Attainable Goals? The Spirit and Letter of the No Child Left Behind Act on Parental Involvement

Now in its third full school year of implementation, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has been drawing praise and blame. It has been praised for its goals of increasing all students’ learning, requiring disaggregated data to monitor the progress of major subgroups of students, and having high-quality teachers in all schools. It has been criticized for overemphasizing the importance of standardized achievement tests, setting unrealistic time lines for clearly unreachable goals, and underfunding its requirements. Although most attention has been paid to the NCLB’s requirements for annual achievement tests and high-quality teachers, the law also includes important requirements for schools, districts, and states to organize programs of parental involvement and to communicate with parents and the public about students ’ achievement and the quality of schools. In contrast to some other sections of the law, Section 1118--Parental Involvement--has improved over time by drawing from research in the sociology of education, other disciplines, and exemplary practice to specify structures and processes that are needed to develop programs to involve all families in their children’s education (Booth and Dunn 1996; Epstein 2001). This section is also in contrast to early legislation, which mandated a few parent representatives on school or district advisory councils but left most parents on their own to figure out how to become involved in their children’s education across the grades (Borman et al. 1996). In this essay, I offer my perspectives on the NCLB’s requirements for family involvement; provide a few examples from the field; suggest modifications that are needed in the law; and encourage sociologists of education to take new directions in research on school, family, and community partnerships.