'Entre Familia': Immigrant Parents' Strategies for Involvement in Children's Schooling

Teachers and administrators in schools with large, working-class Latino populations often complain of parents' indifference or lack of involvement in children's schooling because of their low visibility at school events and relatively little face-to-face communication with teachers and school administration. In a series of semi-structured interviews with Latino immigrant parents, this study finds that, despite different educational experiences than those of their children in the United States, these parents engage in many of the parent involvement strategies observed by previous research to be most beneficial, though often through avenues bypassing the school itself. This finding presses schools and districts to recognize both the ways in which immigrant parents actually do the many things for which they never receive credit and the value of the other forms of involvement in which parents are active. We classify these reported behaviors into categories of "asking questions" about school and school processes, "attending" events at school or outside of school that parents deem supportive of children's learning, and "altering/augmenting" children's educational trajectories to improve outcomes. The study also reports on obstacles that interviewed parents faced in their efforts to interact with schools in conventional ways.