Contestation or Collaboration? A ComparativeStudy of Home–School Relations

AMANDA E. LEWIS

TYRONE A. FORMAN

University of Illinois at Chicago

In this article we focus on two public elementary schools that are known to havea great deal of parental participation, examining the relationships parents andschool personnel build, and how these relationships unfold. We found thataccommodation and community typified parent–teacher interactions at oneschool, while interactions at the other could be characterized as ambivalent andfraught with competing demands. We argue that social class and school cultureinteract to shape what is possible for parents and teachers to accomplish in theway of forming strong and meaningful relationships, ultimately leading to quitedifferent outcomes.

I want involvement, but I don’t want them to be obsessive about it.

—First-Grade Teacher, Forestview

Your help is needed

—Metro Elementary director to Metro parents

Too often in discussions of schools we talk in the language of account-ability, management, and training rather than the “language of relation-ships” (Payne 1991). The idea that a school’s success is at least partiallydependent upon the existence of strong relationships among membersof a school’s community is not new (Eccles and Harold 1996; Swap 1993).However, too little research has investigated just how these relation-ships take shape.

In this article we build on existing research by focusing on two schoolsthat are known to have a great deal of parental participation to examineexactly what they do, what kinds of relationships parents and schoolpersonnel build, and how these relationships unfold. In both schools,educators desire parent participation, and both schools evidence a greatdeal of parental involvement. Yet, as the epigraph above illustrates, edu-cators’ actual relations with the parents in each school differ greatly. Weexplain why their relations differ—how the staff come to hold such dif-ferent attitudes toward parents—and argue that issues of social classand school culture interact to shape the possibilities open to both parentsand teachers in forming strong and meaningful relationships.

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Anthropology & Education Quarterly 33(1):1–30. Copyright © 2002, American AnthropologicalAssociation.

In this study we are concerned less with parent involvement as it di-rectly affects student outcomes (e.g., parent supplemental teaching orhomework assistance) than with involvement as it affects school func-tioning. Public schools today are institutions that are often short on help,money, and supplies. Parents are one source of help and, in some cases,of additional money and supplies. However, as Annette Lareau(1989:159) points out, parents also are in certain ways the “natural ene-mies” of school personnel, driven in most cases by particularistic con-cerns (their child) that do not mesh well with the more universalisticconcerns of school personnel (all children in the school or* class; see alsoWaller 1932). This can lead to conflicting agendas and to some ambiva-lence on the part of school personnel about parental participation. Al-though it would be hard to find an educator who is opposed to parentshelping their child with homework or reinforcing the importance ofschool and of respecting the teacher, it is quite a different story when dis-cussing parental participation in the daily functioning of schools. In thisway we distinguish parental involvement of the kind that can happenoutside the school building from parental participation that involves di-rect school- or classroom-level participation or intervention. It is this lat-ter dimension that we explore here.

In examining why parent-school relationships in the two schools areso different, we focus on the role of social class and school culture inshaping home–school relations. Although other useful work has dis-cussed the way parents’ social class impacts their school involvement (interms of the cultural capital, resources, and knowledge that parents door do not have; see e.g., Connell et al. 1982; Heath 1983; Kerbow andBernhardt 1993; Lareau 1989; Smrekar 1996), few have discussed the re-lational aspects of class as it plays out in parent–teacher interactions. AsConnell et al. point out, “The relation between teachers and parents hasto be understood as itself a class relation, that is, one structured by theirrespective class situations” (1982:128). For instance, teachers, who as agroup might share a similar social class status across school districts, arequite differently located in relation to the specific communities theirschools serve. While some are in higher-status positions relative toworking-class or poor local parents, others are in parallel or even lower-status positions relative to high-income families in their communities.Although these status differences are not all determining, they do im-pact how parents and teachers understand each other and each others’roles and responsibilities—influencing teachers’ and parents’ level ofopenness with one another, styles of engagement, and mutual expecta-tions. In this sense, class is relative and is significant as much for its socialand cultural impact as for its impact on material resources. However,class does not have a simple or direct effect that is always the same andtherefore easy to predict. School culture sets the context for relationshipbuilding; it is the “field” on which class dynamics play out (Bourdieu

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1977b). Thus, we pay attention both to the role of social class and to localcontexts in mediating the relationships that transpire.

Background

Relationships between schools and parents have never been straight-forward. Historically in the United States, most parent-involvementprograms were more accurately school involvement programs (or parenteducation programs), meaning that school personnel felt it part of theirduty to get involved in the home and essentially teach parents how to dotheir jobs. Parents were involved to the extent that they were counseledabout proper parent behavior (Musgrove 1966). By the end of the 1950s,a widely accepted ideology of parent involvement had evolved. Accord-ing to this ideology, parent–school interaction is limited to discussionsof modern child rearing, participants are (almost) always mothers, andlevels of parent involvement are determined by the school and are usu-ally limited to fund-raising, participating in room-mother activities,joining the PTA, and supporting the student at home. The assumptionthat families would accommodate the school’s value system rather thanthe school accommodating the unique communities or populations thatit served was and continues to be the dominant ideology (Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler 1995; Lightfoot 1978; Nedler and McAfee 1979).The rise of an ideology of professionalism in schools in many ways rein-forced this assumption; as school personnel took on the identity of ex-pert and educational authority, the professionalization movement indi-rectly limited the range of potential relationships school personnel couldhave with parents and perpetuated the already narrow definitions of theroles parents should have in their children’s schools (Swap 1993; Tyackand Hansot 1982).

Today few educators question the value of having parents involved inschool. Particularly for urban public schools, where teaching faculties donot approach the diversity present in the student body, parent participa-tion in schools is often postulated as the only way to foster the kind ofsociocultural congruence that encourages academic achievement (Del-gado-Gaitan 1991; Fine 1993; Heath 1983; Moll and Greenberg 1990;Philips 1993). These cultural discontinuities, which make parent in-volvement so important, also are precisely what can make home–schoolrelationships more challenging. The discontinuities between home andschool generated by race, social class, and linguistic differences are notmerely issues of culture but also of power. Marginalized parents, whothemselves often have had negative schooling experiences, often feelquite alienated when confronted with the authority of school and schoolpersonnel (Delgado-Gaitan 1991; Delpit 1990; Fine 1993). These confron-tations involve interaction across multiple axes of difference. The axis ofdifference most relevant to the current project is social class.

Building on a long history of studies of social class and schooling (An-yon 1981; Apple 1982; Bernstein 1977; Bourdieu 1977a; Bourdieu and

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Passeron 1990; Bowles and Gintis 1976; MacLeod 1995; Willis 1977), agrowing body of literature focuses on explaining how parents’ socialclass does or does not affect their involvement in schools (Connell et al.1982; Heath 1983; Lareau 1989; Smrekar 1996). Much of this research hasspecifically examined material class-specific factors that can act to in-hibit parent involvement (Connell et al. 1992; Kerbow and Bernhardt1993; Smrekar 1996), including the inflexibility of parents’ work sched-ules, number of daily hours worked, and transportation difficulties. AsKerbow and Bernhardt state, parent involvement is clearly affected “bythe presence or absence of family resources” (1993:134). Variations intime, energy, money, and knowledge, “all take their toll on how muchthe parent is able to accomplish” (Kerbow and Bernhardt 1993:134).

A number of analysts, however, have argued that we need to lookmore closely at the role of other kinds of family resources. Much of thiswork draws on the writing of Pierre Bourdieu, who utilized notions of“cultural capital” and “habitus” to explain how some cultural practicesand norms—specific kinds of what Swidler (1986) called “cultural tool-kits”—come to be those that schools recognize as proper and acceptable,while others are seen as deviant or inferior (Bourdieu 1977a). Lareau(1989), for example, examines families’ social and cultural resources tounderstand in more nuanced ways the role of class in shaping parent-school interactions. Lareau and Horvat (1999) build on this to demon-strate that school personnel are crucial in this equation—at stake is notmerely how parents put their social and cultural resources to use buthow school personnel differentially respond to or reward parental re-sources. As Anyon (1981) and others have demonstrated, teachers haveclass-specific expectations and understandings of the communities theyserve. Social class thus affects both the range of material and cultural re-sources families have available and the way school personnel interactwith and respond to parents. Therefore, in multiple ways, class can im-pact the quantity, quality, and content of home–school relations (Con-nell et al. 1982; Hoover-Dempsey et al. 1987; Hoover-Dempsey and San-dler 1995; Lareau 1989).

In the complex process of home–school relationship building, the roleof social class, particularly with regard to status, power, and authority, isoften relational rather than absolute, with neither teachers nor parentsuniversally powerful or powerless (Connell et al. 1982). Moreover, theexact role of social class in shaping home–school relations is often muchmore complex than is regularly acknowledged. For instance, much edu-cational research on parent–teacher relations still leaves social class as arelatively unspoken background factor. In one example, Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler’s (1995) model of parent involvement generallyoffers important guidance for thinking about parents’ involvement deci-sions; however, socioeconomic status is left out. This is not, they explain,because they think it is unimportant, but because they include onlythose variables that are most important. We suggest that, in fact, issues of

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social class and of relative status difference have direct and significantimpacts on the variables they determined to be important enough to in-clude. For example, they argue that we can not leave out the importanceof “fit” between parents’ involvement activity and the schools expecta-tions (Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler 1995), but we would argue thatthese activities, expectations, and “fit” are all related to issues of status.For example, what schools invite or request parents to do and what op-portunities they provide are inextricably linked to class and power. So-cial class is not merely a background social fact, but is an active part ofeveryday relations. Cultural capital and class “habitus”—the consciousand unconscious styles, tastes, preferences, modes of interaction, knowl-edge base, expectations, and cultural performances parents and teachersbring to schools—are regularly part of the scene, shaping everyday in-teractions.

Methods and Settings

We use Ogbu’s “multilevel approach to school ethnography” (1981)to study two schools, Forestview and Metro. This approach incorporatesdetailed observations of daily interactions with an examination of socialand historical forces, including the nature and processes of social stratifi-cation (race, class, and gender) that enter into individual normative be-havioral transactions in all settings where teaching and learning occur(i.e., home, classroom, playground, and the like). Paying close attentionto how social forces do and do not structure what takes place in the dif-ferent institutions and between various individuals, we use Ogbu’s mul-tilevel approach to examine interactions between families and schools.We highlight those factors that contribute to the positive development ofhome–school relationships as well as those that seem to get in the way.

Though many interactions between home and school are structuredand formal (e.g., back-to-school night), here we are most interested inthe unstructured and informal—that is, the everyday interactions thatare the substance of home–school relations. It is these daily school prac-tices that limit or* encourage parent-school collaboration (Banks andMcGee 1993; Eccles and Harold 1993; Epstein 1990; Epstein and Dauber1991; Lightfoot 1978; Payne 1991; Swap 1993). As Lightfoot states,“chance, daily interactions certainly [have] weightier significance thanthe vacuous, ritualistic PTA meetings scheduled by the school” (1978:11). Although we take care to include PTA-related interactions as an im-portant “official” site of home–school relationship building, we includethem as one of a range of sites of interaction on par with naturally occur-ring interactions that take place in the everyday life of schools.

Beginning in the fall of 1993, the first author spent four months at For-estview.1 She spent two to three days a week at the school, either in afirst-grade class in which she was located, in observation in otherclasses, in the faculty lunchroom, in the main office, or on other parts ofthe school’s campus. Functioning informally as an assistant in Ms.

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Cone’s first-grade classroom, she had numerous informal and open-ended conversations with key informants (teachers and parents); onlythe principal, John Pirelli, whose time during the day was hard to comeby, was formally interviewed. In addition to observing during schoolhours, she also attended after-school parent–teacher events, includingroom-mother afternoon teas, PTA meetings, and back-to-school night.2

Our research at Metro took place over four months in 1990 and in-cluded observations of students, teachers, and parents in natural set-tings; collection of local documents; and informal interviews with nu-merous school community members. As at Forestview, we spent muchof our time at Metro in one early-childhood classroom (where parentswere likely to be actively involved and around).3

Forestview was chosen because of its location in a homogenous, up-per-middle-class suburb, and its reputation as a school with very activeand involved parents. The school was known to have a great quantity ofparent participation, and it was at least superficially clear that many ofthe traditional class and cultural barriers to parent involvement werenot present. Metro is a small, alternative school in an economically dis-tressed urban area. We selected Metro because, despite its heterogene-ous school population and the need to contend with many obstacles toparent involvement, it, too, has a reputation for extensive parent in-volvement.

Though initially seeming to be very different, upon further examina-tion Metro and Forestview are more similar than different. For example,although Metro is a school of choice, in many ways, so is Forestview.Most of the parents we spoke to at Forestview explained that they hadquite carefully checked out schools and district boundaries before buy-ing their present homes. Indeed, the principal noted that one of the rolesof the school in the community was to “raise property values,” as theschool’s strong reputation attracted many families to the surroundingneighborhoods. “School choice” in this sense, is not merely about choos-ing between schools within large, urban districts, but also expressed in-directly through housing patterns; in this way, at both schools parentsdirectly or indirectly chose their child’s school. In addition, though For-estview is larger than Metro, their staff to* student ratios are compara-ble. Thus, although our analysis will pay attention to the variations inschool size, because of its extensive resources, Forestview does not facemany of the challenges of its larger urban elementary-school counter-parts. Thus Metro and Forestview are more appropriate points of com-parison than Forestview would be to a typical urban school of over 600students.

Forestview

Forestview is a neighborhood elementary school in a middle-classsuburb in Northern California. Located in an extremely diverse me-tropolis, the neighborhood surrounding Forestview is noteworthy for its

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homogeneity. Of the total population of 31,585, over 89 percent of thissuburb’s residents are Caucasian (1990 Census*); 7 percent are Asian, 1.4percent are black, 0.6 percent are American Indian, and 6.6 percent are ofHispanic origin.4 The median household income is $46,885, while themedian family income for households with children in residence is$53,641. Only 2.1 percent of families in the city are living below the pov-erty line.

The school building was constructed in 1955 for a maximum of 666students. It is spread out on fairly spacious grounds; no part of the build-ing exceeds one story. The school consists of three long rows of buildingsconnected back-to-back and side-to-side. It is flanked on the back andsides by a number of playgrounds (multiple basketball, volleyball, teth-erball, and foursquare courts) and fields (baseball field, soccer field, andmiscellaneous large grass area). A number of factors turn what wouldotherwise be a less-than-inviting physical structure into a rather pleas-ant and welcoming space—the extensive grass of surrounding play ar-eas, children’s work covering classroom windows, and planters in thewalkways.

As Table 1 shows, both Forestview’s student body and its faculty mir-ror the demographic characteristics of the surrounding area. A majorityof the 33 members of the school’s professional staff are European Ameri-can women, with the exception of three European American men, threeAsian teachers, and a half-time Latina ESL teacher (statistics were notavailable for the 17 half-time instructional aides, but anecdotal evidenceindicates that they are primarily Caucasian women). The three men onstaff all have positions of authority: one is the principal, one the speechtherapist, and one a fourth-grade teacher (and unofficial staff-PTA rep-resentative).

Metro

Metro shares a large Turn of the Century* building with three othersmall schools. Located in a low-income neighborhood in a large city onthe Eastern seaboard, surrounded by graffiti-covered green scaffolding,and coated in gray, chipping paint, the school building is not an appeal-

Table 1.Racial and Ethnic Makeup of Students and School Personnel at Forestview

Race Students School Personnel

European American 86% 89%Latino 6% 1.5%Asian American 4% 9.5%Other 4% 0%

Source: Forestview School Report Card, January 1993. “Others” includes AfricanAmericans and Native Americans

Lewis and Forman Contestation or Collaboration? 7

ing place. Though Metro’s hallways and stairwells are not in bettershape than any other part of the building, the artwork covering the wallsgoes some distance toward creating a more inviting atmosphere.

Metro has a student body that is primarily African American and Lat-ino. Located on the edge of a low-income neighborhood, it is a small al-ternative elementary school. Not all of Metro’s students come from theimmediate neighborhood around the school; some come from an evenlower-income neighborhood just north. In the 1990 Census*, the imme-diate Metro neighborhood was 52 percent Latino (primarily Puerto Ri-can) and 39 percent African American. The poverty rate was approxi-mately 40 percent. Metro’s student body of more than 200 students isdivided into mixed-level classes spread across four floors of the schoolbuilding. Both the student body and the professional staff are fairly di-verse.

The context for parent involvement at Metro is unique in that it is aschool of choice that requires parents to sign an agreement that statesthat they will work with the school in order to help their children be suc-cessful.5 Although the ways in which this agreement manifests itselfvary greatly from family to family, its baseline includes attending sev-eral parent-teacher-student conferences during the year, meeting withschool personnel when needed, and reselecting the school each year (byresponding affirmatively to a form sent home each spring).

Home–School Relationship Building

Forestview: Traditional Roles Present New Challenges

Parents came up as a subject of intense feeling during our very firstvisit to Forestview—the first official staff meeting of the year. After in-troductions and a welcome, the principal circulated a number of sheetsasking for volunteers for after-school homework club, adopt-a-kid, bul-letin board, newsletter, and PTA meetings. As he was about to passaround a sign-up sheet for PTA meetings—in fact, before the articlecould even begin its round—a wave of emotion was released. Thefourth-grade teacher and the only male on the regular teaching staff, Mr.

Table 2.Racial and Ethnic Makeup of Students and School Personnel at Metro

Race Students School Personnel

African-American 44% 20%Latino 28% 33%Other 26% *47%*

Source: Metro School Records 1989–1990. “Other” includes Asian Americans,European Americans and Native Americans.* = All European American.

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Brody, stood up to speak.6 As he stood, Ms. Cone, the first-grade teacherwhose classroom we studied, leaned over and whispered that Mr. Brodywent to all the meetings last year, “He’s the only one who goes.” Mr.Brody declared he was not going to attend* any more: “They don’t wantme there.” Describing the meetings as quite tense, he explained that hefelt unwelcome there. Another teacher immediately joined in, “Theyhave their own agenda.” A third stated, “Parents only want to do whatthey want.” A flurry of resentments were expressed: “Parents don’t un-derstand our jobs.” “Parents don’t understand how much work we do.”“They don’t trust us, they’re talking about not giving us any supplymoney for our classrooms this year.” “Last year they wanted receipts foreverything but everyone spends way more.” The principal reined in theconversation and explained that he would draw up a contract, based onteachers’ requests from the last year, to “regulate” parent involvement.Teachers seemed appeased but the question of attendance at PTA meet-ings was unresolved.

As illustrated by the principal’s proposed solution to the “problem”with parents, most Forestview staff felt the need to develop strategies forlimiting and structuring parent participation. As Swap found, “parentinvolvement is sought” but “within carefully circumscribed bounda-ries” (1993:21). Teachers in the school had developed elaborate systemsfor regulating parent involvement in the school. Though teachers appre-ciated the principal’s efforts to help with this, they had clearly takentheir own steps at asserting control. Although some strategies weremore organized, others involved elaborate “unofficial practices.” Thiswas brought home to us on the first official day of school for the chil-dren. Ms. Cone explained to us early that morning that there was an un-written policy among teachers to stay away from their classrooms (thisusually meant going to the teacher lounge) from 8 a.m. until just beforeschool started at 8:30, so parents could not try to drop their children offearly. While Ms. Cone was taking care of last-minute preparations in herclassroom, she lost track of time. At approximately 8:15, a parentknocked and then opened the door. Soon after, at least eight parents andchildren stood around in the classroom asking Ms. Cone questions. Par-ents got their children situated and then left. As Ms. Cone later put it,“We didn’t get out fast enough.” Around 8:20, we saw a large group ofparents and children standing in front of the school waiting for the bell.Clearly other teachers had “escaped”; they had the technique perfected.This was Ms. Cone’s second year of teaching and she was still learning.A senior member of the staff joked with her later about this slipup. Overtime Ms. Cone received a great deal of advice from her more-experi-enced peers on how to manage or control parent participation.

Part of Forestview teachers’ struggles and elaborate efforts seemed toinvolve reasserting authority over the classroom, guarding preciousautonomy along with their sense of professionalism. Teachers repeat-edly expressed the sentiment that parents did not understand what their

Lewis and Forman Contestation or Collaboration? 9

jobs entailed and did not respect how much work and time they put intoteaching (see also Henderson 1987; Swap 1990). In fact, a number of inci-dents demonstrated that teachers were at least partially correct.

In one sequence of events over a two-week period, Ms. Cone had along negotiation with one set of parents over when they could come intothe classroom. Ms. Cone had set things up so that parents could sign upto come in on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays at preestablishedtimes. She planned special activities that parents could help with duringthese times. A series of confrontations began with one child’s (Sammy’s)father wanting to come in on a Friday. Ms. Cone decided to allow this,but against her better judgment. As she explained to us, she would nowhave to plan something special for his visit. She usually tried to do groupwork on days when parents were coming to her class. She explained thatthis had to be adjusted depending on who they were and how well theycould work with groups; by having parents come into classrooms tohelp, Ms. Cone and other teachers were constantly contending with par-ents’ varied skills. As she remarked, “Some of them aren’t very goodwith kids,” so Ms. Cone wrote out very detailed directions for each par-ent-student activity.

In this particular incident, Ms. Cone was very frustrated aboutSammy’s father’s coming to class on a Friday because she felt it was animposition and was worried that this would become a regular habit.“It’s taken me a long time to get this system down where I have themsign up at the beginning only for specific times. . . . They want to comewhen they want to come, and it’s not always convenient. . . . SometimesI need to just be with the students.” In fact, her fears were realized when,the next week, Sammy’s mother (who usually came on Wednesday)could not make her regular day and decided she, too, wanted to come ona Friday. Even though Ms. Cone politely told her, “No thanks,” themother was quite persistent. We witnessed Ms. Cone explain to themother that she only sets up parent stations two or three days a week.The mother replied by asking in exaggerated tones, “Do you do grouplessons all day Monday and all day Friday?” Though she maintained hercomposure at the moment, Ms. Cone later expressed her frustrationsabout the exchange:

I just felt like so mad. She doesn’t know how much work it is to have parentscome, and sometimes it’s better for the kids without them. . . . I used to letthem come in whenever they wanted to; I used to rush around planning someactivity for them to do and then they wouldn’t show up. Everyone thinks thatthey can do your job.

Sammy’s mother did not drop the subject. Several days later she was stillasking about coming on a Friday, at one point inquiring, “Do you onlydo art once a week?” In her struggle to continue to be polite and friendlywith a mother who seemingly was not responding in kind, Ms. Coneseemed very frustrated: “My job isn’t to make the parents feel good, its

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to do what’s best for the kids. I spend so much time getting ready for theparents, that’s why I only have them come on certain times.” Ms Conewas clearly upset. “Oooh, she just makes me so mad! She just cannot fig-ure out why I do not want her to come.”

Ms. Cone expressed a number of very real frustrations here. In light ofthe care she took to avoid having this kind of situation arise, and with allthe work she put into getting ready for parent visits, it is no wonder shefelt affronted when this mother would not take no for an answer andthen implied that Ms. Cone was not doing a proper job because she didnot want her to come in. Sammy’s mother, on the other hand, quite un-derstandably could not comprehend why her child’s teacher would notwant the help she was offering. She expressed a sense of bewildermentover Ms. Cone’s decision and in the end was indignant about it. In part,Ms. Cone’s resistance to the mother’s visit seemed to be due to Ms.Cone’s felt pressure to perform—the feeling that her very competence asa teacher was on display and under scrutiny whenever parents werearound. In her view, it was neither imaginable nor permissible to have aparent just come to school and be a part of whatever happened to be go-ing on. This seemed motivated by a desire both to maximize adult help,and to control (either defensively or proactively) what parents saw anddid in the school. Teacher and parent here were, at least in part, strug-gling over ownership of school space. In the short run, Ms. Conewon—Sammy’s mother did not come in on Friday—but not withoutsome costs. This kind of exchange fits with prior research that has foundteachers, in some cases, actively discouraging parent involvement inschool (Comer 1980; Dornbusch and Ritter 1988; Epstein and Dauber1991; Hoover-Dempsey et al. 1987; Swap 1990). In these cases, teacherswere not discouraging all forms of parent involvement (e.g., they werenot discouraging parent involvement in school activities at home) butwere trying to assert control over their classrooms and had come to seeparents as a challenge to that.

Forestview teachers’ perspectives on parents’ presence in the class-room were similar to Ms. Cone’s; most teachers believed it was good forthe students to see their parents in the classroom, but teachers’ descrip-tions of daily experiences with parents volunteering in their classroomswere always filled with ambivalence, if not outright resentment. Ms.Monroe, a first-grade teacher, expressed it this way: “It’s nice to have anextra pair of hands, to help clean up or do daily rotation stations. . . . Iwant involvement, but I don’t want them to be obsessive about it.” Latein the fall semester a third-grade teacher told us she did not have parents“come in regularly anymore . . . I only have them come when I have spe-cial messy projects . . . and to tell you the truth I haven’t called any yetthis year.” Dornbusch and Ritter (1988) identified related themes amongthe teachers in their study, many of whom expressed resentment about“parent-initiated contact.” The general distrust we heard from For-estview teachers highlighted issues that persisted throughout the period

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of our data collection: struggles over resources, feelings of disrespect,competing agendas, and strong feelings about the need to control parentparticipation. Teachers were not the only ones who had recognizedthese tensions. As one parent put it, “I’ve had a mixed experience on thePTA board. Some folks here have negative ideas about teachers, theprincipal, and staff . . . it can make for a very abrasive situation.”

Both teachers and parents gave a number of examples of their some-times competing agendas. Although this stemmed partly from whatLareau (1989) named as competing visions (parents particularly focusedon their own child, while teachers are necessarily more universally fo-cused on all the children), it was also a result of competing priorities forthe school’s direction. In classroom activities teachers complained ofparents only wanting to help their own kids, of trying to “spy on” or col-lect information on a neighbor’s child, of not wanting to do any of themonotonous work that teachers needed help with (cutting, pasting, col-lating, and stapling), or of wanting only to help with certain subjects.Parents talked about all the various negotiations and accommodationsthey had to make with different teachers each year. One parent ex-plained the negotiating this way: “They’re all comfortable with differentthings and want you to do different things—grade papers, help withparties, help in the room—some don’t want you in the room. I don’tmind but I know people who get frustrated.” These struggles aroundcompeting priorities and agendas often manifested themselves in pri-vate, heated conversations between the principal and the PTA president.The biggest conflicts of the year, however, manifested themselves inteachers’ struggles with the PTA over resources.

While teachers’ primary interactions with parents were related toclassroom volunteering, the PTA organized and structured most otherparent involvement in the school. As we observed in the first schoolmeeting, teachers felt hostile toward the PTA. The hostility was mostoften expressed as a sense of disrespect. For example, as Ms. Monroe putit, “The PTA [will] give you $75 in May, then they’ll put restrictions on itlike you have to get together with your grade level to decide how tospend it. It has to be nonconsumable and then they want receipts for it,like they think you’ll spend it on yourself.” Also, there were several re-cent events that had greatly increased the tension with the PTA. ThePTA scheduled their fund-raiser (selling gift wrap) so that it overlappedwith the teachers’ fund-raiser, math-a-thon, a contest in which studentssign up sponsors who pay for the number of math problems studentsanswer correctly during a school-organized, one-day math event. Themath-a-thon raised only half as much as usual and, because the moneydoes not all go to cover the same expenses, teachers’ priorities lost out.While the teacher-organized math-a-thon traditionally had paid forthose things teachers believed to be essential (particularly the copy ma-chine) but that the school’s regular budget could not cover, the PTA gavefunding priority to special assemblies, field trips, and other “extras.”

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One result of these tensions was that teachers left most nonclassroom-specific interactions with parents to the principal and resisted participat-ing in PTA-initiated activities. Thus, unfortunately, students’ needssometimes fell by the wayside in the complex negotiations and strugglesbetween parents and teachers.

The principal, John Pirelli, talked a lot about encouraging parent in-volvement in the school as one of his highest priorities. Parents we spoketo talked about this in relation to how they felt about the school: “Hemakes a big difference in how welcome people feel.” Mr. Pirelli strug-gled, though, with encouraging this same sentiment among the staff. Indiscussing his proposed parent-involvement contract, he explained tous that it was his way of helping teachers find mechanisms to take morecontrol of the relationship with parents. Moreover, he was, as he put it,“trying to convince them that it’ll give them better clientele” and “maketheir jobs easier.” He ended the explanation on a somber note: “It’s astruggle.”

However, just as the teachers were comfortable with most forms of in-volvement that did not interfere with their classrooms, Mr. Pirelli pri-marily liked those forms of participation that did not involve issues hebelieved to be under his jurisdiction (e.g., school governance). Duringour time at the school he had an extended, simmering feud with parentleadership. Mary, one fairly active mother, explained that the principal’shesitancy about parent involvement was partly based on past conflictswith the PTA around the handling of specific issues:

We’re kind of radical for my school district anyway. [The district] wanted topaint the school in the middle of the year, and we thought that it was a horri-ble idea. It would’ve been really inconvenient for teachers, not to mention thefumes [which are bad for our children to breathe]. John didn’t want them todo it either. I told him we were going to go talk to Dr. Billick, the superinten-dent, and we met with him. We didn’t want to hurt John, but we wanted whatwas best for the school. There had been a lot of talk about [our neighborhood]pulling out of the district and so, for political reasons, Dr. Billick agreed to putoff the painting until summer. Forestview got a reputation after that and Johngot a lot of flack for not being able to control the PTA. We did other things too,the district wanted to know what was going on. Liz [PTA president] was re-ally combative. She and John are just too much alike. John wants parent in-volvement but he’s threatened by it.7

There was great tension here involving a principal who actively advo-cated for parent involvement yet also had to deal with the fallout fromPTA actions. Forestview parents were not asking for permission to acton behalf of their children and the school. Thus, the school and parentshad the same goals, but conflict arose about how to reach them. Parentshad the social resources to make things happen and were not alwayscareful about the possible side effects of their actions On the other hand,they raised legitimate complaints about the principal’s resistance to

Lewis and Forman Contestation or Collaboration? 13

their participation in school governance. He freely admitted that he washaving tension with the PTA when we spoke with him:

From my perspective, the decision-making one is difficult because parentshave a conception of how to deal with things, which is different than my con-ception, which is based on the reality of knowing what’s happening. Andwhen I have to say to parents, “Back off on that,” because they’re on overload,it doesn’t go over so well. . . . It’s difficult.

The principal believed that he knew what was best and that “they” didnot, and thus parent input on governance issues was neither needed norparticularly wanted. On the other hand, Forestview parents, as Mary ex-plained, felt that they knew what was best for the school and were notslow to take action, even if school personnel disagreed.

Summary. Forestview presented a case in which a school with a historyof academic success, a great deal of parent interest, and few structuralbarriers to parent involvement still had trouble creating cooperativerelationships between school staff and parents. Struggles centered onresources, autonomy, respect, and authority. As the principal stated,parents’ efforts to help the school made the staff’s jobs more difficult—astaff that already worked very hard. Ironically, though we found atForestview the kind of tight linkages between home and school thatLareau (1989) discussed in her study of a similar school, the relations atForestview were strained. Teachers at Forestview were almost alwaysfriendly with parents face-to-face—in some ways they took for grantedthat parents would always be around. The problem was that the parentswere at school whether they were wanted or not.

The Forestview case highlights the dynamics of social class andpower. For the most part, parents were not threatened by the school orby the personnel. They expressed a sense of ownership when talkingabout the school and seemed to feel secure that their presence was agood thing for the school and for their children—no matter what teach-ers said. Good examples of this were the interactions between Ms. Coneand Sammy’s parents, and the way the PTA dealt with the superinten-dent regarding having the school painted during winter break. In the lat-ter case, part of the PTA’s success was due to its members’ leverage asrepresentatives of a fairly wealthy community within a large and mostlypoor school district. Parents put their collective economic, social, andcultural capital to work to do what they thought was best. Note that theiractions were not taken in concert with (or in consultation with) For-estview personnel, but, in fact, caused the principal to come into conflictwith his supervisors. As we will soon see, this is quite different from thesituation at Metro.

In contrast to parents, teachers at Forestview were less secure in theirown authority and power. This is not entirely surprising, and it waspartly nurtured by the hierarchical arrangement of the school. Also, fac-ulty like those at Forestview work within a social context broader than

14 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 33, 2002

the school community, one in which elementary-school professionalsare undervalued and where it is not considered outrageous for them tospend their earnings on what are essentially office supplies. Clearly For-estview staff felt some resentment. In our first informal interview withMr. Pirelli, he argued that part of the problem was the way teachers weretaken for granted. “There has been no cost of living adjustment from thestate in four years . . . there’s no more money . . . The problem is thatteachers will compensate; they won’t let their classrooms fall apart, soparents can’t see the effects and therefore don’t raise a fuss.”

Looking at the parent-involvement situation at Forestview from thepoint of view of the actors, we can see a situation that was too often frus-trating for everyone involved. Yet, what was perhaps most disturbingwas how teachers’ struggles with parents over control and autonomytook their focus away from the best interests of the children in their class-rooms.

Metro: Inventing New Roles for All School Community Members

Our first visit to Metro produced a quite different initial impression ofschool relations with parents. During a tour of the school we saw parentsinformally spending time in a number of classes, sitting with childrenlistening to a story, chatting with aides, and planning a field trip. In aconversation with one parent, a third-grade student’s* mother noted, “Icome in when I can. Maria is always welcoming. All the teachers I’veknown here are. . . . They’re like, ‘This is your school. . . . Come be a partof it.’ ” The director expressed the same idea when she told us that theschool could not be successful without a lot of parent participation:“We’re a community.”

In an open-ended interview, Metro’s secretary, Mary, explained justhow this sense of community worked: “No insignificant job is insignifi-cant.” She stated that the custodian’s contributions were just as critical tothe school’s success as her own or as any teacher’s. She offered an anal-ogy to illustrate her point about the interdependence of all parts of theMetro community. “Without a brain the body cannot function, andwithout a body there is no use for a brain.” This did not mean that therewas no conflict between community members, but rather that such con-flict was expected, welcomed as necessary, and openly addressed.

The openness of conflict was often a direct result of the school’s phi-losophy of “no closed doors.” In fact, in the main office there were nodoors or walls separating the secretary, director, assistant director,teacher work area, and visitor check-in. One morning this openness ledus to witness a heated conversation between the director and assistantdirector. Their voices were raised as they discussed an incident that hadhappened the previous day. The director told the assistant director thathe had mishandled a situation with a teacher. In the end the assistant di-rector disagreed. Although there was no resolution, both went back towhat they were doing without pause. This was not the only time we wit-

Lewis and Forman Contestation or Collaboration? 15

nessed open disagreements between staff members, both among peersand across status categories (e.g., director and classroom aide). Welearned early exactly what the community’s commitment to open doorsmeant. Very little that the school did involved deliberate acts of self-presentation or performance; thus, the staff priority of giving studentsthe best education they had to offer was rarely compromised by con-cerns about appearances. As Fine (1991) discusses, democracy is messy,and in a context in which there is commitment to democracy, conflict isnot understood as a “problem.” In the case of the disagreement betweenthe director and assistant director, neither felt the need to hide their con-flict from public view, or to explain it away later.

Negotiation, accommodation, and cooperation between school-com-munity members were prominent themes in our study of Metro. Theschool hosted weekly parent breakfasts to get community input on a va-riety of issues. Although the attendance fluctuated from week to week, arange of different parents attended and most staff members came at leasttwice a month. During another exchange with Mary, the secretary,something occurred that demonstrated another form of cooperation thattook place in the school. While we were talking, a parent called to say shewas unable to pick up her child at 3:00 p.m., when the school closed.Mary arranged to have another staff member walk the child to the hospi-tal where her mother was in the emergency room. Mary addressed theincident’s significance in our conversation:

See that type of thing. . . . Now let me ask you a question. Do you think, thatyou could call a public school and say to that person in the office: “I can’t get tomy kid right now, can someone from this school please bring [her]?” I doubtit. Not sayin’ they wouldn’t, that’s categorizing all the schools, but I doubt it.“The office closes at 3:00, you better get here or else we’ll take your kid to theprecinct.” You see what I’m sayin’ . . . and that’s what makes the school work.

Incidents like this provided children with a sense of continuity betweentheir parents and school. We found another example of accommodationduring an exchange between George, a kindergarten teacher, and a fa-ther from his classroom. When the father told George that he would notbe able to make the next field trip, George asked him when he would beavailable. The friendly exchange ended with George adjusting in orderto help this father get involved in his class. He rearranged a neighbor-hood field trip for one of the days the father said he was off work. Later,when the father arrived for the trip the two joked about the ends towhich George would go to get them involved in the class.

Similarly, parents were generally respectful of the many demandsteachers faced in doing their jobs. Toward the end of the conversation inthe school yard, the father attempted to accommodate George’s sched-ule in setting up a conference.

16 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 33, 2002

Father: I was just wondering, remember we were supposed to have a meet-ing but Robby had the chicken pox. Is it possible for me to [scheduleanother one]?

George: Yeah it’s possible, I just have to find out a time when.F: What day isn’t good, mornings or, or afternoons, after school,

what’s better?G: Mornings.F: What do you think, Thursday mornings?G: The only day that’s not good is Fridays.F: All right, I’ll talk to [my wife].

This exchange reflected a kind of mutual respect in which each personrecognized the other’s work life and tried to make the home–school con-nection work around competing demands. During our interview withGeorge, he spoke about parent involvement in the school and why hecould not imagine teaching in another school:

I couldn’t work in a [school without it]. One of the reasons why this schoolworks for me is because of parent involvement. I have a very close relation-ship with the parents. I can’t see working with those kids and not having veryclose ties with parents. . . . [I can] call a parent and say, “Look, I’m having aproblem,” and parents say, “Sure, I’ll come.”

George saw his relationships with parents as essential to his effective-ness as a teacher. In our time at Metro, he called on parents often, and notjust for help with specific children. Importantly, asking for help in theMetro context did not mean admitting professional failure or shortcom-ing. It was part of the school culture that parents needed to be engagedwith the educational process because it was a joint undertaking. What wefound most noteworthy was that this translated into very real relation-ships with parents, in which, as one teacher put it, “There is nothing tohide.”

Though it was not easy or always comfortable, Metro teachers seemedless protective of their autonomy than teachers at many schools. We be-lieve this was due to the school’s culture as a place where no one was ex-pected to be perfect and in which everyone was learning and growing.The director provided great leadership here. In the same way that themain office served as an open and shared space for the director, assistantdirector, and school secretary, no classrooms in the school were closed.In practice this meant not only that people could enter and visit class-rooms at will, but also that the director was often called upon to cover aclassroom for a period lasting from a few minutes (for a teacher’s quickmeeting with a parent) to several hours (so a teacher could visit anotherschool). The director also was regularly called to classrooms to witnesssomething. For example, one day we were in the office interviewing thedirector when a teacher rushed in, grabbed the director’s arm, and beck-oned her to the library. She tried to explain that she was busy but theteacher gave her a gentle yank, saying, “You’ve got to come see this.”

Lewis and Forman Contestation or Collaboration? 17

The director welcomed us along and we were soon all rushing up thestairs to see the teacher’s third-grade class reading to the kindergartners.The director spent almost 20 minutes watching and interacting with thechildren before rushing off for lunch duty. As we found in many differ-ent ways, ownership of the school, the children, and school activitieswas shared. This dynamic included the director, who shared the work-load with teachers as well as the control. As the director expressed it,

teachers are collaborators. I have enormous interaction with them. . . . All pol-icy decisions are made by the staff working together. The school’s leadershipteam is made up of the director and three teachers. Classrooms aren’t autono-mous. . . . I have to be trusting. . . . We’re pushing peer observations, visitingeach other’s classrooms.

In another example of this, posted on the wall of the main office was a ro-tating schedule of the chair and note-taker for all weekly spring staffbusiness meetings. Every staff member took a turn at each role. In fact,we found that Metro’s democratic organization contributed greatly toteachers’ positive feelings about working with parents. Other researchhas shown the important role school leaders play in improving par-ent–teacher relationships (Hoover-Dempsey et al. 1987).

The foundations for the respect between parents and teachers couldbe found in Metro’s school philosophy as expressed by a number ofteachers. The following excerpt from an interview with another teacherdemonstrated a belief that school should be an extension of home life:

In this school we try to connect students’ home and school lives and to extendlearning into the neighborhood. It means more to them if we can connect theirlives in and out of school. It’s what [the director talks about] . . . children learnmore and learn better when we can bring in their life experiences.

Teachers at Metro recognized that if they wanted to bring children’s in-terests and experiences into the curriculum they needed parents. In thisway teachers regularly communicated to parents that they valued par-ents’ knowledge and input. For example, in a letter to parents, the Metrodirector explained the goals of parent–teacher conferences:

Dear Parents: The time is approaching for the mid-year review. Each teachernow has a very good idea of your child’s potential and development. Yourchild’s work will be shared at the March Family/School Conference, alongwith many concrete suggestions for improvement as well as continuity of suc-cess. Your help is needed in filling in the gaps as to how your child works athome, how he/she spends time at home, what your child’s interests and in-volvements are; help the teacher to plan better for your child’s school. If anymajor change has occurred in school, in terms of your child’s concentration,completion of work, social interactions, emotional status, I will share theseconcerns with you, as well. If you have noticed any changes at home, I wouldlike you to tell me about them. I then can proceed to make plans that will go along way towards increasing your child’s success in school.

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Thus, parent conferences were not viewed as a time for teachers to re-port to parents about a child’s academic progress, but as a way for theimportant adults in a child’s life to share not only academic information,but also social and emotional information. Expert status was understoodnot as the sole purview of school staff but as something shared with andencouraged in parents. Except as providers of basic needs, and of homesupport for school success, parents at Metro did not occupy traditionalroles. Parents were rarely called upon to be fund-raisers, bakers, or roommoms. Instead they were involved as members of a community, as edu-cational collaborators with important information about their children,and as comrades in struggles related to keeping the school functioning.A particular incident that took place while we were there is illustrativeof this last point.

Because Metro was not a neighborhood school, most parents did notlive or work in close proximity to the school. One of the primary modesof communication between home and school, aside from telephone calls,were the school notes that went home weekly with students. In a seriesof communications, the school let parents know about upcoming build-ingwide meetings concerning building safety. These ultimately culmi-nated in efforts to organize to get the school district to address safetyconcerns. Eventually, with much work on the part of school staff andparents, they managed to get the issue addressed:

Dear Parents: We HAVE BEEN VICTORIOUS!!! Through much negotiation,hard work, phone calls, many meetings, many many more meetings, andmany more phone calls over the weekend, we have achieved our goal. Manyparents worked 24 hour days over this weekend so we could be assured of areturn to our school. . . . First: tonight, at 6:30 there will be a most importantmeeting in the auditorium at Metro for all parents, fifth/sixth grade students,staff of Metro. BABYSITTING WILL BE PROVIDED BY THE P.A. [Parent As-sociation].

This illustrates not only one of the ways the school tried to accommodateits parents—providing baby-sitting—but also the commitment parentsgave to the school when they were made full partners in the educationalprocess. The relationship was one of reciprocity so that staff commit-ment engendered parental commitment.

Summary. Community building in many ways typified the Metroschool culture. In this regard, Metro personnel have, as Cummins states,“redefine[d] their roles with respect to minority students and communi-ties” (1986:18). We believe this role redefinition was, in many ways,about setting up a culture in which parents were seen as partners ratherthan simply clients or consumers, and in which parents treated teachersas professionals, not as the recipients of their tax money. These effortswere obviously not just about school culture. Many Metro parents wereunemployed or working for very low wages. They were often, them-selves, service workers. In this setting very few Metro parents had higher

Lewis and Forman Contestation or Collaboration? 19

status than school personnel. Metro faced a very different reality thanForestview—most parents at Metro did not have a lot of resources. Tokeep families involved, the school had to engage parents in unconven-tional ways. On the other hand, precisely because of the school’s culture,Metro was able to overcome a number of identified social-class andstatus barriers to creating partnerships with parents.8 This was madepossible both through various school efforts to address practical needs(e.g., providing baby-sitting at meetings and flexibly scheduling confer-ences), and, importantly, through constant open communication to par-ents, letting them know that they and their knowledge were valued, andthat they were, in fact, an essential part of the school community.

Welcoming parents into the school with open arms was perhaps madeeasier for school personnel precisely because of the type of communityMetro works with; personnel had the advantage of often having morecontrol over the agenda they were inviting parents to join. They had suc-cess when they invited parents in, but they also seldom had parentsthere in ways or at times that they did not want them. Although we be-lieve the school philosophy that stated that parents were welcome at alltimes was important here, we recognize that this particular propositionwas not put to the test as often as it might have been in another setting(e.g., Forestview). Teachers worked to involve and empower parents,but they did so from a position in which they themselves already felt em-powered and respected. We cannot stress enough the fact that for thehome–school connections at Metro to work, both teachers and parentsneeded to feel like full, respected members of the community. At Metro,the culture was organized so that collaborating and sharing space withparents made good sense. We would argue that Metro’s success was duenot merely to a unique set of idiosyncratic and unreplicable circum-stances, but also to its ability to build a community in which collabora-tion, and all the work that goes into it, was not only possible but under-stood to be the logical way to operate.

Discussion and Conclusion: Contestation or Collaboration?

Several factors contributed to the development, or nondevelopment,of collaborative relationships between parents and teachers at the twoschools examined here. Although social class clearly played a role in thedevelopment of parent-school relations, it did so in complicated ways.In the matrix of everyday relations in schools, social-class resources (ma-terial, social, and cultural) enabled some parents to act as effective advo-cates for their children no matter what—whether in concert with or inopposition to the school. However, lack of material resources did notmean parents could not act as advocates. For example, although For-estview parents exercised their power in spite of the school rather thanin concert with it, Metro’s history of building strong collaborative rela-tionships with parents and empowering them with full membership inthe school community allowed the school to prosper in struggles with

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the school district despite a lack of economic power. In the case of Metro,the potentially negative impact of social-class status on parent involve-ment was in some ways neutralized by staff efforts to make certain thatlow status did not function as a deficit in the context of the school. Thus,although schools too often play a reproductive function with regard toclass status (Anyon 1981; Lareau 1989; Willis 1977), our findings demon-strate that such a role for schools is not automatic. Although social classhad clear effects—for example, on the number of parents involved andthe quantity of time they could spend at school—its effects were not sim-ple, direct, or determinative.

Thus, we found that social class was not an easy predictor of parentparticipation, a finding that is quite consistent with the literature (see,e.g., Kerbow and Bernhardt 1993, and Lareau 1989). As discussed above,status differences did fundamentally influence the nature of home–schoolinteractions in that they shaped both the relative feelings of empower-ment (for both parents and school staff) and the kinds of resourcesschool-community members brought with them to school. Althoughparents’ social class impacted the quantity of time they could spend atthe school, the critical difference we noted was in the quality of relation-ships between parents and teachers at these schools.9* Metro parentswere not at school as much as Forestview parents, but this did not meantheir involvement was less effective. For example, because parent–teacher relationships at Metro were generally more collaborative, theywere more focused on mutual goals of children’s emotional, social, andacademic development.

Our comparative analysis highlights the importance of relative socialclass and status as essential ingredients in the creation of positive par-ent-school relationships. Whereas at Metro teachers felt relatively em-powered, teachers at Forestview felt particularly disempowered. In bothschools this factor had a direct impact on the kinds of relationshipsteachers were able (or wanted) to build with parents. In addition, em-powerment was a relational issue, and in these terms Metro teacherswere more empowered through their relationships with mostly poorand working-class parents (forming a kind of collaborative team work-ing for the children in the school), whereas Forestview teachers were fur-ther disempowered through their relationships with high-status parents(often in something close to a consumer-service worker relationship)who often did not treat them with respect. We experienced some of thisfirsthand during the Forestview open house. A late-arriving parent en-gaged one of us in a conversation, throughout which he was at turns dis-tracted or condescending. During a turn in the conversation, he learnedthat he was speaking to a graduate student at a prominent universitynearby who was an alumnus of the same Ivy League school he had at-tended. His tone immediately changed as he said, “Oh. . . . I thought youwere a student teacher.”

Lewis and Forman Contestation or Collaboration? 21

Although it is true that Metro teachers’ dealing with lower-status par-ents may have partly accounted for their relative feelings of empower-ment, this sort of status gap is not typically a formula for successfulparent-school relations. Often in such inner-city schools this status dif-ference is precisely where antagonism begins. As Lareau (1996:62) notes,“*working-class and lower-class parents perceive educators as ambassa-dors for dominant institutions and, in many instances, as a possiblethreat to their family. This looming and possible threat of educators tofamily stability often leads to tension between working class parents andteachers. Also, in many such schools, as in the past, families are assumedto be dysfunctional. Key here to Metro’s success in combating thesetrends was the presence of a staff who themselves felt empoweredenough to engage parents in meaningful ways, and who viewed sub-stantial parent engagement as essential to, rather than in conflict with,teachers’ and students’ potential for success.

It is important to acknowledge that social-class differences are not theonly factor at work in dynamics between families and schools. Race andethnic differences also play critical roles. Though we made efforts to con-trol for this in selecting schools in which there was congruence betweenpersonnel and families across race and ethnicity, the effects of race werenot necessarily “neutralized.” The role of racial congruence in a multira-cial space such as Metro might well have different effects than the racialcongruence in a white setting such as Forestview (Lewis in press). AsLadson-Billings (1994) and Walker (1996) discuss, there is reason to be-lieve the racial and cultural continuity among African American andLatino parents and staff in settings such as Metro might help to create acontext for mutual identification and solidarity. It is not clear whetherwhiteness functions similarly. On the other hand, there is reason to becautious about assumptions of automatic mutuality or solidarity in set-tings such as Metro. As Alexander et al. found, even within racial catego-ries, “teachers’ own social origins exercise a strong influence on howthey react to the status attributes of their students” (1987:665), and, wewould argue, of their parents also. Thus, class and status issues continueto be a factor for intraracial interactions. Metro had acknowledged thispossibility in its attempt to recruit and train local community membersas paraprofessionals and teachers.

Whether with regard to social class or race, the lesson here seems to bethat for school personnel and parents to develop strong and meaningfulrelationships, they must begin from a base of mutual respect and caring.In our work, we found that mutual respect is made more or less difficultin the interaction between social class and school culture. For example,teachers, such as those at Forestview who do not feel empowered withintheir school community, will inevitably have a difficult time invitingother adults in. Here the school culture only exacerbated challenges cre-ated by class. Yet, in schools such as Metro, empowering staff may wellcome (as in the case of some professionalization movements) at the cost

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of disempowering parents. Instead we argue that staff empowermentmust be undertaken at least in part for the specific purpose of creatingprofessionals who are interested in and capable of engaging families inmeaningful ways. In this way, issues of class and status are most criticalnot in absolute terms but with respect to the relative sense of empower-ment different stakeholders bring to school with them—both parents andteachers—and in the way the local school culture either further empow-ers or disempowers them.

In these ways the larger social context of each school was critical inshaping the kinds of relationships parents and school personnel formed.It had a clear impact both on the amount of parent involvement and par-ticularly on the nature of parent participation. We found that accommo-dation and community typified parent–teacher interactions at Metro,while interactions at Forestview could be characterized as ambivalentand fraught with competing demands. As we discussed in the analysisof each school, the school-community culture set the context for the rela-tionships that took shape in both settings. Adults operating in each con-text took actions based on local understandings of proper behavior,roles, and expectations—understandings that were arguably influencedby social class.10 At Forestview, parents were positioned as clients orconsumers. In this way it did not often make sense for educators to sharetoo much information with parents. The staff effort was to keep parentshappy and at a distance. At Metro, the school philosophy centered onpartnership and the mutual exchange of information. They believed thatsuccess depended on working well with families. This is not generally acommon sense approach but rather the result of a great deal of work onthe part of the director and staff—in fact, many urban schools have takenthe posture of educating students in spite of their families rather than inconcert with them. In this way we can see an internal logic to the very di-vergent behavior of the staffs at these two schools, primarily in responseto external stimuli and* structural limitations. If we are truly interestedin increasing the cooperation between school and home, there is much tobe learned from both the positive and negative aspects of parent–teacher in-teractions at these two schools. We must be attentive both to whatLareau has called “the dark side of parent involvement” (1989:149), andto the possibilities for overcoming class barriers to parent involvement.Clearly culture, power, and class shaped much of what we witnessed atthe two schools, but not in ways that were easy to predict or that are im-possible to adapt or change elsewhere.

Both parents and teachers come to the home–school relationship withan abundance of past experiences (either their own or that of close othersaround them) that influence how they enter into those relationships. Of-tentimes, school personnel have fears that are grounded in past negativeexperiences in working with parents (Banks and McGee 1993; Coleman1991; Delgado-Gaitan 1991; Zeichner 1991). Because involvement withparents is often limited to unpleasant situations, such as disciplinary or

Lewis and Forman Contestation or Collaboration? 23

academic problems (Coleman 1991; Dornbusch and Ritter 1988; Epstein1996; Epstein and Connors 1994; Lareau 1989), and because parentsoften enter schools with very specific agendas that do not coincide withthe school agenda, conflict necessarily arises (Coleman 1991; Fine 1993;Lareau 1989; Zeichner 1991). Parents, on the other hand, often come toschool with a history of less-than-positive schooling experiences them-selves and feel ambivalent if not hostile toward educational institutionsthat define them as having cultural deficits (Lightfoot 1978).

How, then, to facilitate parent involvement? Concha Delgado-Gaitan,in her outline of what parent involvement should be argues for a modelof parent empowerment:

Empowerment is an ongoing intentional process centered in the local commu-nity involving mutual respect, critical reflection, caring and group participa-tion through which people lacking an equal share of valued resources gaingreater access to and control over those resources. [1991:23]

Similarly, Michelle Fine argues for “rich and real” (1993) parent in-volvement that would involve a three-way commitment to organizeparents, restructure schools and communities to better educational andeconomic outcomes, and invent rich visions of educational democracy.Both Fine’s and Delgado-Gaitan’s conceptualizations recognize that cre-ating meaningful interactions between parents and schools means meet-ing parents where they are, culturally and economically, and buildingrelationships from there. In addition to empowering parents, meaning-ful improvement of education for all children requires tapping into par-ents’ funds of knowledge and “harnessing social resources for the trans-formation of teaching and learning” (Moll and Greenberg 1990:344). Forit is not merely parents’ presence in the school that is needed, but a typeof collaborative relationship between parents and teachers that will en-courage mutual respect and inspire dialogue (Delpit 1990).

However, as we have shown, it is not always just parental empower-ment that must be a concern. In some cases, parents come to school al-ready empowered and it is teachers who struggle with their sense ofcontrol, authority, and autonomy. One response to this, a push forteacher professionalization, has often exacerbated tensions that haveregularly involved questions about expertise and are closely related tostruggles over what counts as legitimate school knowledge (Apple 1993;Moll and Greenberg 1990; Tyack and Hansot 1982).

We believe that Payne (1991) was correct that getting back to the“language of relationships” is important to successful school change. Asour work shows, it is in the daily process of school community membersinteracting—compromising, misunderstanding, accommodating, andbutting heads—that relationships are built and school communitiesshaped. In this way, specific parent-involvement programs may well beless important than the climate in which they are implemented. AsPayne describes, “the magic . . . does not seem to lie so much in the struc-

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tures [put] into place as the interaction between those structures, the in-tellectual ethos, and the social climate in which they are embedded”(1991:18). As much research has shown, good things happen in schoolswhere members feel a sense of community (Bauch and Goldring 1995,1996; Bryk et al. 1993). Social class can function as a barrier to buildingcommunity, but as we have shown, it is not necessarily so.

We believe that efforts to foster more collaborative school communi-ties must begin with the assumption that everyone involved in schoolswants what is best for the children in their schools. The director of Metrotold us that the only way she is able to build relationships with parents isto begin with the assumption that every parent loves his or her child andis doing his or her best. We believe the same assumptions needs to be ap-plied to teachers. Although staff accountability is important, it cannot bethe only goal of school reform. Indeed, an emphasis on accountabilityoften exacerbates the already widespread feeling among teachers (onethat we found at Forestview) that they are undervalued, underpaid, un-dersupported, and, too often, vilified for failing to solve problems thatthey did not create. Teachers may perform best, and important to this re-search, work best with parents, when teachers feel respected and effica-cious (Hoover-Dempsey et al. 1987). As we learned from the school per-sonnel with whom we worked and talked, they are most often behavingas rational actors within difficult circumstances, responding to the con-text in which they are working. Finally, like most issues in public educa-tion, discussions of parent involvement are full of complexity, compet-ing demands, and struggles over power. Given conditions as they exist,there is clearly room for improvement in public schools everywhere. Al-though we can never avoid the complexities of bringing families andschools together, creating contexts that encourage parents’ full partici-pation in their children’s education holds great promise as one way tochange and enhance current realities.

Amanda E. Lewis is an assistant professor in the Departments of Sociology andAfrican American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (aele-wis@uic.edu). Tyrone A. Forman is an assistant professor in the Departments ofSociology and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago(tyforman@uic.edu).

Notes

Acknowledgments. The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful com-ments of Paul Ammon, Mark Chesler, Jan Geyer, Muge Gocek, Annette Lareau,Valerie Lee, Linda Levine, Barbara Lewis, Sally Lubeck, Pedro Noguera, DianaSlaughter-Defoe, Lily Wong-Fillmore and several anonymous reviewers on ear-lier drafts of this article. An earlier version of this article was presented at the19th Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum, cosponsored by the

Lewis and Forman Contestation or Collaboration? 25

Graduate School of Education and the Center for Urban Ethnography at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, March 6–7, 1998.

1. In the interest of consistency, although we did not conduct all the data col-lection together, we will use the term “we” whenever referring to our role in thefield. Names of schools and individuals are pseudonyms.

2. Although having had a more formal role (as a student teacher) in the schoolat an earlier time, during the research process the first author’s role was flexibleand informal. She was enough of a known entity around the building that shewas not asked to wear the visitor badges required for parents and other sporadicvisitors. She was as much participant as observer (e.g., working with smallgroups in the classroom, or eating lunch with teachers in the staff lounge). Asone of many young, white women working in and around the school, most peo-ple assumed she belonged there as a teacher, student teacher, paraprofessional,parent, or student volunteer. As we discuss in more detail later in this article,this familiarity occasionally provided interesting insights into parent’s views oftheir children’s teachers.

3. Research at Metro was done collaboratively with both authors spendingseveral days a week at the school. Both authors were informal assistants inGeorge Jackson’s kindergarten class. We were identified to those in the school asstudents at a local progressive, graduate school of education, and staff were gen-erally friendly and welcoming. Because Metro is generally an open space, therewere many adults coming and going throughout the day and, thus, our presencein the school never seemed either noteworthy or distracting to others. We wererarely at the school at the same time and, thus, built distinct relationships withschool members.

4. Because the federal government distinguishes Hispanic origin from race indata collection, those who identify as Hispanic also must select a racial category.Thus the 6.6 percent of the population identified as Hispanic here also is repre-sented within the various racial categories.

5. Metro accepts students on a lottery basis, giving high priority to those com-ing from the low-income neighborhood surrounding the school.

6. Although all names of people, schools and locations used in this article arepseudonyms, we follow each school’s practice in referring to staff. At For-estview, teachers were referred to by their last name, while at Metro staff wereall called by their first name.

7. Forestview resides in a wealthy enclave in the middle of a much larger andlower-income school district. For years the community has threatened to pullout of the district and form its own smaller school district (as many otherwealthy neighborhoods in surrounding areas have).

8. Although we do not want to minimize the impact of Metro as a “school ofchoice,” we did not find the kind of strong parent community there that, for in-stance, Smrekar (1996) found in her research on schools of choice. This could bedue in part to the internal heterogeneity (race, neighborhood, language, hous-ing, and class) among the school’s parents. Although most parents seemed com-mitted to the school, their level of commitment was quite variable.

9. One mother argued for the further complexity of the relationship betweensocial class and participation when she explained that Forestview parents couldafford to spend much more time at the school than those who lived in the moreexclusive community nearby. This was because those who lived around For-estview had lower mortgages and, thus, could afford to have only one parent

26 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 33, 2002

working, whereas in the wealthier community, two incomes were often neces-sary to sustain the family standard of living.

10. This is not to imply a direct or uncomplicated relationship between cul-ture and behavior. But the local culture clearly has some impact on the choicespeople make and the kind of relationships that they develop. Leadership (theprincipal or director) played a crucial role here in setting the tone.

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