Beyond School Choice: Black Women’s Politicized Parental Involvement Strategies in K-12 School

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 11. School Choice Processes

Abstract

r belief suggests that working mothers struggle to participate in traditional forms of parental
involvement, but African-American working class mothers in this study transform their work in order to enact
parental involvement in their children’s schools with varying levels of success. Interviews with a small sample
(N=10) of Black mothers highlight their accumulation of capital from their varied work and educational
experiences. This paper fills a gap in literature on parental involvement in schools that has focused on
contrasting strategies in the middle class to the working class (Lareau: 2011) and parent coaching strategies
(Calarco: 2019); the importance of impression management in Black Middle Class public identities and strategic
mothering (Lacy: 2007; Barnes: 2015), evidence of Black working class women’s parental involvement
strategies in their children’s schools. This paper focuses on three specific strategies of preparation, presence, and
school/class choice as enacted by women within a school choice system. I map these strategies against the
political process model in order to argue that 1) Black working class women’s parental involvement is part of a
larger political process; 2) the activities in their politicized parental involvement, and the efficacy of their
interventions are best understood as an extension of the political process model that has origins in the Black
Panther Party, which was only burgeoning during the theorization of the original model. This paper can be used
to both fill a gap in the knowledge surrounding Black women’s parental engagement as strategic and to extend
the political process model to capture the way the post-civil rights radicalization of Black politics had deep
influences on the foundation that Black working class women’s school engagement currently builds on.

Author

• Gabrielle L Peterson, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor