Parents Who Choose Not to Collaborate with Their Children’s Schools

The Marshall Memo

In this thoughtful Teachers College Record article, New York University professor Fabienne Doucet explores the relationship between newly-arrived Haitian immigrant parents and the Boston-area schools their adolescent children attend. In her study of 54 families, Doucet (herself a Haitian immigrant to the U.S.) found that parents engage in “tactical resistance to Americanization” and “play an active and deliberate role in creating distance between the world of the home and school… [A]t the heart of parents’ concern was the fear of losing their children.” There are three ways parents resist building bridges with educators:

• Protecting the home terrain – This is displayed as a concern with family privacy, parental strictness, and discouraging children’s friendships with other students; parents are anxious to maintain the ability to discipline their children as they see fit.

• Equating schools with Americanization – This is shown through criticisms of U.S. schools and schooling, which parents see as quite different from the French/Haitian system. Parents are particularly concerned with what they see as lax discipline in schools and too-early introduction of sex education. They are also perplexed when teachers constantly seek their input and feedback about their children’s school performance (weren’t they the experts?) and find teachers too intrusive and pushy (again, the concern with family privacy).

• Negotiating a seat at the table – This is shown through occasional parental advocacy, especially when they feel their children have been treated unfairly, and through seeking out reciprocal partnerships, as opposed to the more typical school-centric “partnership.” Many Haitian parents feel ill at ease in schools because of language barriers and the sheer unfamiliarity of American classrooms. 

“The findings I have presented here,” says Doucet, “question the pervasive notion in educational literature and practice that close links between home and school should be the goal of both teachers and families… Bridging is not value neutral… Bridge-building assumes that both sides have come together and agreed to the bridge… Educators at every level need a model of family-school relations that acknowledges power and the potential loss of it (for both sides) through bridging… Resistance to bridging must be understood in this context, and those in power must be willing to share that power if they truly desire parents’ voices to inform and shape their work.” 

“(Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds” by Fabienne Doucet in Teachers College Record, December 2011 (Vol. 113, #12, p. 2705-2738), available for purchase at

http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=16203