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Parenting education programs aim to teach parents, often low-income mothers, a set of skills, behaviors, and attitudes believed to promote improved opportunities for their children. Parenting programs are often offered in schools, with instructors teaching pregnant or parenting teens about child development, attachment, and discipline strategies. Despite the large numbers of participants and significant public and private funding going to parenting education, sociologists of education in the United States have paid little attention to the topic. Existing research, by scholars in other disciplines, has found parenting education to be a relatively weak intervention. Yet this research focuses exclusively on individual-level processes, paying little attention to social context or other factors. This study uses extensive observational and interview data from parenting education programs in two schools and one social service organization to examine what is taught, what is not, and the intersections between program content and the structural realities shaping parents' lives. The results show that although they were designed for low-income mothers, the classes were silent on the issue of poverty, treating poverty-related concerns as irrelevant to the task of parenting. Furthermore, when such topics did emerge, instructors redirected the conversations to personal behaviors and characteristics. Thus, the ''hidden curriculum'' of parenting education conveyed the message that good parenting should be unaffected by the challenges of poverty. The mothers, however, struggled to provide for their children in conditions of extreme scarcity, making it difficult for them to focus on other parenting issues.

In fall 2001, the University of Pennsylvania opened a public elementary school a few blocks away from its West Philadelphia campus. With the opening of this school, Penn joined the list of colleges and universities that have recently gone into the business of operating elementary or secondary schools. In each situation, the university role differs somewhat--for example, Penn is working in partnership with the teachers union and school district, while the University of Chicago and several other universities actually run their own charter schools--but in every case the university is assuming a responsibility that has traditionally been outside of its sphere. Indeed, the founding of many of these schools was at least partly informed by a larger development in higher education: the emergence of a heightened commitment to civic and community engagement on the part of major research universities. In this article, the author uses primary and secondary source material to explore the history of these schools, examine the role they have played in the larger educational arena, and attempt to draw some connections between historical versions and their more recent incarnations. She argues that the latest round of university-operated schools, with their goal of serving low-income, urban communities, represents something of a new direction for this endeavor. She further argues, however, that an examination of the history of university-run schools has much to offer in terms of understanding the particular challenges such schools face. (Contains 11 endnotes.)

The author uses the "lifecourse" of one model--the community partnership plan--as a lens into school reform in Philadelphia, focusing particularly on the politics of school reform and Philadelphians' responses to privatization. The aim of the article is to show that education reform is not about the orderly implementation of a particular program but rather about competing visions, multiple purposes, and, often, chaos and disjuncture. The data gathered and discussed in this article was a part of a larger study of the state takeover and reorganization of the Philadelphia School District. This study, which is being conducted by Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based non-profit research organization, encompasses many aspects of the reform process, including the ways reform affects public engagement in education. In an effort to understand both the roles community organizations have played in the district and the disappearance of the community partnership plan, the author attended numerous public meetings at the school district and at individual schools, reviewed local and national newspaper coverage of the takeover, and conducted interviews with representatives from a number of local organizations.

Who benefits from parent-teacher organizations in schools? Which parents are included, and which are excluded? How can school leaders work with them? In this article, an historian and a sociologist review the complex history of parent-teacher organizing and examine current issues in parental efforts to improve schools, including concerns about equity.

A growing body of literature has begun to explore the individual identities, motivations, and school choices of middle-class, typically white, parents who choose to reside in socioeconomically and racially mixed central city neighborhoods. Drawing on qualitative research in three US cities, we argue that a focus on middle-class parents' collective engagement in schooling is particularly important in under-resourced urban contexts. In these environments, we show, middle-class parents' use of social networks often extends beyond basic information-sharing about school quality to encompass a range of activities undertaken with other families "like them" who have also chosen to enroll their children in an urban public school. We find that, in some instances, middle-class parents' collective actions can benefit an entire class or school. Yet in other instances, their activation of social capital can contribute to processes of social reproduction in urban schooling by excluding or marginalizing low-income students and their families.

A generation ago, billboards, flyers, or radio spots advertising a public school would have been unusual and surprising. Now they are an increasingly regular feature of the educational landscape. As schools compete for students and resources in the new educational marketplace, they increasingly look to market themselves to prospective parents (and funders). The ways educational organizations use marketing to develop and promote a particular identity, recruit or exclude students, and navigate new systems of competition and accountability are thus critical elements of schooling in the 21st century. This is especially the case in urban areas, where choice policies are more common. In this issue, the authors have usefully unpacked key dynamics around the marketing of public educational services. In this commentary, the author first discusses two of the contributions this collection of articles makes that are particularly important to the field: demonstrating the disconnections between theories of marketing and the on-the-ground realities, and revealing the centrality of identity to the marketing process. She then argues that future research, building on these findings, should pursue a highly contextualized understanding of educational marketing.

School turnaround--a reform strategy that strives for quick and dramatic transformation of low-performing schools--has gained prominence in recent years. This study uses interviews and focus groups conducted with 86 teachers in 13 schools during the early stages of school turnaround in a large urban district to examine teachers' perceptions of the social and organizational conditions within their schools. The study shows that some turnaround schools provided more positive working conditions than others, particularly with respect to organizational function and culture. It further finds a strong association between teachers' perceptions of school-level working conditions and support for school turnaround.

With the proliferation of choice policies in education, parents are increasingly positioned as "consumers" tasked with choosing the "best" school for their children. Yet a large body of research has shown that the process of selecting a school is far more complicated than policy-makers and researchers often predict. This article uses ethnographic data on middle-class parents in a large city who are considering sending their children to a diverse neighborhood public school to further develop our understanding of school choice. Drawing from sociological research on consumption as a social and cultural process, we examine the intersections between parents' choice of a particular school (i.e. consumption) and their own identity construction. Our data show that the "act" of choosing a school can become, for parents, a means of expressing and enacting a particular identity. In this case, the intersections between identity and choice pushed many parents--invested in seeing themselves as liberal urbanites--towards an urban public school. We suggest that similar dynamics could have different outcomes for other groups of parents and that the symbolic nature of the school choice decision has broader relevance and merits further study.

There is an ample scholarly and popular literature describing the rise in "anxiety" among middle-class parents. This paper draws from a study of urban middle-class parents who were considering sending their children to public school. Focusing on one neighborhood and its school, it describes the impact of anxiety on the choice process. It further examines the emergence of a counter-movement among parents who saw their choice of the school as rejection of contemporary "helicopter parenting." (Contains 1 table and 8 notes.)

Background/Context: Market models of school reform are having a major impact on school districts across the country. While scholars have examined many aspects of this process, we know far less about the general effects of marketization on public participation in education and local education politics. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article uses an examination of marketization in Philadelphia over a six-year period (2001-7) to explore its implications for public engagement--or the ability of individuals and groups to work with and influence the school district and hold officials accountable. Setting: The research was conducted in Philadelphia, the sixth largest city in the country. In 2001, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania took over the School District of Philadelphia, citing on-going fiscal crises and poor student achievement. The resulting reforms included new leadership, new governance structures, and significant privatization. Research Design: This is a qualitative case study of school district change in Philadelphia, focusing on the implications for public engagement. Data Collection and Analysis: Data included over 50 interviews with education administrators, civic and political elites, and representatives of grassroots and community groups. Data also included six years of participant observation at public meetings and in reform coalitions. Analysis followed a grounded theory approach designed to identify district policies and practices related to public participation and to document how these practices shaped the ability of individuals and groups to engage productively with the district. Findings/Results: We find that the marketization of education in Philadelphia had a major impact on the district's institutional structure and practices for interacting with local stakeholders. Our data point to several changes that were particularly consequential in shaping the opportunities for engagement and the direction such engagement took. These are: a corporate governance structure, an emphasis on communication, widespread contracting out for services, an increase in school choice, and a focus on customer service. Conclusions/Recommendations: These changes have resulted in channeling of public participation along individual lines at the expense of collective forms of action and, more broadly, undercutting of the understanding of education as a public good. Given the continued influence of market models of education reform at the local and national levels, it will be important for policymakers to pay close attention to the ways by which marketization can limit engagement and to develop strategies, such as increased transparency and new vehicles for public input, to address this tendency.

Given recent trends, middle-class families may become an increasing presence in urban districts. Such parents could help secure badly needed resources and raise expectations. This study of parental involvement in two urban schools suggests that middle-class parental involvement may be more complex than often assumed. The authors find that middle-class parents bring myriad resources to urban schools and can be catalysts for change. However, the relationship between parental involvement and widespread benefit was mediated by parents' own goals and perspectives as well as by the larger social context. Furthermore, compared to a more individualistic approach to parental involvement, a collective orientation is more sustainable and has greater potential for benefiting all children in the school, without regard to their social class. (Contains 2 tables and 15 notes.)

This article examines an effort to use urban schools to promote the revitalization of a large northeastern city in the United States. In order to attract and retain professional families to a regenerated central city, downtown schools are re-branded and promoted to such families as suitable for their children. The article draws on interviews and observation in a particular downtown elementary school to examine the experiences of different groups of parents in this new educational market. The data reveal how middle- and upper-class parents are treated as sought-after customers who gain and retain positions of influence over the direction of the school once their children are admitted. However, the same processes marginalize low-income and minority parents. The article concludes that while the goals of the policy may be ostensibly worthy, one of its consequences is to reinscribe existing status positions and inequalities. (Contains 16 notes.)

With ethnographic observations and in‐depth interviews of parenting classes serving middle‐ and upper‐middle‐class mothers, this paper explores how mothers engage and experience expert advice. Contemporary models of motherhood expect more than nurture and sacrifice; modern mothers must also be highly skilled and well informed. A wealth of information is available to help mothers navigate a high‐pressure environment in which their actions are believed to have deep, long‐lasting impact on children's future health, happiness, and success. How do mothers engage with expert advice, what demands does it place on them, and what rewards might that generate? Our data include approximately 50 hours of observation, 10 formal, in‐depth interviews, and multiple informal interviews with mostly white, highly educated, relatively affluent mothers. Interview narratives and fieldnotes were coded and analyzed with Dedoose. We show that mothers in our study experience a paradox of expertise, in which more knowledge often fails to produce more certainty. Parenting advice is complex, contingent, and sometimes contradictory, and the stakes in which mothers work to synthesize this information feel astoundingly high. The labor of gathering, synthesizing, and activating expertise is a unique and underexamined form of emotional and intellectual labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parenting education is designed to address problems associated with childhood poverty, but such programs have had limited success. This ethnographic study of a parenting class serving low-income African American mothers examines tensions between parents and instructors over the use of physical force in disciplining children or in resolving conflicts more broadly. The article uses the concept of cultural frames to analyze how parents and instructors understood the issues at stake, showing significant differences between the frame the instructors used (discouraging all forms of force) and that of the parents (who saw force as sometimes necessary and effective). The instructors' therapeutic frame positioned children as vulnerable and prioritized self-esteem and positive relationships, and it did not resonate with parents, whose protective frame emphasized their responsibility to keep children safe in a dangerous world. This study examines interactions between parents and instructors to show that when frames come into conflict in social settings, collective affirmation of a particular frame can be a source of resistance and solidarity, thus raising questions about the potential of anti-poverty interventions that do not pay attention to context or meaning making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]