Abstract
In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Although the authors of “How to Walk to School” partly acknowledge the limitations that less privileged parents face when they state that their book is written for “middle class urban parents,” this acknowledgement is insufficient, not least because “middle class” obscures the extent of the wealth supporting schools like Nettlehorst. When I checked prices of available real estate in the Nettlehorst catchment area in September 2015, the least expensive two-bedroom property was selling for $205 K. Parents willing to squeeze their families into a one bedroom for the sake of the children’s education could find one condominium available for $184 K. To rent a one-bedroom apartment runs about $1200 per month. Median property values were approximately half a million dollars.
Important sources include: Guadalupe Valdes, 1996. Con Respeto. New York: Teachers College Press; Annette Lareau. 2003. Unequal Childhoods. Berkeley: U of California Press; Sharon Hays. 2004. Flat Broke With Children: Women in the Age of Welfare New York: Oxford University Press.
This typology appears in various publications by Epstein; the most succinct is presented in Epstein, “School/Family/Community Partnerships: Caring for the Children We Share.” Kappan Classics, November 2010 81–96. Originally published in Phi Delta Kappan 76(9) May 1995 701–712. Epstein originally used the term “parental involvement,” but, in response to charges that this phrase marginalized parents who were unable to be “involved” in normative ways (e.g. volunteering during school hours), she switched to what she hoped was a more inclusive phrase. That her research has not, as it is taken up by policy-makers and school administrators, always had the pro-equality effects she apires to, is part of my charge. Epstein’s work, and the work of other advocates of school/family partnerships such as Anne Henderson, has, however, also supported school efforts to engage parents in meaningful ways. For an account of one school that successfully pulled this off, see Soo Hong, A Cord of Three Strands: A New Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2011. In short, the object of my critique is not Epstein’s research per se, but rather the effects it and other mainstream parental involvement research lends itself to.
See “Cassandra in the Classroom,” Santoro, this issue, for a related account of neoliberal educational policy-makers silencing teachers, whose gendered subjectivity also renders their speech subject to criticism and dismissal.
Landes cites a wealth of scholarship on early modern France. See “Women’s Voice in the Old Regime,” chapter 1 in Women and the Public Sphere, pp. 17–38.
See Landes, chapter 4, for an account of women’s citizenship in the Revolution.
On the disappearance of earlier political work towards civil rights, see “Choices or Rights?” Eastman, Anderson and Boyles, this issue.
The reader who is counting will notice that there is still one more type of involvement in Epstein’s rubric. Type 6 is “Collaborating with Community,” which prescribes student service to the community and community service to families and schools. Although Type 6 also calls on parents—and youth—to suppress dissent and provide unpaid labor, it touches on a wider scope of institutions and relationships and thus stands somewhat outside the school/parent relationships discussed in this article.
References
Cucciara, M. 2013. Marketing schools, marketing cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
David, M. 1993. Parents, gender and education reform. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Edelberg, J., and S. Kurland. 2009. how to walk to school. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Engels, F. 1884. The origin of the family, private property and the state. New York: Penguin.
Epstein. 2010. School/family/community partnerships: Caring for the children we share. Kappan Classics 2010: 81–96.
Federici, S. 2012. Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction and feminist struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Folbre, N. 1994. Who pays for the kids? Gender and the structures of constraint. New York: Routledge.
Fraser, N. 1997. Justice interruptus. NY: Routledge.
Gerson, K. 2010. Unfinished business. New York: Oxford UP.
Gottzen, L. 2011. Involved fatherhood? Exploring the educational work of middle class men. Gender and Education 23(5): 619–663.
Gregory, A., and S. Milner. 2011. What is “New” about fatherhood? The social construction of fatherhood in france and the UK. Men and Masculinities 14(5): 588–606.
Griffith, A., and D. Smith. 2004. Mothering for schooling. New York: Routledge.
Hill Collins, P. 2008. Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge.
Hong, S. 2011. A cord of three strands: A new approach to parent engagement in schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
Hutchison, K. 2012. A labour of love: Mothers, emotional capital and homework. Gender and Education 24: 195–212.
Johansson, T., and R. Klinth. 2008. Caring fathers. Men and Masculinities 11(1): 42–62.
Landes, J. 1988. Women and the public sphere. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lareau, A., and E. Weininger. 2008. Time, work and family life. Sociological Forum 23(3): 419–454.
Oakley, A. 1994. The sociology of housework. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
O’Brien, M. 2007. “Mothers’ emotional care work in education and its moral imperative,” Gender and Education 19(2).
Okin, S. 1979. Women in western political thought. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Okin, S. 1989. Justice, gender and the family. New York: Basic Books.
Posey-Maddox, L. 2014. When middle class parents choose urban schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ravitch, D. 2013. Reign of Error.
Reay, D. 1998. Class work. Routledge: Taylor and Francis.
Rousseau, JJ. 1960. “Politics and the arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater”. Trans. Allan Bloom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. p 106.
Tyack, D. 2004. Seeking common ground. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Wall, G., and S. Arnold. 2007. How involved is involved fathering? An exploration of the contemporary culture of fatherhood. Gender and Society 21(4): 508–527.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Shuffelton, A. Parental Involvement and Public Schools: Disappearing Mothers in Labor and Politics. Stud Philos Educ 36, 21–32 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9537-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9537-0