A promise of partnership: Parental involvement and social reproduction in one middle school

This dissertation constitutes the first ethnographic examination of how collective parental participation operates in schools. For several decades, policy makers have mandated programs to increase collective parental involvement. Many of these programs tacitly assume that by participating in decision-making bodies or advisory committees, low-income parents will pressure schools to promote achievement among poor and minority students. To understand how visions of parent participation intersect with the social and organizational realities of schools, I conducted an ethnography at one middle school during an academic year. I examined three committees that involve parents: the site council, the Parent-Faculty-Student Organization, and the English Learner Advisory Committee.;Institutional and social reproduction theories each partially explain the combination of deference and differentiation manifest in collective parental involvement. Institutional theorists are attentive to the ways schools discourage parental involvement and encourage deference but less attentive to how school structures reproduce inequality. In contrast, social reproduction theorists focus on how the school structure transmits social class but are relatively inattentive to school processes. Alone, neither theoretical framework explains the limitations of collective parental involvement. This study synthesizes the two.;This study demonstrates that sites of collective parental involvement failed to create genuine involvement for disadvantaged families. In many cases the school's interaction with parents unequally distributed cultural and social capital toward middle-class parents and away from working-class parents. This study illuminates the processes through which collective parental involvement serves as a vehicle for social reproduction. In sum, not only was the school an active participant in reproduction, but parental participation itself reproduced inequality. For this reason, collective parental involvement fails not only as a means of facilitating poor or marginalized parents' role in school governance, it fails more broadly in engaging these families in the work of schooling.