Does Parental Involvement Change After Schools Assign Students an IEP?

• In Event: Thinking Ecologically in Educational Policy and Research

Abstract

The importance of parental involvement in the educational process has been emphasized by teachers and educational psychologists, and much research has linked various forms of parental involvement to the academic outcomes of students (Jeynes, 2005). The specific aspects of parental involvement vary, but scholars have generally categorized various actions into home-based, such as monitoring students’ work progress, and school-based parental involvement, such as volunteering at schools. Researchers suggest that parental involvement is particularly important for parents of students with disabilities to ensure special education services are appropriate and effective. In the U.S., approximately 7.0 million students receive special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), constituting for 14% of total public-school enrollment. IDEA emphasizes the importance of parental involvement in both formal and informal educational settings, beginning with the creation of students’ Individualized Education Program (IEP). While parents are not legally mandated to participate, IDEA protects the rights of parents to participate in all aspects of the special education process and be treated as an equal member of the IEP team.

Other work has shown how critical parental involvement is with regards to supporting the children’s educational outcomes (e.g., Sheldon & Epstein, 2002). Yet, missing from the conversation was the question as to how parental involvement could change once the IEP had been assigned. That is, cutting across ecological contexts, do changes in school affect changes home, and, if so, for whom?

Drawing from Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory, we consider various forms of parent involvement to exist within microsystems (e.g. home-based involvement) and mesosystems (e.g. school-based involvement), and that these actions are shaped by different factors of exosystems (e.g. neighborhoods) and the overarching macrosystems (e.g. economic resources). Within this framework, we consider to what extent involvement changes for parents of students with disabilities following the assignment of the child’s IEP. Specifically using the ECLS-K: 2011, we exploit variation in home-based and school-based involvement actions based on children who have an IEP in one year but not the year before/after; and we examine how these changes differ based on child, household, and school characteristics.

Our findings suggested that, on average, the level of parental home-based involvement increases slightly after their children receive an IEP; but we identified heterogeneity for different groups of students. For instance, once children from lower-income backgrounds or children from immigrant families received an IEP, their parents exhibited greater parental involvement compared to their respective reference groups. This heterogeneity highlights the importance of understanding the effects of an IEP from an ecological perspective—that is, the effect of an IEP on parental involvement shifted in magnitude from a small to moderate effect size once we considered contextual characteristics, such as income or immigration status. Finally, we also explored differences by disability type and grade level. We found that there were no differences between IEPs assigned to children with high-versus low-incidence disabilities and no differences by grade of IEP.

Authors

• Jacob Kirksey, Texas Tech University

• Michael A. Gottfried, University of Pennsylvania

• Jennifer A. Freeman, The University of Pennsylvania