A Critical Analysis of Family Engagement Policy in the Every Student Succeeds Act by Ariel Chung

The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was established to unite political parties and diverse stakeholders in ensuring the success of every elementary and secondary school student regardless of their race, income, zip code, disability, home language, and background (Department of Education n.d.). ESSA deliberately promotes parent and family school engagement through federal funding and state and district program reporting requirements. I employ two critical theoretical perspectives—the general critical policy analysis (CPA) and the critical discourse analysis (CDA)— to examine ESSA’s family engagement policy’s production, distribution, and reception (Apple 2018). The two critical perspectives reveal how the ESSA’s language and policy tools, by treating families as passive receivers, perpetuate the power structures that exclude some parents from engaging in schools and children’s education.

Description of Policy – Family Engagement in ESSA

ESSA positions family engagement as critical to “improving basic programs operated by state and local educational agencies” (ESSA 2015, §1010) and achieving “21^st Century schools” (ESSA 2015, §4501). The family engagement policy aims to “assist parents in participating effectively in their children’s education and to help their children meet challenging State academic standards” (ESSA 2015 §4504). ESSA emphasizes inclusivity by replacing the term “parental involvement” (No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) 2002, §1118) with “parent and family engagement” (ESSA 2015, §1010). ESSA also prioritizes engaging non-dominant families through targeted funding and programs. ESSA relies on two channels to promote the engagement of underrepresented families: funding and state reporting requirements.

Funding

ESSA mandates districts to reserve at least 1% of Title I funds for parent and family engagement initiatives, including school staff training, family outreach, information dissemination, collaboration with school-based organizations or businesses, etc. ESSA asks schools to prioritize “increasing engagement of economically disadvantaged parents and families” (ESSA 2015, §1010), including a focus on low-income families when deciding how to use the funds. Additionally, Title IV of ESSA extends federal grants for establishing Statewide Family Engagement Centers (SFECs). The competitive grants allow SFECs to (1) provide training and technical assistance for state and local agencies or (2) partner with states to design and implement general family engagement projects that “assist parents in participating effectively in their children’s education” (ESSA 2015, §4504).

Reporting Requirements

Similarly, ESSA requires districts to represent the needs of underrepresented families within program reporting requirements. ESSA mandates that districts and Title I schools work with families to develop, implement, and update family engagement initiatives. For example, in grant applications, districts must include plans to involve parents in developing, reviewing, and revising engagement programs (ESSA 2005, §1010). Schools must also outline plans to develop engagement strategies with low-income families jointly and to encourage engagement through holding annual parent-school meetings, providing flexible programs and services, and disseminating information (ESSA 2005, §1010).

Analyzing Family Engagement in ESSA from Critical Policy Analysis’s Perspectives

Seeing policy as a social construct, CPA focuses on how policy emerges, what perceived problems policy intends to address, what the differences are between written policy and practiced reality, and how a policy perpetuates dominant power structures (Diem et al. 2014; Sampson 2019). A CPA perspective raises questions regarding ESSA’s intention and consequences: What does the language used or not used tell us about the policy’s assumptions on engaging parents and families? How do these assumptions come into play in different policy fields (Rawolle and Lingard 2015)? How might ESSA reinforce the dominant white middle-class culture through policy processes?

Regarding the language used, ESSA’s shift to “parent and family engagement” recognizes the significance of other family members and family member’s agency to engage (rather than be involved) in children’s education. However, regarding policy distribution, the funding categories and reporting requirements indicate that family members are passive receivers who should be informed about, invited in, and educated by the formal education system. For example, in the grant applications, SFECs need to include plans for providing “technical assistance for evidence-based parent education programs” (ESSA 2015, §4503). Furthermore, the stated policy goal (i.e., effectively improving children’s academic achievement) assumes that efforts to include family members (especially families from low-income or minority backgrounds) in school education can lead to better student academic achievement. However, research has shown that conventional approaches to family engagement are often rooted in dominant expectations of parental educational engagement (Lareau 1987; Mill et al. 2016). These practices often see nondominant families as deficient and thus fail to engage members of these families (Barajas-López and Ishimaru 2020; Baquedano-López et al. 2013). With a narrow focus on academic achievement, ESSA misses opportunities to build on different families’ diverse ways of supporting their children’s learning (Ishimaru 2019).

Abundant studies have shown that parents and family members from socioeconomic and racially minoritized backgrounds often feel unwelcome, misunderstood, and disrespected in schools (Allen and White-Smith 2017; Rattenborg et al. 2019). CPA underscores how school-based family engagement efforts may counterproductively reinforce privilege and inequality without recognizing and addressing these families’ realities (Sampson 2019). Furthermore, CPA can shed light on family members’ counteractions and resistance to policies designed for them in the policy reception phase (Diem et al. 2014), highlighting family’s activism to take agency in children’s schooling and education.

Analyzing Family Engagement in ESSA from Discourse Theory’s Perspectives

CDA sees language as a social practice, highlighting the context of language use and language’s power to shape society (Meyer 2001; Wodak 2001). From a critical discourse perspective, policies are official discursive formations that engender different power relations under various contexts (Foucault 1976). Analyzing ESSA’s family engagement policy through a critical discourse lens leads to critical questions such as: What counts as family engagement policy in different contexts? How is common-sense of family engagement constructed through these policies? Which discourses seem to be marginalized (Peterson 2015)? While the following paragraphs center federal-level reality-making for a more focused analysis, a critical discourse perspective reminds us that state- and district-level responses are also policies that reflect, reconstruct, or reinforce institutional knowledge that shapes the day-to-day realities of family-school relationships.

At the federal level, the production of policy discourses is both normative and productive in that they manifest a series of truth-making acts (Peterson 2015). By listing the types of programs that are fundable and the sorts of content required in state reporting, ESSA creates circumstances within which family engagement efforts operate (Ball 1993). ESSA builds norms around common-sense parents and family engagement to be school- or center-based intervention that is provided to families (especially “economically disadvantaged parents and families” [ESSA 2015, §1010]) by trained educators. Regarding policy production and distribution, the grant incentive built into the policy impels states and districts to reinforce this vision by mobilizing their institutional knowledge and implementing school- and center-centric engagement programs. The mandated state reporting further manages this common-sense of family engagement constructed at the federal level. For example, by requiring states to include plans for annual parent-school meetings, different engagement programs, and information dissemination strategies, ESSA reinforces conventional school-based family engagement practices.

By analyzing truths and types of knowledge constructed through policy discourses, CDA reveals the omnipresent power relations (Foucault 1976; Meyer 2001) created, maintained, and resisted through language. In ESSA, knowledge about family engagement is constructed at the federal level and implemented at the state and district levels. There is no mention in ESSA of parents’ and families’ knowledge and agency in engaging in their children’s education. As ESSA allows states to establish and implement education standards, state contexts should also be a focus of analyses (Rodriguez and Monreal 2017). Furthermore, analysis of power relations at the district and school-level also reveals how families use their knowledge to contest or assimilate into the school- and center-centric engagement policies under ESSA.

Discussion and Conclusion

Both critical theoretical perspectives underscore the ESSA policy language used, the power of policy to shape realities, and the policy’s impact on different contexts and communities. General CPA reveals that despite efforts to deviate from the exclusionary tone of NCLB, ESSA still sees parents and families as outsiders who need to be educated and involved in their children’s schooling. Moreover, the emphasis on students’ academic outcomes underlines the neo-liberal pursuit of effective education, minimizing underrepresented families’ nontraditional forms of capital for supporting children’s education. Consequently, it reinforces dominant middle-class values and practices that have long caused non-dominant families to feel unwelcomed and misunderstood in schools. CDA, on the other hand, unveils how the federal government constructs family engagement as school- and center-based programs provided by trained educators. In this engagement model, parents and family members are passive receivers included in and informed by the education system. This socially constructed common-sense knowledge of engagement is reinforced by state reporting requirements.

Both general CPA and CDA disclose the dominant culture’s values and beliefs hidden under seemingly neutral policy. They reveal how the policy language and the tools used perpetuate an imbalanced power structure within which families are treated as passive receivers who only have a voice when invited and included by the system. Analyzing ESSA’s family engagement policy through these two critical theoretical perspectives reveals how policy can be utilized to change and maintain realities that preserve the dominant culture and established power.

About the Scholar

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