The Voices of Parents in the Classroom

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which nine parents experience their children's high school. Although the high school is in the inner city of Boston and serves mostly children of color from working-class and poor families, the parents hold themselves to expectations based on middle-class and dominant societal norms. They experience the school as an institution that often does not live up to its responsibilities to educate and protect their children. The parents then place most of these responsibilities for their children's educations on themselves, both to ensure their children's futures and to prevent any negative judgments from being made about their parenting. This paper attempts to allow parents to tell the story of their children's school in their own voices and to begin to resist the ways that inner-city parents have been constructed in the literature in the past. In order for urban education to truly change, the voices of parents must be allowed into the conversation and this paper attempts to begin the recognition of those voices.