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Citation:

Abrams, L. S., & Gibbs, J. T. (2002). Disrupting the Logic of home-school relations: Parent involvement strategies and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Urban Education, 37(3), 384-407.

Annotation:
This article reports an elementary schoolÕs efforts to create opportunities for sustained parental involvement and whether these efforts supported participation by parents of different social classes and ethnicities. Researchers identified four roles active parents adopted in relation to the school: helper, monitor, advocate, and active decisionmaker. Parents took on different roles for a variety of reasons, such as making sure that children of their cultural community didnÕt fall behind other groups. Researchers found that mothersÕ perceptions of their own power at the school varied significantly across ethnic, cultural, and social class lines and that mothers from all groups felt disempowered or alienated in some way. This study also revealed that there were conflicts between different groups of parents, and that active parents could either include or exclude other parents in subtle ways. This report is part of a larger 3-year evaluation study of a school in Northern California that underwent substantive reorganization and rebuilding after an earthquake. The data for this study were drawn from semi-structured interviews with thirteen mothers of diverse ethnicity and social class, who were either active on various school committees such as PTA, a bilingual advisory committee, and a steering committee for the schoolÕs coalition of local service providers. Several non-active mothers were also interviewed. This article provides a detailed snapshot of power relationships between different groups of parents involved at a school. The article did not describe the methods used to analyze the information gathered in the interviews with parents.