Family involvement: Examining ideas and exploring alternative relationships for working-class African American families

In the 1960s, family involvement emerged as a federally funded initiative for Head Start and Follow-Through programs in preschool and early elementary grades. The purpose of these programs was to increase the involvement of low-income families, regardless of the mothers' education levels, in order to ensure success at the start of formal schooling for their children. In holding tightly to a mainstream/traditional definition of family involvement as the ideal, schools concluded that working-class African American families were not adequately involved in school; this unfair perception continues to create a conflict between these families and school. It is crucial to create meaningful opportunities to hear the experiences of these families and connect their realities to these broader political issues. The goal of this study is to challenge existing family involvement approaches by exposing how each approach is utilized to either maintain the power and privilege of the traditional Eurocentric hierarchy or assert new paradigms to institutionalize the redistribution of unequal power and unfair privilege within school.;This qualitative study seeks to (a) examine how 17 working-class African American families conceptualize family involvement and (b) explore their suggestions for alternative relationships between themselves and school. To meet this goal, a two-step methodology was employed using in-depth interviews and interventive focus group discussions: (a) an initial in-depth interview to understand how families conceptualize family involvement; (b) an interventive focus group discussion to move toward organizing around a common definition of political education; (c) a second interventive focus group discussion to apply political education; (d) an optional interview to share comments outside the focus group discussions; and (e) a final interventive focus group to move towards healing and activism.;The findings demonstrate how existing approaches to family involvement serve to maintain traditional power and privilege in schools and how they work against the academic achievement of working-class African American families. As a result, this study creates an environment for these families to collectively suggest ways alternative relationships could exist between themselves and school as well as strategies that could fundamentally alter their existing relationships with school.