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Collaboration between schools and parents has become increasingly prominent on the political agenda in Norway. Schools are obliged to promote parent–school cooperation in accordance with parents’ rights as stakeholders in education. This article explores the governing strategies of seven primary or lower-secondary schools that have taken initiatives to improve parent–school collaboration. The main intention is to explore how New Public Management (NPM) measures (such as market values, decentralization, competition, and output control) and New Public Service (NPS) tools (including coalition building and citizens’ involvement) are reproduced at the local level when parent–school collaboration is put on the agenda. The analysis shows that street-level discretion at school level implies considerable uncertainty around the achievement of policy objectives. Different opinions on parents as a target group seem prominent in explaining how frontline workers act and strategize. Two distinct collaboration strategies are identified: serving and steering. The serving strategy is based on a linear partnership by making use of local knowledge in order to reach parents and enable their participation. The steering strategy is characterized by non-linear relationships with parents and certain steering mechanisms by routinizing collaboration activities, modifying goals for parent–school collaboration and rationing school services to parents.

Parental participation is a fundamental principle of the Danish folkeskole (for children aged 6–16), yet this article explores how too much parental cooperation influences the relationship of teachers to their professional responsibility. The majority of research on parent–teacher cooperation has focused on parents’ opportunities to participate in school life, but little is known about what teachers think about such collaboration, and how imbalances in power and authority in parent–teacher cooperation influence teachers’ professionalism. The use of reflexive autoethnographic accounts, participant observation and document analysis during a four-year period in one school provided emic insight into the, often invisible, social processes of power. Semi-structured interviews with teachers in a second school were also conducted. Drawing on a body of interrelated work focusing on Bourdieu, situated learning theory and literature about professional studies, the findings suggest that parent–teacher communities can be understood as stratified fields which provide different and complex spaces for exerting power and domination. Although power in these communities is constantly negotiated, professional responsibility may be lost when parents occupy central positions in parent–teacher collaborations.