Introduction
At an elementary school in Lexington, Massachusetts, parent teacher organization meetings begin at 9:05 AM sharp on Tuesdays and typically run for an hour, with the option to join online “if that is more convenient.” Though presented as an accessible option to become an involved parent in the school’s decision-making process, it is an invitation that carries unspoken assumptions. Firstly, that they have reliable internet access, and secondly, that they can step away from their duties at the start of the typical work hour. In either case, the parents described as involved are credited with personal commitment, while those described as uninvolved may be read as lacking it, both readings shaped by the conditions that structure participation in the first place.
Existing research has shown that there are disparities in involvement, with middle-class families more likely to participate in ways that match school expectations. However, much of this research takes for granted what schools consider involvement, focusing on whether families participate rather than how participation is defined. Less attention has been paid to how schools create these expectations through their communications like newsletters and family engagement materials. These school documents are not neutral. They reflect what schools recognize, foreground, and invite. Yet few studies look at these texts as places where meaning is created. This study looks at how schools themselves define and structure involvement in their communications, and how these definitions may take different forms across district socioeconomic contexts.
The following questions will guide the research: (1) how do school communications promote parental involvement? (2) what forms of involvement are explicitly or implicitly valued? (3) what assumptions do these communications make about family structure, time availability and access to resources? (4) what forms of labor remain unacknowledged or invisible? (5) how do these patterns vary across school districts of different socioeconomic contexts?
Literature Review
Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital provides a foundation for understanding how educational institutions emphasize certain forms of knowledge and participation. Bourdieu (1986) argues that schools reward forms of cultural capital aligned with middle-class families, reinforcing inequality. Extending this logic to parental involvement, participation can be understood not simply as a matter of effort or commitment, but as a matter of whether the form it takes aligns with institutional expectations.
Bowles and Gintis (1976) extend this account in a different direction, arguing that schools sort students into different roles within an unequal economic order, preparing some for autonomous, leadership-oriented work and others for compliance with institutional procedures. While their original argument concerns student outcomes, the parallel for parental involvement is direct: schools may extend the same sorting logic to parents themselves, calibrating the kind of involvement they invite according to the institutional position they imagine families occupying. Building on cultural capital theory, Lareau (2003, 2018) explores how parenting practices vary across social classes and how these differences are interpreted by schools. Lareau identifies two main patterns: “concerted cultivation,” typically associated with middle-class families, and the “accomplishment of natural growth,” more common among low-income families.
Concerted cultivation involves structured activities and frequent communication with institutions. The accomplishment of natural growth emphasizes autonomy and less structured institutional engagement, with parents providing support in ways less visible to the school. Schools interpret these differences through a restricted lens, recognizing middle-class practices as involvement while misinterpreting working-class approaches as disengagement.
Bernstein (1975) argues that educational institutions have a “hidden curriculum” that encodes rules about behavior, communication, and belonging. These rules are embedded in everyday practices, including language use, scheduling, and expectations for participation, and are often aligned with the cultures of socially dominant groups, like middle and upper class families.
Delpit (2006) makes a similar point. Schools operate through dominant cultural codes but rarely make those codes explicit. Families unfamiliar with these norms are not excluded through formal rules but through small mismatches between what schools expect and what families’ lives actually look like. School communications serve as the main places where these expectations are expressed and reinforced.
Family structure is also key in shaping how parents are able to be involved in school. Research on family life shows that caregiving responsibilities are often unevenly distributed, particularly in single-parent households. Edin and Kefalas (2005) find that single mothers frequently balance work, childcare, and household responsibilities with limited support, leaving less time and flexibility for school-based involvement.
Reay (1999) offers a similar perspective, showing that working-class mothers are highly engaged in their children’s education, but often under constraint. For them, involvement mostly takes place out of school, including providing emotional support, maintaining routines, and supporting learning at home. However, these forms of involvement are not visible to schools, and thus are often overlooked.
Across these frameworks, parental involvement emerges not as a fixed attribute of families but as something institutions actively construct, recognize, and stratify. The coding framework developed for this study translates this premise into analyzable features of school communications, making it possible to examine how schools define involvement in practice.
Methods and Research Design
This study employs qualitative discourse analysis to examine how schools construct and communicate expectations of parental involvement. Discourse analysis is suited to this research because it focuses on how language functions as social practice, shaping norms, expectations, and power relations within institutional contexts.
Sample
The sample consists of documents collected from six public school districts in Massachusetts, selected based on available data on median household income and rates of free or reduced-price lunch participation. The districts then were grouped into three categories: high-income (Lexington, Weston), middle-income (Arlington, Watertown), and working-class (Chelsea, Lawrence). The study focuses specifically on elementary schools within each district. Elementary education represents a critical stage in which schools establish foundational expectations for family engagement and parent–school relationships. Prior research suggests that parental involvement is most actively structured and encouraged during early schooling, making this level of schooling relevant for examining how institutional norms are created and perpetuated (Epstein, 2010).
Income is treated here as the primary stratification variable, but it does not vary independently of other district characteristics. The higher-income districts in this sample are also predominantly white and have low English Learner enrollment, while Lawrence and Chelsea are majority-Hispanic and have substantially higher EL populations. District size, per-pupil spending, and demographic composition all cluster with income, and this study does not try to separate them. The patterns described here should therefore be read as features of a clustered set of district characteristics, with income as the most analytically tractable axis, rather than as the effect of income alone.
Within this sample, documents were collected from two schools per district where possible, resulting in a dataset of 79 documents: 68 documents from the 2024–2025 academic year, and 11 overall policy documents which were undated. Schools in the corpus include Bowman and Fiske Elementary (Lexington), Country and Field School (Weston), Brackett and Stratton Elementary (Arlington), Cunniff and Lowell Elementary (Watertown), Hooks and Kelly Elementary (Chelsea), and Frost and South Lawrence East Elementary (Lawrence). Multiple document types including newsletters, parent-teacher organization (PTO) materials, policy documents, and website content were collected in order to capture a broad range of school communications.
The author attends a public high school in one of the districts included in this sample. Documents were analyzed against pre-defined codes to keep analytic claims grounded in the corpus rather than personal familiarity.
Data Collection Procedures
Data were collected over a six-week period through systematic review of publicly accessible school and district websites. Documents were identified by systemically navigating commonly used sections such as “Family Engagement,” “Newsletters,” “PTO,” and “School Policies.” Additional materials, including PTO bylaws and event announcements, were collected where available. The absence of certain documents, particularly in some lower-income districts, was also noted as part of the data collection process.
Coding and Analysis
The coding framework used in this study was developed directly from the literature on cultural capital, parental involvement, and institutional discourse. Rather than creating categories arbitrarily, the goal was to utilize key theoretical concepts to extrapolate observable features of school communications. In this way, the coding scheme seeks to turn abstract ideas such as resource access, institutional alignment, and parental expectations into analyzable dimensions.
Six primary coding categories were used (A-F): temporal accessibility, family structure assumptions, economic/resource assumptions, valued forms of involvement, invisible labor, and language tone. Each category captures a distinct aspect of how parental involvement is structured and communicated. For example, temporal codes reflect research on time poverty and scheduling constraints, while economic codes capture assumptions about access to resources such as money, technology, and workplace flexibility.
Documents were manually coded for language directed toward parents and families. Relevant excerpts were identified and assigned one or more codes, allowing for multiple dimensions of analysis within a single text. For example, references to roles such as “serve as a PTO board member” were coded as D2 (“leadership roles”) because they position parents as organizers and leaders within school-based initiatives. In contrast, language such as “please contact the main office to complete required forms” was coded as D5 (“institutional navigation”), as it directs parents to engage with school procedures and administrative processes. Codes capturing absence, particularly E5, were applied at the document level: a document was coded E5 when it described or solicited family participation without acknowledging the time, planning, or coordination that participation would require.
The corpus produced 598 total coded instances across the 79 documents, since documents could receive multiple codes. When districts were grouped into high-, middle-, and low-income categories, this produced 221 coded instances in high-income documents, 285 in middle-income, and 92 in low-income. Percentages reported in this study refer to the share of coded instances within a given income group, not the share of documents in which a code appeared. For example, “D1 and D2 account for 13.12% of coded instances in higher-income districts” means 29 of the 221 total codes in that group. This distinction matters because a single document can receive multiple codes, so these percentages describe the composition of institutional language rather than how many documents include a given code.
To examine variation across socioeconomic contexts, code distributions were compared across the three groups to identify which forms of parental involvement appeared more frequently in different contexts. A skew analysis was also conducted to highlight these differences more clearly. For each code, the percentage observed in low-income districts was subtracted from the corresponding percentage in high-income districts. These difference scores indicate the direction and magnitude of variation across income groups, making it possible to identify which codes were more strongly associated with particular socioeconomic contexts.
Because coding was conducted by a single researcher, the analysis carries limitations that independent coding would help address. Several safeguards were used to support consistency. Each code was defined with explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria before coding began, ambiguous passages were flagged and revisited after the initial pass, and a memo log was kept throughout to record borderline decisions. A subset of documents was re-coded after a delay to check for drift. These procedures cannot substitute for formal inter-rater reliability, and the coded distributions should be read with that limitation in mind.
Findings
Parental Involvement Is Defined Through Visible, Institution-Facing Participation
School communications consistently define parental involvement through participation in school-organized activities. Attending events, volunteering, joining parent organizations, and engaging in school-based decision-making are presented as the primary ways parents are expected to be involved. Forms of support that occur at home are rarely acknowledged. This emphasis on visible, school-based participation is reflected in the prominence of involvement-related codes such as D1 (“physical presence at school”) and D2 (“leadership roles”), alongside D5 (“institutional navigation”) and D7 (“institutional access/influence”), all of which describe activities that bring parents into direct interaction with school systems. For example, one communication notes that parents “become more committed to improving the school… when they enjoy the opportunity to serve or be represented on a school council,” coded as D7 because it frames involvement as an invitation to gain influence through institutional structures.
At the same time, the most frequent pattern in the dataset is the absence of recognition for home-based support, captured in E5 (“no acknowledgment of invisible labor”), which appears more often than any other code (n = 58, 9.7% of all coded instances). E5 also appears unevenly across income groups, being more frequently coded in higher-income district documents than in lower-income ones, where institutional and procedural language takes up more textual space. In both contexts, involvement is described through visible, formally organized actions, while support taking place outside these settings is less likely to be referenced.
Parental Involvement Is Framed as a Normative Expectation
School communications consistently assume parental involvement as expected and broadly shared among families. Language directed toward parents presents participation as typical and normalized, using phrases such as “we encourage all families,” “please make sure,” or “we look forward to your participation.” These communications often present participation as part of an ongoing relationship between families and the school, rather than a one-time or optional activity.
An example of this appears in Stratton Elementary’s student handbook, where the statement “families are expected to review school communications and remain informed about policies and procedures” (coded as F2’s positive expectant tone) frames engagement as an ongoing responsibility rather than an optional form of participation. Similar patterns appeared frequently across the dataset, particularly through F2 (“positive expectant tone”) and F3 (“invitational tone”), which occur 38 and 35 times respectively (6.4% and 5.9% of all coded instances). These instances frame involvement as routine, with expectations for attendance, reminders, and invitations presented as standard opportunities.
Participation Assumes Access to Time and Resources
School communications embed expectations that parents have access to time, financial resources, and technological tools necessary to participate. Parents are asked to attend meetings during the school day, join virtual sessions, volunteer regularly, contribute financially, and remain responsive to school communications. These requirements are presented rigidly, treating access to time, flexibility, and resources as a standard practice of parental involvement.
This pattern is reflected in the distribution of resource- and time-related codes. Attendance procedures, for example, often require families to report absences through school forms and, in some cases, meet with staff to develop attendance plans, coded as C5 (“assumes technology access”). Across the corpus, C5 appears 33 times, C1 (“unpaid volunteer time expected”) appears 32 times, and C6 (“workplace flexibility assumed”) appears 29 times, indicating that participation frequently relies on access to technology, discretionary time, and flexible work schedules. One example illustrates how these assumptions are embedded in seemingly neutral logistics. The Fiske Elementary Insider’s Guide notes that PTO meetings “take place at school at 9:05 AM and typically run for one efficient hour” with “an option to join online if that’s more convenient.” The framing presents flexibility as already accommodated, but participation still requires either physical presence at a weekday morning meeting or access to a device and stable internet during work hours. Notably, while the overall frequency of resource-assumption codes is comparable across income groups, the composition shifts: C6 (workplace flexibility) accounts for 7.7% of coded instances in higher-income district documents (n = 17 of 221) but only 4.4% in lower-income ones (n = 4 of 92), while C5 (technology access) shows the inverse pattern, accounting for 8.7% of coded instances in lower-income documents (n = 8 of 92) and just 2.7% in higher-income ones (n = 6 of 221). The type of resource taken for granted varies, even when the total weight of resource expectations does not.
References to potential constraints are rare. F4 (“acknowledging barriers”) appears only 5 times across the corpus (0.8% of all coded instances), suggesting school communications rarely recognize circumstances that might limit families’ ability to participate.
Parental Involvement Is Constructed Differently Across Socioeconomic Contexts
Within this sample, school communications do not only emphasize involvement differently across districts, but construct distinct forms of participation. While all districts promote engagement, the roles and activities associated with involvement vary between high, middle, and low-income districts.
In higher-income district documents, involvement is more frequently associated with D1 (“physical presence at school”) and D2 (“leadership roles”), indicating an emphasis on volunteering and leadership within parent organizations. Lower-income district documents show higher proportions of D5 (“institutional navigation”) and D7 (“institutional access/influence”), reflecting greater emphasis on school councils, advisory groups, and procedural governance.
This difference becomes clearer when these codes are considered together. In higher-income districts, D1 and D2 account for 13.12% of coded instances (n = 29 of 221), compared to just 2.17% in lower-income districts (n = 2 of 92). D5 and D7 make up only 2.26% of coded instances in higher-income districts (n = 5 of 221), but 22.83% in lower-income districts (n = 21 of 92). Within this sample, these patterns suggest school communications construct distinct types of parental roles across socioeconomic contexts.
The contrast is visible in the language of the documents themselves. In higher-income district documents, parent roles are framed through community-building and enrichment. The Fiske PTO playbook describes Room Helpers as people whose work makes “school life smoother for everyone,” where “kids enjoy better-coordinated activities. Teachers get quick, practical support. Parents feel informed and included.” Weston’s Field School similarly states the school “values and depends on parental involvement” because “student performance is profoundly influenced by parental engagement in the educational process as well as in school life.”
In lower-income district documents, the language shifts toward governance, compliance, and institutional access. A School Site Council notice from Hooks Elementary in Chelsea, for example, lists the meeting agenda as “Role of SSC, Attendance Data Update, Public Comments,” framing parent participation as procedural input into school accountability. In Lawrence, the Working Families Initiative is described as “a groundbreaking effort to link the families of Lawrence Public Schools students with resources to access employment and advance economically,” positioning the parent–school relationship as a channel for social services rather than school enhancement. Within this sample, the same institutional category, formal parent participation, is framed as community enhancement in one context and as compliance, governance, or service navigation in another.
Discussion
Interpretation and Theoretical Contribution
The findings support existing scholarship showing that parental involvement is not neutral. Prior research has demonstrated that schools tend to reward forms of participation aligned with middle-class resources and institutional familiarity (Bourdieu, 1986; Lareau, 2003, 2018). This study confirms that pattern, particularly in the emphasis on visible, school-facing forms of engagement and the limited acknowledgment of home-based labor. The findings also suggest something more. Within this sample, school communications construct qualitatively different institutional roles for parents across socioeconomic contexts, not only different levels of expectation.
This complicates Lareau’s distinction between concerted cultivation and natural growth. Lareau’s framework remains useful for explaining why middle-class forms of participation align more closely with school expectations. Yet within this sample, the institutional role assigned to parents differs across socioeconomic contexts in ways that go beyond parenting style. In higher-income district documents, parents were more often positioned as volunteers, leaders, and contributors to enrichment. In lower-income district documents, they were positioned as participants in governance, compliance, and institutional navigation. These patterns likely reflect a cluster of related conditions rather than income alone. Even so, school communications are not simply recognizing some families as more involved than others. They are constructing qualitatively different forms of parental labor. The issue becomes not only unequal access to involvement, but unequal institutional expectations about what parents are for.
Equity and Practical Implications
Inequity in parental involvement is not only a matter of access, but also of recognition. Existing research has shown that families participate under unequal conditions. These findings suggest a further problem: even when families are engaged, the forms of labor they perform may not be treated as involvement within school-defined frameworks.
Yet school-centered definitions can obscure substantial home-based labor, including supporting learning, maintaining routines, and coordinating children’s daily needs. Families with inflexible work or caregiving responsibilities may therefore remain educationally engaged while being less visible within school-defined forms of participation. This is particularly significant for single parents, especially single mothers, whose involvement may include coordinating transportation, managing schedules, navigating school procedures, or sustaining routines under economic strain. These forms of labor are often intensive but do not map neatly onto the visible, school-centered activities most often recognized in school communications.
This framework creates the possibility that absence from visible school-based activities may be read as lower engagement, while home-based forms of support remain less institutionally visible. Once visible school-facing participation becomes the dominant measure of engagement, families with fewer opportunities for that kind of participation are more easily interpreted as less engaged, even when schools do not explicitly say so. School communications may contribute to inequity not only by distributing opportunities unevenly, but by recognizing family effort unevenly.
If parental involvement is structured through definitions that prioritize visibility, availability, and resource access, addressing inequity requires rethinking how participation is designed rather than simply expanding existing opportunities. Schools could use communications to recognize everyday forms of support, for example, newsletter features that highlight ways families support learning at home, or inviting families to share how they contribute outside of school. Schools also rely on both fixed schedules (A1) and ongoing expectations that parents remain responsive (A5), assuming families have both availability and flexibility. Rather than treating flexibility as an extra accommodation, schools could design participation with these constraints in mind, offering asynchronous options alongside scheduled events and addressing practical barriers like transportation or childcare during major school functions. A final issue concerns how parental roles differ across income contexts. In lower-income districts, parents are more often positioned as supporting school operations (D5, D7). Expanding access to roles focused on enrichment and community-building could broaden how participation is recognized. In higher-income districts, schools could place more value on forms of involvement that are less visible. The goal is not to make participation the same across contexts, but to ensure families are not limited to a prescribed set of roles.
Limitations and Future Research
Several limits affect how the findings should be interpreted. The analysis is based on public documents from six Massachusetts school districts, so the results are tied to a specific place and parental involvement may be defined differently elsewhere. The data also comes from a single period, mainly the 2024–2025 school year, and does not capture how communication practices may shift over time.
Two methodological limitations deserve particular attention. First, coding was conducted by a single researcher. While inclusion criteria, memo logs, and re-coding of a subset of documents were used to support consistency, these procedures cannot substitute for independent coding, and the coded distributions should be read with that limitation in mind.
Second, document availability varied significantly across districts. Some lower-income schools lacked PTO pages, newsletters, or family-engagement graphics, while higher-income districts had extensive material of these kinds. A search of public-facing websites for Kelly and Frost Elementary, for example, turned up no PTO page, newsletters, or family engagement graphics, so the analysis of those districts leans more heavily on policy and governance materials. This means that the differences observed across income groups may partly reflect the different types of documents available for analysis, not solely different institutional constructions of parents. Comparisons across income groups should therefore be understood as comparisons of what schools chose to make publicly available, which is itself part of the discourse this study analyzes, but which also complicates any claim about differences in institutional construction alone.
This study also focuses on what schools publish, not how people respond to it. It cannot show how parents, teachers, or administrators interpret those expectations. Future research could extend this analysis to other states, track how communications shift over time, and incorporate interviews to capture how families experience these expectations. It could also examine middle and high schools, where expectations for parental involvement may take different forms across grade levels.
Conclusion
Across the documents examined in this study, parental involvement is presented in consistent ways. It is most often tied to being present at school, having time available, and responding when needed. These expectations are not always stated directly, but they shape what school communications recognize as involvement. At the same time, this definition does not reflect how many families actually engage with their children’s education. The work of supporting children at home and maintaining daily routines is part of involvement, but not recognized as such within school-defined frameworks.
Within this sample, school communications also construct involvement differently across socioeconomic contexts. In higher-income district documents, schools invite parents into roles of enrichment, leadership, and community-building. In lower-income district documents, schools more often position parents as participants in governance, compliance, and institutional navigation. The same word, involvement, names two different forms of labor, calibrated to two different institutional expectations of what parents are for.
The 9:05 AM PTO meeting in Lexington is itself an act of definition. It shapes who is recognized as involved before any parent walks through the door, and the same is true of every newsletter, policy document, and family engagement page examined in this study. For this reason, differences in parental involvement are not only about how much parents participate. They are also shaped by how participation is defined. Without changes to those definitions, efforts to increase involvement are likely to reproduce the same patterns rather than address them. Closing this gap requires not only asking families to engage, but asking institutions to expand what they are willing to recognize. Until then, many forms of involvement will remain present but unseen.