A Study On The Differences In The Participation Of Parents Of Primary School Students In Nanjing City In School Education

Parent involvement in schooling is a focus on the study of sociology of education in foreign academia and brought into education reforms around the world due to its positive role in practice.But the topic is seldom examined in China and it is usually replaced with home-school cooperation,which is popular in Mainland China.During the local researches,parents are often viewed as a homogeneous group and little attention is paid to the differences among parents.Meanwhile,with the economic and social development,social class is rapidly dividing and to some degree,social stratification has become a universal social existence.Parent involvement from different classes in schooling is related to the equality during the educational process and affects the equality and justice of education in the long run.This paper focuses on the parents of primary school students and whether there are differences in the willingness and practice among parents form different classes as well as the influence mechanism behind them,mainly using the method of empirical investigation.It shows the involvement of parents of primary school students in the local situation from the views of social stratification,trying to provide new ideas for the study in this field in China.Based on the literature at home and abroad,this study divides parent involvement in schooling into four levels:home-school communication,parental learning,voluntary support and decision management and adopts the pluralistic social stratification standard to segment different parents.Specifically,questionnaires and interviews were used to investigate the current situation of involvement of parents of primary school students in Nanjing.It is found that there exists significant differences in the willingness to involve in school among different classes of elementary school students parents:the upper-class parents constitute the most prominent group and the middle-class parents take second place,while the underclass parents shows the least interest in involvement in schooling,which is extremely remarkable different from the upper-class parents.Besides,as to the practice of involvement,there is no visible difference in the parental learning and decision management,however,it differs remarkably in home-school communication and voluntary support and the upper-class parents are more active than the underclass as well as the middle-class parents involve much more than the underclass parents.By using the Regression Analysis,it is also found that income and occupation have a significant effect on parents' willingness of involvement and educational background plays a significant role in practical actions.from the perspective of social stratification,mainly based on the other information in the questionnaire and interview data with some parents and a teacher are used to discuss the reasons between the results above and it is deduced that the difference of capital directly or indirectly affect their willingness and practice of involvement in schooling.To be specific,the number of children,the family structure,their children's academic performance and their family economic capital,cultural capital and social capital along with the all the factors' effect on parents'cognitive belief,confidence,the close relationship and interaction quality with teachers and schools due to affect parent involvement in schooling.In addition,the school size of the children of different classes makes a difference in the channel and content for parent involvement.Nevertheless,parents from the upper class and middle class don't fully activate their own capital with the traditional home-school cooperation theme there is no obvious difference on the higher level.It further summarizes the problems in two aspects:firstly,there is the hierarchical phenomenon of parent involvement in the willingness and practice of parent involvement in schooling;secondly,the level of our parents' participation in education is needed to be improved.Thus,principles are set up including understand and support disadvantaged parents and endowing rights to all parents.Specific measures are put forward from four aspects:the guarantee of participation system,the quality of participants,the construction of participating organizations and the support of the network.