Archived: The Educational System in the United States: Case Study Findings

Teacher perceptions of parental involvement. 
Teachers expressed concern that
parental expectations are often not translated into specific behavioral standards.
A high school English teacher commented:
I think that most parents have high expectations for their children, but don’t
know what to do to support the kids in reaching those expectations. Sure you

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can say ‘‘I want you to graduate from high school.’’ But you have to give the
students the materials and support needed to graduate from high school. You
have to talk to teachers, make sure that they do their homework, check on
their grades, follow up on teacher reports, and see what is going on in the
students’ lives. You just can’t expect every kid to know what it takes. Some-
times I think parents don’t know what it takes to have their children do well
in school.
A librarian at Metropolitan, however, took another position on the question of
parental involvement:
There are parents who do not know how the education system works. How-
ever, I’m not sure that it’s necessary for them to know how the education sys-
tem works. We have seen waves of immigrants coming through our country
and many of those parents were illiterate, many of those parents did not know
how the education systems worked. However, they said to their children, you
are going to learn in school, and I had better not hear from your teacher that
you’re not doing your homework, and let me see your homework. Even
though they may not have been able to correct the homework, they demanded
that from the child.
This woman, an immigrant of Russian background who had been schooled in Mo-
rocco, recalled her own childhood when her father would review her homework
in a language he could not speak, enforcing homework time, supervising assign-
ments, insisting that work be done before she could play. She acknowledged simi-
lar patterns on the part of some immigrant families in her school, but worried
about others where ‘‘perhaps survival on the streets is more important than aca-
demic excellence. Perhaps as children they were not instilled with the values of
having a good education, and therefore they could not pass that on to their chil-
dren.’’
Teachers talked about ‘‘the breakdown of the family,’’ the large number of chil-
dren in single-family households and the two-parent households with both parents
working. Middle school teachers in particular worried about the emotional toll
this took on their students and the impact on academic work. Some teachers
seemed overburdened by the demands that changes in family structure may have
placed on them in their roles as teachers. Others, such as a business teacher at
South Central, seemed to recognize the need to address this change in family
structure as an underlying symptom of academic underachievement and to view
this as part of the her job as an educator:
A lot of these reasons stem from the students feeling unwanted, not enough
time from the family, feeling like they are just aliens floating in space or some-
thing. Many of these students don’t feel a part of the family. They want to

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know that they are a part of something and somebody . . . . Once the stu-
dents know that you care about them, they really respond to that.
Teachers also expressed concern about the two-parent households in which chil-
dren were likely to have large amounts of solitary, unsupervised time.
Children either go home and there is nobody there, latch-key kids, or we have
children going to day care. They sit down in front of a television, they put
on the VCR, a CD, or the computer, and they play games and are entertained,
but they don’t learn anything from the entertainment. It’s not like Sesame
Street or Mr. Rogers; it’s mindless taking up of time.’’ (Math teacher, East City)
In more upper-middle-class schools, teachers expressed some concern about the
parents they perceived as placing a higher value on work than on children. In
the lower- and middle-class schools, there was more sympathy, and perhaps identi-
fication, with the plight of the families in which both parents worked, perhaps
at more than one job. ‘‘A lot of parents have to work two jobs to pay the bills,
put food on the table. When can they nurture? They’re so exhausted.’’
Not all-parental involvement in schooling is welcomed by teachers. At the more
elite schools, parent involvement was as likely to be mentioned as a problem as
it was an asset. Teachers described parents as overinvested in student achieve-
ment. An East City middle school math teacher commented, ‘‘I mean, we’ve got
some very pressure-packed parents here. They will fight you tooth and nail for
a 98 when you gave the child a 97.’’ At the most elite of the middle schools vis-
ited, parental over-involvement was mentioned as the least satisfying aspect of the
job. Teachers also criticized parents who overrode teacher judgments regarding
course placement and who insisted that their children be placed in higher-level
courses. An East City math teacher said that ‘‘I sound sarcastic, but the kids can
be accelerated as fast as the parents want them accelerated. The parent wants the
child in calculus in the ninth grade, the state says ‘sign him into calculus.’’’
In other schools, teachers and administrators yearned for more contact with par-
ents. At Metropolitan the administration had even attempted raffles and stipends
to draw parents to meetings and lamented the complete absence of parental
involvement in some homes. ‘‘I mean, we have children whose parents don’t pick
the report card up from one year to the next.’’ This school had also initiated par-
ent-teacher contracts for students placed in an accelerated program in order to
ensure more parental involvement, requiring, for example, that parents monitor
homework on a nightly basis. Administrators also worried about the varying
involvement of parents based on class and academic background. The associate
principal at Springdale noted:

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The socially and economically disadvantaged family depends heavily on the sys-
tem to educate their child. They put their trust, they put their hope, in the
school. Not many of them know how to access the system, to come here and
be all they can be to help and support their child. And they don’t have the
money to have a computer, encyclopedias, to help enhance what’s going on
here at the school. But they do put their trust in the school, whereas your
upper echelon, they tend to—I’m not saying they don’t trust—but they tend
to challenge the system more, to make sure that they get the max out of this
school.
Parental involvement in the academic process was seen by all as a critical ingredi-
ent in school success and achievement, but schools vary in their ability to nurture
and support it. Teachers and administrators at some schools have gained a greater
understanding of the reasons for different levels of involvement and attempted to
create strategies for parental engagement. For example, in one of the schools in
West City where a quarter of the students were enrolled in ESL courses, the
former principal had initiated a monthly open house where parents could visit the
classrooms and meet with teachers. He noted the importance in this situation that
‘‘When you speak to the parents, you have to have people who can speak (their
language).’’