Underground Latino Parent Involvement in the Name of Educational Accountability

• In Event: 72.026 - Decentering Parental Involvement: Critical Examinations of Race, Class, Gender, and Immigration in U.S. Home–School Relationships

Abstract

Government officials, policymakers, educators, and families strive to obtain academic access and equity for all students, yet how such a lofty goal is achieved remains highly debated. The current educational reform movement, initiated with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 pushes for an accountability approach to education that focuses on high-stakes testing and educational interventions. Less is known on how educational reform plays out in parent involvement initiatives that target schools that serve low-income students, such as the provisions of Title I of NCLB. This paper reports on the experiences of two undocumented Latina immigrants with children in a Title I middle school that 1) served 97% low-income Spanish-speaking families and 2) had been identified for Program Improvement (PI) for failing to demonstrate sufficient student progress on standardized achievement tests. The research questions that guided this study include: What options are provided to Spanish-speaking parents to be involved in their children’s education in a Title I middle school? How do Spanish-speaking parents make sense of these options and decide when and how to participate in the schooling process?
The focal parents participated in a larger 2-year ethnographic study that explored the experiences of Latino families with public middle schools during the educational reform movement. Linguistic anthropology (Duranti, 1997; Hanks, 1996), with its discourse analytic and ethnographic methodologies, was drawn upon to conduct a micro-level analysis of the meaning-making processes of the focal immigrant families as they navigated their children’s education. The study design included 24 months of home and school observations, semi-structured qualitative interviews with focal parents, students, teachers, and administrators, as well as archival and artifact collection (e.g., district and school reports, websites, mission statements, student report cards, letters to and from school, school event flyers). Data collection at homes and schools involved participant observation, writing of fieldnotes and memos, and audio and video recording of everyday interactions. In-depth interviews with participants triangulated the data collected through observations, and continuous check-ins with participants helped capture the situated nature of local interactions.
Administrators from this Title I middle school reported that they were unable to focus on parental engagement as a priority due to the focus on implementing Title I and other policy-related mandates which manifested into inauthentic interactions with Spanish-speaking families. Still, the focal Latina mothers found a way to be engaged in educational policy-sanctioned activities outside the walls of the school that involved getting paid under the table to recruit neighborhood Latino children to participate in tutoring services through the Supplemental Educational Services mandate of NCLB. It was precisely a conglomeration of NCLB provisions that both limited and provided opportunities for low-income parents to be involved in the business of doing school, a potential consequence of the prescriptive nature of federal parent involvement policy that targets low-income communities. This paper contributes new perspectives on the ideologies behind interventionist policy initiatives and highlights how language, race, class, gender, and immigration status shaped the process of becoming involved in public schools for the focal Mexican immigrant mothers.

Author

• Sera Jean Hernandez, San Diego State University