Family Engagement and Education Reform: Assimilation Toward Empowerment?

• In Event: Student, Family, and Community Engagement for Educational Leadership

Abstract

This review analyzes the literature on family engagement, focused on practices that seek to empower diverse stakeholders to participate in education reform. The review is guided by a framework to map school-community literature along two dimensions—social stance and power and control—to identify the extent that families own engagement spaces and author agendas, and co-construct or shift the norms and beliefs of the education system. I conclude that conflict, not collaboration, is the status quo and that family engagement may not serve to mitigate conflict but create structures and support venues for open negotiation of power. Future research must investigate families’ experiences about what it means to be empowered and why they seek to influence education policymaking and reform.

Author

• Diana Casanova, University of California - Berkeley