Reconceptualizing Parent Involvement: Parent as Accomplice or Parent as Partner?

Policy statements of the last two decades have directed schools to enter into partnerships with parents to enhance the social, emotional, and academic growth of their children. However, in practice and scholarship, parental involvement has been constructed as attendance to school-based activities and needs. This article draws on data from an instrumental case study to explore how and why five single working mothers become involved in their children’s education outside of school. Findings suggest the participants’ efforts were responses to compensate for a school curriculum that they perceived to be deficient in ways that are detrimental to their children’s overall social, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development as fully educated human beings. The reconceptualization of parental involvement that emerges from this study also provides a glimpse into what parents value as important to the education of their children, ultimately having implications and significance for the creation and implementation of educational policy.