As a researcher in parent engagement in school and former parent activist, the author shares three lessons for sparking more authentic partnerships between schools and immigrant families. First, schools need to move away from deficit thinking and validate families' cultures. In the case of Latino immigrant families, this entails understanding…

This article problematizes conventional school-family partnerships, as geared toward narrow school agendas or mandates for collaboration, and documents efforts to lead more authentic partnerships as part of socially just urban schools. Just as meaningful parent involvement needs to go "beyond the bake sale," so, too, must leadership for…

Background/Context: As accountability pressures have mounted toward ever-higher targets under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, low-achieving schools have sought new tools for raising achievement. The association between parent involvement and student achievement is well established, though the association is an indirect relationship mediated…

Family and community engagement are increasingly seen as powerful tools for making schools more equitable, culturally responsive, and collaborative. The commitment of school leaders is vital to school-community connections, yet is poorly documented in the literature and insufficiently addressed in training for administrators. Many school leaders…

Parent involvement has increasingly been mandated as a key component of school reform, and school-community relations courses (as well as standards for administrators) call for collaborating with diverse families and communities. Yet the role of school leaders in engaging parents is underdeveloped in the literature and in preparation programs. How…

How do marginalized parents construct their role in promoting their children's access to educational opportunity? What lessons might their experience have for our understanding of parent involvement beyond the parameters of traditional models? This qualitative case study examined the beliefs, goals, and practices of 16 working-class African…

Examined personal narratives of struggle with schooling from working class Latino parents whose children were in an experimental college access program at a diverse metropolitan high school. Three narrative types emerged: life stories of parents' own struggles as students; stories of bureaucratic rebuff in parents' encounters with staff in their…