Parental involvement has been promoted by politicians and educators as the cure all for academic ills in the American educational system. Programs have been funded and structured to involve all parents in schools in ways valued by middle class parents to the exclusion of language minority families, their language, and their culture. These middle class-based programs, which are founded upon a cultural deficit approach to parenting, do not provide Latino and other immigrant families with the tools they need to help their children and empower themselves. This paper describes an ethnographic investigation of home-based parent involvement as seen through the experience of a Costa Rican family in an African-American community in the northeastern United States. Using interviews, fieldnotes, and documents, this paper details a specific parental involvement effort initiated in a Latino home through a mini-grant offered by the school district. Citing literature from research on the use of funds of knowledgein school and the analysis of social contextual features in approaching the education of minorities, the paper analyzes the parental involvement effort and suggests changes in the ways future parental involvement efforts view parents and involvement. – Publisher’s description
