Abstract
This article presents an exploration of the work of family engagement in a racially- and linguistically-diverse, high-poverty, urban school district in a state of continuous neoliberal reform. Drawing from qualitative research methods, it is argued that family engagement is being reshaped by the imperatives of educational neoliberalization while, at the same time, remaining out of touch with the needs and concerns of families who are racially stigmatized, linguistically diverse, and experiencing extreme economic insecurity. It is further argued that school personnel charged with family engagement carry out exploited, invisible, and emotional tasks that increase in quantity and intensity as the social safety net declines under neoliberalism. Applying an intersectional gender analysis of emotional labor and the re-privatization of social reproduction offers an illustration of how family engagement in neoliberal schools both exploits and reinforces hierarchies of race–class–gender while obscuring these processes through neoliberal discourses of individual responsibilization.
Keywords
The neoliberal shift in education introduced the concept of the “failing school” into the lexicon of policymakers, administrators and the public. Not only are these schools positioned as failing but they are also on the receiving end of a steady stream of reforms and interventions aimed at turning them around. Such schools arguably exist in a state of continuous reform. Despite their multiplicity, reforms intended to help such schools converge around a few common themes: punitive forms of upward accountability; privatization of educational services, choice and competition; and weakened collective bargaining rights for educators. These reforms reflect the pattern of neoliberalization that is reshaping not only the practice of teaching and learning but also the conditions of schools as workplaces.
This paper offers a consideration of how these transformations are reshaping the discourse and practice of family engagement. Using qualitative methods at a racially- and linguistically-diverse, high-poverty, urban school district in a state of continuous reform, we ask the question: what constitutes the work of family engagement, and how do school personnel charged with this work understand its meaning and purpose? It is argued that family engagement is being (re)shaped by the imperatives of educational neoliberalization while, at the same time, remaining out of touch with the needs and concerns of families who are racially stigmatized, linguistically diverse, and experiencing extreme economic insecurity. Moreover, school personnel charged with family engagement perform exploited, invisible, and emotional tasks that increase in quantity and intensity as the social safety net declines under neoliberalism. These patterns exacerbate rather than ameliorate educational inequalities: they also reproduce race–class–gender hierarchies in families, schools and workplaces.
When I began the research for this paper, I wanted to learn how family engagement was understood and practiced by school personnel and how it was being shaped by the context of continuous neoliberal reform. I did not initially set out to conduct a gender analysis; however, my time in the field, as well as my experience as a queer, divorced mother of two young children increasingly led me to notice how the gendered social construct of family, and gendered power relations more generally, were significant in shaping the contexts, discourses, and practices of family engagement. As such, I turned to feminist analyses of family engagement in schools, and of neoliberalism, to help make sense of my findings. Scholarship on the re-privatization of social reproduction (Bakker, 2007; Bakker and Gill, 2003) and the exploitation of women’s emotional labor (Guy and Newman, 2004; Hochschild, 1983) was particularly helpful in this regard. Here, I bring these bodies of feminist literature into dialogue with critical qualitative research on family engagement in schools. In doing so, I seek to advance a more intersectional analysis of both family engagement and educational neoliberalism.
In the first section below, I situate the study within critical qualitative literature on family engagement and neoliberal reform, as well as gendered analyses of family engagement and neoliberalism. I then discuss the context and methods of the study. The findings section explores what family engagement looked like by highlighting the work of one individual—Maribel (a pseudonym)—a parent liaison at a Title I elementary school, who serves as a focal participant. By developing Maribel’s story in depth, I aim to convey a grounded, contextualized picture of family engagement work, and also humanize the individuals who do it. I selected Maribel as a focal participant because her interview contained numerous detailed, illustrative stories that capture key themes and phenomena observed throughout the study. After telling Maribel’s story, I shift to explore these themes by applying an intersectional gender analysis of neoliberal reform and family engagement in schools.
Neoliberalism, family engagement, and gender
The 2001 legislation
NCLB’s emphasis on school competition and choice prompted a line of research among family engagement scholars about how parents enact the role of consumers, including how they research and select charter schools, voucher schools, magnet schools, or home-schooling options, for their children (e.g. Cooper, 2007; Pedroni, 2007; Stambach and David, 2005) or participate in grassroots school-creation efforts (e.g. Dyrness, 2011; Nygreen, 2017). Some studies found that parent participation in school choice reproduced or exacerbated existing race and class inequalities (e.g. Nygreen, 2017; Cooper, 2007; Dyrness, 2011; Stambach and David, 2005). Others have argued that positioning parents as consumers contributes to the naturalization of market logic, the commodification of education as a private good, and the erosion of public education as part of the democratic public sphere (e.g. Apple, 2007; Hursh, 2007; Lipman, 2011).
Research on family engagement within district-governed public schools in the post-NCLB era has likewise pointed to the growing influence of market logic in framing and organizing school–family relationships. For example, in Austin, Texas, a parent organizing effort aimed at “building a new
The story from Austin resonates with other studies of family engagement in the post-NCLB era. For example, Auerbach and Collier (2012) describe a parent engagement initiative in Los Angeles aimed at provoking parents’ anxiety about their children’s test scores. Instead of listening to parents’ concerns, a narrow test-driven curriculum was delivered to help them drill and prepare children for standardized tests at home, leading the authors to conclude that, “Just as an exclusive, laser-like focus on raising test scores prompted by accountability pressure distorts the purpose and spirit of classroom instruction, a parallel focus with students’ families distorts the purpose and spirit of parent education and outreach” (Auerbach and Collier, 2012: 30). Similarly, Ahmann’s (2017) research in Baltimore City Schools found that teachers were taught to talk about, think about, and get to “know” students and their families as “data” rather than people. They were taught to use “accountable talk” in meetings with parents—that is, to talk to parents about their children as data, and use data to mediate conversations with parents about their children. Although professional development trainers presented accountability talk as a way to foster collaboration with parents regarding the shared goal of higher achievement, Ahmann shows that parents experienced it as alienating and that it served to silence parent concerns about their children’s and community’s wellbeing. Instead of supporting closer connections between teachers and families, she concludes that, “accountable talk is a formidable barrier to mutual understanding” between them (Ahmann, 2017: 94).
These qualitative studies of family engagement provide examples of how the urgent, short-term pressure to raise test scores, as mandated by neoliberal reform, can eclipse other priorities and aims of schooling. They also suggest that the longstanding trend of cultural discontinuity between schools and families in high-poverty communities is likely to be exaggerated rather than bridged in contexts of punitive accountability. Although school-centric approaches to family engagement have long been the norm rather than the exception, these studies suggest the pressure of coercive accountability has either eliminated, or seriously reduced, even the small space once available to enact more family-centric or relational approaches. The findings of my study are consistent with this prior research, but I also aim to deepen our understanding of these processes by applying a gender analysis. Inspired by Dominguez-Pareto’s (2015) pioneering work on Latinx women’s educational advocacy in neoliberal schooling, I apply the framework of “gender-as-intersectional”; that is, “gender understood as classed, raced, and shaped by sexual orientation and immigration status among other social categories” (Dominguez-Pareto, 2015: 4).
The construct of family engagement, like that of the family itself, is bound up with gendered power relations. As many scholars have shown, the expectation of family engagement in schools places a disproportionate demand on women because it is mothers and female caregivers who systematically—and across differences of race, ethnicity, and class—bear a greater responsibility for childrearing and household work than do fathers and male caregivers, and this responsibility extends to include engagement in schools (e.g. Arnot et al., 1999; Dominguez-Pareto, 2015; Doucet, 2009; Griffith, 1995; Stambach and David, 2005). As such, women bear both the responsibility for family engagement and the blame when it is lacking; but since the gendered division of household labor is widely naturalized and assumed, women’s disproportionate responsibility for this work typically goes unmarked. The use of gender-blind language such as “parent” and “family” obscures the fact that family engagement work is overwhelmingly carried out by women. As Dominguez-Pareto (2015) points out, while genderless terminology is meant to be inclusive, in practice it renders the time-consuming, emotionally draining, and cognitively demanding work of women’s engagement invisible.
Feminist scholars have advanced similar analyses of women’s sex-typed work in the paid labor force, connecting the devaluation of women’s work in homes to their exploitation in the labor market (Hochschild, 1983; see also Chong, 2009; Guy and Newman, 2004; Guy et al., 2008). Whether at home or in the workplace, tasks and skills coded as feminine (such as caregiving, nurturance, relational and community-building work) are naturalized as expressions of women’s essential nature rather than being recognized as labor, articulated as skills, and compensated accordingly. Like housework and mothering, this work—which Hochschild (1983) famously termed “emotional labor” when exchanged for a wage—is routinely disappeared. Because it is assumed as natural for women, it is not considered “real” (i.e. “productive” or “skilled”) work; these facts reflect male bias and contribute to women’s subordination (Chong, 2009; Guy and Newman, 2004; Hart, 2013). These gendered assumptions were well entrenched long before the neoliberal turn; however, they have persisted in the neoliberal workplace (Phipps 2014; Williams et al., 2012; Young, 2005). At the same time, women’s responsibilities within households have also intensified under neoliberalism due to the re-privatization of social reproduction—or the shift in responsibility for social welfare from the state to the private sector, individuals, and families (Arnot et al., 1999; Bakker, 2007; Bakker and Gill, 2003; Brodie, 2002). Because responsibility for social welfare is redefined as a private individual or family matter rather than a collective responsibility of governments, it is women who disproportionately shoulder the burden (Bakker, 2007; Young, 2005). However, neoliberal discourses of individual responsibilization obscure these processes by framing individuals as solely responsible for their economic fate (Teghtsoonian, 2009; Young, 2005). In this way, women (and particularly women of color) are left to “take up [the] slack” for neoliberal disinvestment and austerity (Bakker, 2007: 546).
In education, neoliberal reform forces parents to assume greater responsibility for their children’s academic success, producing the need for advocacy as an expected form of family engagement (Dominguez-Pareto, 2015). Since it is women within families who shoulder the burden of engagement, these trends mean more responsibility and blame is shifted to individual women—not schools or society—for children’s academic success and failure. It is not surprising that the ideology of intensive mothering has gained prominence in the neoliberal era (Dominguez-Pareto, 2015; Stambach and David, 2005), because it is a responsibilizing discourse that frames individual parents (mothers) as solely responsible for a range of outcomes, including children’s academic achievement and economic futures. These neoliberal trends within workplaces, families and schools share a common theme of shifting responsibility and blame for unequal outcomes to individuals—especially women, the poor, and people of color—leading many to argue that neoliberalism exploits and exacerbates existing inequalities of gender–class–race while obscuring these processes through discourses of individual responsibilization (Bakker, 2007; Brodie, 2002; Davis, 2007). My study sheds light on how these processes play out in education through family engagement discourse and practice.
Research context
I conducted this research in a medium-sized city on the East Coast of the USA, which I call Pittsford. With a population slightly above 150,000, Pittsford is a high-poverty, racially and linguistically diverse, deindustrialized city. Pittsford’s public schools are emblematic of struggling or “failing” schools as defined by national discourse. At the time of my research (September 2012-August 2013), more than half of its 47 schools were officially designated by the state as underperforming. The graduation rate for the district was 53%, compared with an 83% graduation rate in the state. The student population was predominantly poor and of color, with substantial populations of immigrant, refugee, undocumented, and emergent bilingual students. Of approximately 26,000 students in the district, 22% were African American, 15% white, 57% Latinx and 6% multiracial, Asian, or Native American. Nearly 50 languages were spoken, and about a quarter of students spoke a language other than English as their first language. More than 80% received free or reduced-price meals.
At the time of my research, two significant reforms related to family engagement were underway—a teacher evaluation and school evaluation system—both of which involved rubrics to score teachers and principals on family engagement. The district’s Office of Family and Community Engagement ran a parent information center, a series of parent education classes, and supported the work of 46 parent liaisons (PLs)—one at each school. The role of PLs was to facilitate school–family communication and increase rates of family engagement at each school. The program’s director told me that the PLs’ job description had changed three times in seven years, each time adding new responsibilities without any pay increase. At the time of my research, PLs earned US$13 per hour, without benefits. Most were part-time, at 30 hours per week; they were not classified as “professional” employees by the Human Resources categories used in the district, and were not unionized. The Office of Family and Community Engagement provided initial training and ongoing professional development to PLs through monthly meetings that brought all of them together. However, school principals hired PLs and served as the PLs’ direct supervisors; as such, PLs were accountable upward to principals but not horizontally to parents and families, hindering their ability to serve as advocates for or partners with parents in the case of conflicting agendas. The program’s director acknowledged that some principals assigned menial tasks to PLs, and that PLs typically lacked decision-making authority in responding to parents’ concerns.
The demographics of PLs in the district provide an important layer of context. According to the director, a majority were women of color, non-college-educated, and mothers of children in district schools. While she said that a small proportion were college-educated women who did the job “for the love of the work and political motivation” or as a stepping stone to re-enter the workforce after a period of fulltime parenting, most were women for whom “this [work] is their bread and butter”. Of the 46 PLs in the district, three were men at the time of my data collection. Although I did not formally collect documentation of racial identification, my observations at two district-wide PL meetings revealed that all three men, and all but four out of 43 women, were racially identifiable as People of Color. It is significant, but not surprising, that PLs were predominantly women of color working in a job that was low status, low paid, and lacking in autonomy: racialized and gendered inequality regimes are typically reproduced in workplaces (Acker, 2006), a pattern that has persisted under neoliberal restructuring (Acker, 2006; Williams et al., 2012). It is also significant with regard to this study that PLs tended to be mothers of children in the district and, therefore, members of the very community they were charged with engaging. As such, their devaluation in the school-as-workplace is reflective of the more general devaluation of Pittsford families and communities. Because PLs were the most direct, regular point of contact between schools and families, data collection for this study focused on learning about PLs and their work. I describe below the research methods used.
Methods
Qualitative methods, consisting of interviews, group discussions, and observations conducted over a one-year period, were used. To begin the work, I met with the Director of Family and Community Engagement to get an overview of the district’s efforts. She invited me to attend two district-wide PL meetings, where I could introduce my study and recruit volunteers for interviews. With a Research Assistant, I observed two meetings and co-facilitated group discussions with all PLs who were present. We recruited interview participants and used snowball sampling methods thereafter, by asking PLs to recommend others whose work focused on family engagement. In total, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five PLs, two elementary teachers who participated in a home visit program, one paraprofessional, and the Director of Parent and Community Engagement. With the exception of the Director, all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. (I took detailed field-notes during and immediately after the 70-minute interview with the Director.) At one school, the PL invited me back to facilitate a group discussion with a Somali-born paraprofessional and two ESL teachers who taught Somali refugee students.
To understand how school personnel understood and practiced family engagement, interviews and group discussions involved asking them to describe their work—what they did on a typical day, the purpose of what they did, and what they wished to do or would do if they had unlimited resources. These questions were intended to elicit an understanding of what the work of family engagement looked like and how school personnel understood its meaning and purpose. In addition to interviews and group discussions, I conducted participant-observation at six school- or district-sponsored events and celebrations for families, where my observations focused on how family engagement was defined, justified, and enacted—and how the needs and interests of families were implicitly framed in the discourse. I took detailed field-notes during and immediately after each observation. A combination of inductive and deductive thematic coding procedures was used to analyze the body of transcripts and field notes. In practice, this meant reading the transcripts and field notes with the research questions in mind, looking for statements where participants described what they did to engage families, what their goals were, and why those goals were important. A priori codes were applied to excerpts that answered the research questions specifically, such as “purpose of family engagement” or “work of family engagement—phone calls”. Other codes, such as “emotional labor”, emerged inductively through an open-coding process in which I looked for recurrent themes rather than applying pre-set codes. The unanticipated emergence of the theme for emotional labor prompted me to explore the literature on emotional labor and women’s work: this allowed me to develop an intersectional gender analysis of the findings, and to apply this lens to interpreting my data.
The lens I bring to interpreting the data is also influenced by my lived experience as a mother and community-engaged researcher before, during, and after the data collection period for this study. I am a white, native-born US citizen, university professor, and mother of two—an infant and toddler at the time of data collection. For two years prior to initiating this research, I regularly and actively volunteered with a community-based organization dedicated to organizing with undocumented immigrant families in Pittsford. Through this experience, I came to know many Pittsford parents in the context of their communities, without the school as mediator or reference point. I personally experienced juggling the demands of parenting, work, and pregnancy while maintaining a rigorous schedule of community meetings and events. A divorce in that period gave me a taste of what it feels like to maintain this juggling act while solo-parenting very young children. It also prompted me to notice how many women with whom I worked in community settings were performing even more impressive feats of multi-tasking with far fewer resources than I had. Although I did not formally collect data on families in the CBO as part of this study, the experiences I had and the relationships I developed with Pittsford parents through my community work inevitably shaped my understanding and interpretations.
Findings
In my first meeting with the Director of Family and Community Engagement, I asked her to describe the work of her office: she replied, “Parent engagement is a mandate. We are complying with that.” It is noteworthy, but not surprising, that an administrator would describe the work of her office in terms of compliance rather than with reference to its mission and purpose. It is particularly unsurprising in Pittsford which, like other districts serving high-poverty minoritized communities, is on the receiving end of a seemingly incessant stream of reforms and interventions, turnaround efforts, takeovers, and redesign plans—creating a context of continuous neoliberal reform. As noted earlier, the district used rubrics to score teachers and schools on family engagement. The director expressed satisfaction with the rubrics, saying they were philosophically in line with her vision. She was pleased that principals and teachers now took family engagement more seriously than they had in the past; however, she worried that too many focused solely on getting a passing score without understanding the broader aims of family engagement. In her vision, PLs would act as organizers, mobilizing and empowering parents to demand school change. She named a scholar, Karen Mapp, whose writing had inspired her (e.g. see Mapp and Hong, 2010). Despite her commitment to this empowerment-based approach, however, she worried that some personnel viewed the rubrics as simply a hoop to jump through.
In conversations with school personnel, many voiced concern that family engagement levels were low in the district and needed to be increased. At each public event I attended, speakers cited research linking higher levels of family engagement to higher achievement outcomes, and implored those present to get their neighbors, friends, co-congregants, and extended family members more involved in schools. At the same time, my interviews provided many examples of family engagement in practice. These included stories of parents acting as advocates (for IEPs, extra tutoring, after-school care, spare uniforms); volunteering; calling a meeting with the Superintendent about gun safety after the Sandy Hook shooting (which had taken place in December 2012); planning a trip to the local zoo; and organizing a fundraiser for families displaced in an apartment building fire. One PL seemed to suggest parents were At the beginning [of the school year], they [parents] felt like they were being locked out [of the school] because we said
To convey a more grounded, contextualized picture of what family engagement actually looked like, the remainder of this section focuses on one PL, Maribel, at Victoria Elementary School (a pseudonym is used for the school). More research would be needed to determine how representative Maribel’s experience was: indeed, her level of commitment and dedication could have been exceptional. However, even if her story is unique in some ways, it is instructive and illustrative of key themes learned from interviews and group discussions with other PLs, as the subsequent discussion section will demonstrate. Moreover, the conditions under which she worked were not unique and thus her story highlights some of the structural challenges that PLs faced district wide.
Maribel
On a typical school day, Maribel arrived to work at 07:30, in time to greet parents as they dropped off children. According to Maribel, much of her day was spent translating for parent–teacher meetings. She was scheduled to attend all such meetings, sometimes as many as four a day, just in case translation was needed. Roughly 80% of Victoria’s student population was Latinx, and about one-third was emergent bilingual (called “Hispanic” and “English Language Learners”, respectively, by the district). Maribel, a bilingual Puerto Rican woman, said most of the parents she encountered were Spanish-dominant, with about an even mix of Puerto Rican families and immigrant families from Latin American countries. Each morning, Maribel made her way through a list of children who were absent and those who were out of uniform, calling their homes. Another major responsibility was coordinating parent volunteers—individuals who read to children or provided tutoring in classes, and groups who completed tasks such as stamping textbooks or stuffing folders.
Beyond these routine duties, Maribel said much of her time was spent giving impromptu support to teachers when they needed to communicate with an adult at home. She said: “I’m here all the time. If a teacher needs to call home and she can’t speak their language, most likely she’ll come here [to Maribel’s office].” As an example, Maribel recalled a kindergartner who came to school with a US$10 bill which his teacher assumed was for an upcoming field trip. But the child refused to give her the money and could not explain why—either due to the language barrier or to being five years old, or a combination of the two—so the teacher sought Maribel’s assistance. Maribel called home and reached an adult who informed her the money was for gas; the car was running on empty, and the adult picking him up would not make it home otherwise.
Maribel’s day was rarely over when she left Victoria Elementary at 17:00. One of her responsibilities was to plan, organize, and host events for families in the evenings and weekends, such as parent workshops and a school-wide picnic for families and teachers. She also participated in her school’s home visit program—a reform that involved teachers visiting families at home. An enthusiastic supporter of this program, Maribel helped recruit teachers to participate, supported their training, and often accompanied them on home visits. Maribel also developed personal relationships with families. She was meeting regularly with one child to provide tutoring, while giving emotional support to his mother who was experiencing a crisis. She mentioned two occasions when she wrote letters of support—once during a divorce case, and once for a deportation hearing—and did what she could to provide logistical or emotional support to undocumented families who asked for her help. She said parents at the school had her cell phone number, and they used it.
In addition to offering emotional, material, and logistical support to families, Maribel mediated conflict between families and schools, at times having to suppress her own empathy to enforce school rules. She told two different stories illustrating this point. In both, she described mothers who became “furious” with the school and took out their anger on her. The first involved a child out of uniform; Maribel had called home to ask someone to bring a uniform to school. When the mother arrived, she insulted and yelled at Maribel for not keeping spare uniforms available. Maribel was sympathetic. She knew some families washed children’s clothes by hand and left them on the heater to dry: laundromats were expensive and inconvenient; children’s clothes were always getting dirty; clothing left on a heater did not always dry fast enough to wear the next day; the school did not keep spare uniforms on hand; and this mother had been called away from work, likely losing wages. Knowing all this, Maribel felt compassion for the mother but suppressed these feelings in order to enforce school rules.
In the second example, Maribel recalled a mother whose three children were assigned to two different elementary schools. She wanted all three at one school, but that would only be possible if she moved two from the favored school to the less favored one—something she wasn’t willing to do. Maribel expressed sympathy with the mother, noting that it was impossible to pick up and drop off all three children on time given the schools’ locations, but went on to explain Even though I understand her, the policy is that your child has to go to another school. He can apply [for this school] but he’ll be on the waiting list and I don’t know when he’ll get in, three years maybe? I don’t know. So for now I couldn’t help her. I could just explain to her how the system runs. So it is a challenge, from the system to the parent. You know, as simple as it is and as much as I understand her, that’s just how the system runs.
One insight we can draw from Maribel’s narrative is that much of her day-to-day work consisted of emotional labor. The requirement to suppress empathy, and to “please everyone” in contexts marked by conflicting agendas, are both examples of emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983). So too is the support she provided to families informally through crisis intervention, tutoring, and writing letters. For Maribel, this work occurred behind the scenes; it was not part of her official job description, recognized, or compensated, yet it directly supported the mission of family engagement. It was, in other words, made invisible as work, continuing a long-standing trend of “disappearing” women’s emotional labor (Guy and Newman, 2004). These points become even clearer in the example that follows.
When asked about her ideal vision of family engagement for the school, Maribel said the principal sets priorities each year, and “this year the priority is attendance”. But she quickly went on to talk about her effort to start a “walking school bus”; that is, organizing groups of children and adults to walk to school together to promote pedestrian safety and build community. Victoria Elementary is located near on- and off-ramps to an Interstate highway. Maribel pulled a road map from her desk to demonstrate as she explained: “Ok, so you could have a first grader, a second grader, walking See, this is a one-way and this is the highway ramp. If I am a driver and I need to take a left here [onto the ramp], and if a student is going to cross this street right here, [rhetorically] can a car see them? There is no crossing guard there! There’s no sign there! [Interviewer: ‘Is there a traffic light?’]: No. There is no traffic light. They didn’t do the walk because it was too dangerous. [ My principal said, I can’t do that. I have asked so much from my teachers already. If I ask for one more thing, I don’t think I’m going to get a positive answer. Just drop it. Can’t they [parents] do something else? They could put some pressure on the right people so that they could put a sign, or paint the street down there in a way that is a bright white or a yellow, or one of those poles, those plastic ones that don’t cost too much.
Not only does this story represent a case of parallel disconnected worlds—between parents’ and schools’ priorities—but it also shows how Maribel’s work was rendered invisible by punitive accountability regimes. The time, effort, and skills it took Maribel to establish relationships with families, learn about their concerns, act on those concerns by locating and contacting an organization in another city—all of this work was rendered insignificant, invisible, because it did not align with school-defined aims for parent engagement (raising attendance) or the ultimate neoliberal aim of producing test-score gains. This is one of the ways that punitive accountability systems render the emotional labor of PLs invisible. In the discussion below, I elaborate on these insights and consider their implications.
Discussion
The work of PLs in the school, like the work of care-givers in a family, directly supports children’s survival, growth, wellbeing, and learning. It is relentless, continuous work, but it remains largely invisible. A gender analysis allows us to see three ways in which this invisibilization is accomplished.
By rubrics that reduce complex relational work of family engagement to numerical indicators; Accountability measures that focus on “outcomes” rather than processes and relationships; and Wider patriarchal assumptions that define “productive” work as that which leads to profit or a wage (or test score growth) rather than work that sustains and nourishes life (Hart, 2013; Mies, 1982; Rioux, 2015).
Not only do punitive accountability systems “disappear” women’s emotional labor (Guy and Newman, 2004), they also assume the “infinite flexibility of women’s labor” (Bakker, 2007: 546) since neoliberal austerity increases the quantity and intensity of work falling disproportionately on women in homes and schools. An intersectional–gender analysis (Dominguez-Pareto, 2015) helps us understand how it is women of color who bear the brunt of neoliberal disinvestment and punitive accountability regimes in schools. This lens helps us identify processes through which neoliberal forms of family engagement in education both exploit and reinforce existing inequalities of race, class, and gender.
To illustrate these points, let’s consider Maribel’s story of the “furious” mother called to school for her child’s uniform violation. Mandatory uniforms were introduced in all Pittsford schools in 2008, for the declared purpose (as stated on the district’s website) of improving discipline and reducing violence. This reflects a broader national trend toward imposing uniforms and strict dress codes in public schools, especially urban schools, since the 1990s (Brunsma, 2004, 2006). The trend toward insisting on uniforms being worn by public school students has developed hand-in-hand with neoliberal reform efforts and reflects the neoliberal logic of punitive accountability: with mandatory uniforms, the concept of a “uniform violation” was invented, producing one more way to punish, criminalize, and remove students from learning. Calling a parent to school during the day for a uniform violation would be unheard of a generation ago but is now seemingly commonplace in urban districts, and was certainly commonplace in Pittsford. Indeed, a major piece of Maribel’s work each day involved placing phone calls home about children not wearing uniform
The race and class implications of school uniform enforcement have been critiqued. Disproportionately, Black and Brown students’ bodies—including body language, clothing, and hair—are more tightly policed than those of white students, and schools serving larger proportions of students of color are more likely to have strict rules regarding uniforms, dress codes, and grooming than those serving predominantly white students (Brunsma, 2004; Carr, 2014; Ferguson, 2001; Goodman, 2013). Enforcement of clothing rules often results in a loss of instructional time and/or a disciplinary record, because violations may be punished by detention or removal from class—both counter-productive measures that harm —students’ opportunity to learn and which, again, disproportionately affect students of color. This is especially troubling when applied to young children who have little or no control over the clothing available to them in a household. Requiring a parent to bring clothes to school or retrieve a child out of uniform disproportionately punishes low-income and working-poor families where adults are likely to work for hourly wages, have less flexibility over their time, and fewer transportation options.
In addition to these race and class implications, punitive enforcement of clothing rules punishes mothers and female caregivers disproportionately because they are most likely to be the adults in households responsible for doing kids’ laundry and getting them dressed in the morning, and most likely to be the adult who is called when a child is in violation. Race and class privilege protect some white and middle-class women from shouldering the same responsibility/blame by transferring it to poorer women and women of color who provide domestic labor. At every step, fathers and male caregivers are outside the loop and off the hook. It is patriarchy that creates these conditions within households: patriarchy also normalizes them, so the fact that women shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for, and cost of, children’s uniform violations goes unnoticed and unmarked. Meanwhile, at Victoria Elementary, it was Maribel, a Puerto Rican woman, who was tasked with the thankless job of calling, and then facing the anger of a “furious” mother, who was quite likely at her wits’ end from having to do it all.
By policing the clothing of young children, neoliberal education reform generates more uncompensated household labor that is disproportionately assigned to women. Neoliberal discourses of individual responsibilization place responsibility/blame on students and parents (i.e. mothers) for complying or failing to comply with clothing rules, instead of recognizing the absurdity of how these rules are punitively enforced in the first place. In this way, the impacts of strict clothing rules mirror the impacts of neoliberal reform in other areas of social life: increasing the amount and intensity of unpaid household labor disproportionately assigned to women while creating new structures of punishment and blame for failing to carry it out (e.g. Bakker, 2007; Bakker and Gill, 2003; Teghtsoonian, 2009; Young, 2005). At the same time, austerity policies reduce support for families across many areas of social life, including schools. This is how women are left to “pick up [the] slack” for neoliberal disinvestment (Bakker 2007: 546). My study offers insights about how this occurs within Pittsford schools and families, affecting caregivers and PLs alike, both of whom are disproportionately women of color.
In my discussions with PLs, they identified basic economic and material needs as the biggest concerns for parents. They listed things like the need for after-school childcare, no place for children to do homework at home, lack of access to transportation, difficulty doing laundry, and no access to school supplies. One of our large group discussions focused on transportation as a major barrier: driving was expensive (and unlawful for undocumented parents); the city was decentralized; and public transit inadequate. PLs also said families moved frequently and as a result children were required to change schools, so it was not uncommon for elementary-age children to change schools several times in an academic year—creating instability, undermining learning, and making family engagement more difficult. At a middle school where many Somali refugee children attended, the PL said some children arrived at Pittsford directly from refugee camps in Kenya, could not read or write in any language, and had not experienced formal schooling. Despite the presence of a large community of Somali refugees at the school, the PL said that school communications were not translated into Somali language and that teachers did not receive training or support in understanding Somali students’ history or culture, or the conditions of their migration.
All of this occurs against the backdrop of increased workplace vulnerability, declining wages, and growing economic inequality that characterize neoliberalization—as well as virulent anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Black rhetoric in the nation as a whole. For Pittsford’s majority Black and Brown population, aggressive policing and racialized state violence impose a constant threat, while punitive accountability in schools punishes and criminalizes children, fueling a school-to-prison pipeline. These trends undermine children’s and families’ wellbeing. They place families in stress, and in states of extreme insecurity: these are not conditions conducive to nurturing and nourishing children’s growth and development. Nevertheless, PLs did what they could to support caregivers and children, build trust, and foster family engagement in these extremely unfavorable circumstances. Despite the enormity of their charge, their jobs were low-paid, low-status, and lacking in autonomy. Several PLs believed that teachers had little knowledge or understanding of the work the PLs did each day. The invisibility of PLs’ labor was both literal—in that it happened in private, on sidewalks, in homes, through face-to-face interactions—and conceptual, because it resisted quantification on rubrics and other evaluative metrics demanded by neoliberal reform. Economic inequality, structural racism, and patriarchy created and normalized these conditions; neoliberalization exploits and exacerbates them in schools, families, and workplaces.
Conclusion
Critical scholars of family engagement have long written about a mismatch between schools’ and families’ priorities, but my findings lend support to the idea that neoliberal reform is exacerbating rather than ameliorating this mismatch. The distance between schools’ and families’ priorities in a context of hyper-accountability and extreme economic insecurity is so vast that it can be described as a case of parallel disconnected worlds. At the same time, PLs such as Maribel, and caregivers like the “furious” mothers she encountered, are working under severely challenging conditions to engage, communicate, get children to school dressed and fed, and support children and each other. They are doing so in contexts of extreme economic vulnerability, racialized state violence, austerity and budget cuts. Their work is made more difficult and more intense by the increased economic insecurity and withering social safety net that define neoliberalism, and by punitive accountability and education “reforms” that disproportionately punish and harm their children. All the while, neoliberal discourses of individual responsibilization assign responsibility and blame for children’s academic achievement to individual teachers and caregivers—both of whom are disproportionately women.
Despite these facts, we should not give up on pursuing relational and community-building approaches to family engagement, which aim to cultivate equitable, democratic, and trusting relationships between educators and families. In pushing for this vision, we must insist that this work takes time and there is no shortcut, especially when working across differences of race, class, language and nationality. Time and space must be provided to do this work, and it should be recognized as a fundamental skill set of educators and liaisons charged with family engagement. This does
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My research assistants, Anais Surkin and Brenda Muzeta, offered valuable support on this research. I am grateful to Pauline Lipman, Marta Baltodano, and Irenka Dominguez-Pareto for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. I am indebted to Wilson DeCandio for many conversations that contributed to my analysis.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declares that no potential conflicts of interest exist with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Faculty Research Grants Program.