeship programs, schools, town meetings, etc. Then, 200 years ago, a movement arose to promote free, universal public school education. Well intended though it was, it conveyed the notion that education was something that occurred in a school, with certified teachers, between certain hours of the day. Education became segregated from the community and localized in schools. This narrow view of education tends to limit parent input.

2. Teachers have struggled hard and long to obtain professional status and now jealously guard their rights. Their training and their milieu reinforces their image of being experts in a field of work that only qualified people can do. Many do not take kindly to the notion of participatory strategies that include students and Parents. Sharing educational responsibility with parents is often seen by teachers as an intrusion on their professional domain.

3. Teachers unions, on the whole, have not been behind parent involvement. Donald Myers, in his book Teacher Power: Professionalization and Collective Bargaining sums it up this way: Citizens seek to enlarge their control of schools. This movement comes at the same time that teachers seek increased autonomy from lay control. Thus, laymen and teachers are on a collision course, the final determination of which is uncertain.” Teacher unions, in their efforts to secure teacher power, portray parents as another “boss” in a field of already too many bosses.

4. Many efforts are made to water-down parent involvement. One way is to call it community involvement and some community schools have been known to absorb an active parent group into their activities–activities which may even use public school funds for organizing racial, recreation and education programs for adults. Resistance to genuine parent involvement in schools sometimes takes the route of creating “busy-work” or diverting parent efforts to periphery activities.

6. Some educators feel that they are in a unique position to serve as change agents and that schools should become the primary means for social reform. One “community school” in England aimed to bring about radical change, but after an extensive public inquiry several teachers were dismissed as having strong radical convictions. Parents, on the whole, were excluded in this school. (See Education Advisory 67, pg. 11.). Parents are often viewed as “conservative” and a hindrance to those who wish to use the schools for social change. “We need to achieve for children what their parents want for them.”
-Shirley Hufrtedler, United States Secretary of Education, 1979