A Critical Study On The Policies Of "Parental Involvement" In America

Families and schools are the two primary units in the process of the education of children.Experienced large-scale expansion,professional development and modern system construction,schools have become the overwhelming force of modern education,while families have been marginalized.However,as the tension between children's dependency on school system and the children's diversified development has increased,family-school partnership is imperative.Since the middle of the 20 th century,United States has constructed family-school cooperative relationships in the policy path continuously and firmly.The policies try to include all families.How to view the essence of family-school relationship under the policy advocacy? Are families the independent educational functions,or are defined as an instrument of school? Whether the family-school relationships need a policy guidance? Should policy guide the family-school relationships legitimately and effectively,and what's the basis for judging its legitimacy and effectiveness?This study attempts to discussion the above research questions through the following several parts:The first chapter establishes the framework of analyze the family-school relationship under the policy advocacy on the basis of “the life world theory”,put forward by J.Habermas.The legitimacy,effectiveness and the value orientation of the parental involvement policies has been the primary focus.The second chapter is to carding the history and the content of parental involvement policies,and to clear and definite the target population,the original principles and purposes,policy initiatives,and the logic characteristics of the policies.The third chapter explains the concept of policy,and reveals the feature of the mainstream culture groups' family-school relationships,the evolution of parental involvement as a concept,and how this concept frame the current policies.The fourth chapter examines the cognitive basis of the target population about family-school relationships through reviewing the racialism influence on their life and education experience,cultural tradition,and other values.Through the review,the policies' pertinence,adequacy,legitimacy and effectiveness have been challenged.The fifth chapter explains the routes of “legitimization” of parental involvement policies,including empirical analysis researches,standardized path,and the federal power and funds.The process of the “legitimization” has been dominated by experts consciousness,technocratic consciousness,and instrumental rationality,which intensifies the specific family-school relationships model of the mainstream groups.In chapter six,contradictions in the practice of the policies have been revealed.The neglect of the cultural conflict between the white teachers and the disadvantaged children' parents,and between the white-middle-class parents and the disadvantaged children' parents have seriously influenced the polices' value orientation about effectiveness.In the conclusion part,this study points out: firstly,the “parental involvement” policies in the United States has distorted and “self-righteous” distortions in basic values and value choices.The policy is not based on the meaning and the living world of the policy target population,instead,it is based on the legalization of “instrumental rationality”.This leads directly to the neglect of the intersubjectivity between the actors.The process of reproducing the symbolic meaning of home-school relations becomes a process of depoliticization and consciousness manipulation;secondly,American parental involvement policies tend to shape a distorted and “schoolization” family-school relationship,and thirdly,“parental participation” policies represents a school relationship that is deeply affected by “instrumental rationality”,so it has seriously harmed the Children's natural development and the family's educational function.This study finds that the family-school relationship guided by American parental involvement policies is not a true partnership,family is also not an independent educational function unit.In the family-school relationships guided by policies,families have become a dependency and an instrument of modern schooling.Parents' supervision,advice,accountability,and appeal all have been limited to the schools' economic development function,and it is difficult to truly independently and consciously focus on the free development of their children.Families and children have all become standard products under modern rationality.Irrational emotional communication between the children and parents has been covered by academic achievement.All kinds of serious moral has been replaced by all kinds of personality traits adapting to the specific system on account of survival and development.From this perspective,American parental involvement policies have a serious violation of families and children.