Parental involvement in school pedagogy: a threat or a promise?

ABSTRACT

This paper brings together two rich bodies of knowledge that have barely intersected in research: parental involvement in the school and processes of pedagogical change. Until now, parental involvement has been studied in many contexts, but references to parental involvement in a school’s pedagogy are rare. Management of pedagogical change has also been studied extensively, but mainly by relating to the school as an organisation that functions separately from the community context. This study, conducted in 2019–2021 (including the COVID-19 pandemic period), is based on 22 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with parents, principals, and senior education officials of two elementary schools in Israel that are undergoing pedagogical changes. The schools share some similar demographic characteristics but differ in pedagogy: One is an older school characterised by a traditional pedagogy (including, for example, frontal teaching and standardised evaluation); the other is new and was founded with innovative pedagogy in the spirit of the 21st century (for example, personalised teaching and alternative evaluation). The findings reveal that the parents in both schools are interested in influencing the school’s pedagogy, but that they do so in opposite directions: The parents at the more traditional school are interested in promoting innovative learning, while the parents in the innovative school are interested in reintroducing traditional practices. The findings also contribute to the discussion of parental involvement from a gender perspective and the roles of key players. Finally, the article offers initial insights regarding parent–school relations, including the pedagogical aspects, following the COVID-19 pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Parent school relationship
• elementary schools (pedagogy)
• educational practices
• gender bias
• educational change
• COVID-19

Introduction

This article stands at the intersection of two fields of research and educational practice that have broadened in recent years: parental involvement in schools and processes of pedagogical change. Whereas both fields are gaining interest, little attention has been paid thus far – in practice or in research – to the conjunction of the two. The literature on parental involvement describes issues such as parent-teacher communication, parental volunteering in social activities, connection with the broader community, and parents’ rights (Hornby & Blackwell, 2018; Stroetinga et al., 2019; Wilder, 2014).

The literature on processes of pedagogical change is broad, dealing in general with the paradigmatic transition that the education system must undergo in the 21^st century. This literature describes innovative approaches to teaching, learning, and evaluation, and factors that impede or promote processes of change (Mishra, 2019; OECD 2018), but it typically relates to the roles of the principal and the teachers in managing change (Ganon-Shilon & Schechter, 2019; Sergiovanni, 2015; Wolthuis et al., 2020; Zohar & Agmon, 2018). During the COVID-19 pandemic, a new dimension has been added to this literature, emphasising the pedagogical opportunities that can be applied (Zhao, 2020). But even the new literature focuses on schools and teachers separately from parents and community (Azorín, 2020).

In contrast, the current study examines a case in which the parents are involved in pedagogical change (Yemini & Maxwell, 2021). That is, besides being involved in the classic ways, such as volunteering and social activity, they are also involved in issues related to methods of teaching, learning, and evaluation. The current study adopts the distinction of Epstein et al. (2018) between collective parental involvement and individual involvement. We explore organised parental involvement vis-à-vis the school and not only individual parents’ involvement vis-à-vis their child’s teacher. We focus on two elementary schools in Israel, in neighbouring localities that are similar in some respects but different pedagogically: One is an older school with a more traditional pedagogy based on the transmission of knowledge in a uniform and frontal manner, serving a relatively affluent population. The other, situated from the start in a deprived area but serving both a well-to-do and underprivileged population, adopted an innovative pedagogical approach in the spirit of 21^st century learning skills, such as cross-disciplinary learning, personalised learning, and collaborative learning. The newer school opened five years ago with only a first grade, and over the years added additional grades. The more traditional school participated in a municipal initiative to promote educational change: a series of meetings for principals, teachers, and parents in all the municipality’s elementary schools. In the meetings, academics and educators taught the participants about a wide range of topics related to pedagogical innovation.

This study assumes that parental involvement in recent years is growing (Hornby & Blackwell, 2018) and that processes of pedagogical change encounter difficulties in becoming fully realised and sustainable (Hubers, 2020). On the basis of 22 interviews with parents (mostly mothers), principals, and the officials who head the municipality’s education system, this study describes the meaning that involvement in pedagogy has for parents. It points out that parents view themselves as involved in pedagogical issues in the schools, learn about pedagogy independently, and are interested in systemic influence on the schools. The schools, however, find it difficult to communicate their pedagogical considerations to the parents, and this may generate frustration and tension between the sides. The crisis engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the transition to distance learning exposed parents even more to the work of teaching and consequently accelerated and intensified these processes. The main takeaway for educators is that it is important for schools to initiate conveying the pedagogical policy to the parents.

Literature review

The story of change in education systems in general and in schools in particular is generally a tale of struggle, frustration, and disappointment (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2015; Hubers, 2020; Wolthuis et al., 2020). This is true both of changes imposed from outside and those from within the system. Whereas the task seems simple on paper, in practice several factors may impede or even prevent it. The review below concerns the obstacles within the school and those arising from the relations between the school and the surrounding community, which were exacerbated during the COVID-19 crisis. It leads to an examination of the complex relations between the school and the parents (mostly mothers) and to a contemporary view of these relations.

Extensive studies of processes of change in the field of education document tensions and rivalries between various players: school board members, principals and teachers, parents, and pupils (Blossing, 2016; Hubers, 2020). However, most of the studies focus on internal processes of the education system, particularly on the school as an organisation (Bascia & Hargreaves, 2014) and the roles of the teachers and principal in it (Ganon-Shilon & Schechter, 2019; Sergiovanni, 2015). The teachers are the ones responsible, in practice, for implementing a large number of the changes. Therefore, their importance in this cannot be overestimated (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2015; Stronge, 2018; Thoonen et al., 2011). Studies have found that teachers can be the agents of change in the classroom and in the school (Van der Heijden et al., 2015), but that in most cases they see change as a threat and as undermining their role, and in practice they are opposed to it (Al Salami et al., 2017; Berkovich, 2011).

The COVID-19 period has raised the question of schools’ ability to change in a sustainable way and not only in response to emergencies. However, there is as yet little relevant research, and time will pass before we can estimate the meaning of this period for promoting changes in pedagogy and in how schools communicate with parents and the community (Ewing & Cooper, 2021; Shamir-Inbal & Blau, 2021).

A multiplayer field and parental involvement in schools

The work of schools involves many stakeholders and a complex social ecology in which the parent is one of the key players (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Epstein et al., 2018). The extensive research on parent-teacher relations reveals the great tension between the two sides and a plethora of difficulties, including limitations on the time and place available to teachers for communicating with parents, differences in social status and gender, the teachers’ clear preference for working with the children, a perception of the teachers’ role as one in which pedagogy is in the centre, aggression on the part of the parents, and a failure on both sides to coordinate expectations (Cooper, 2015; Hill & Tyson, 2009; Hornby & Blackwell, 2018). Another key difficulty stems from the teachers’ lack of professional training in communicating with parents (Willemse et al., 2018). In most cases the teachers must initiate contact with the parents (Nitecki, 2015), but for the abovementioned reasons they don’t necessarily do so (Townsley et al., 2019; Westergård & Galloway, 2010).

All these difficulties in teacher-parent communication have been greatly exacerbated during the COVID-19 period and the transition to distance learning. Many parents have had to contend with new situations in which the boundaries between school and home have been blurred and changed radically (Garbe et al., 2020). Epstein’s distinction (2018) between parental involvement in the home and in the school has acquired new meaning in that parents have needed new skills, such as creating a learning framework at home for their children, generating motivation to learn, and providing actual help in teaching (Ewing & Cooper, 2021).

Processes of change in Israeli schools

Regarding processes of change, the case of Israeli public schools is not fundamentally different from its parallels in the Western world (Nir et al., 2016). In recent years the Israeli education system has seen many reforms, which have generated a dynamic of decentralisation (Berkovich & Avigur-Eshel, 2019). The frequent reforms have affected the schools, but the extent of that effect is debated. Nir et al. (2016) argue that despite the innumerable initiatives for change (from within the school and from without), including a dramatic investment of resources and training of teachers and principals, the Israeli public school has hardly changed since the establishment of the state (in 1948). Even the declared policy that purportedly grants autonomy to the schools and to local government so they can implement the changes is poorly realised (Kolikant, 2019).

And yet, the response of Israeli schools to the reforms and to the attempts at change is studied extensively, on the assumption that the schools today do not look exactly as they did 50 years ago. The research focuses for the most part on specific aspects of the functioning of the organisation, such as the effect of government policy (Berkovich & Avigur-Eshel, 2019; Zohar & Agmon, 2018), the introduction of technology into the school (Blau & Hameiri, 2017), the development of initiative-taking among principals (Yemini & Sagie, 2015), and changes in the curricula (Cohen, 2016). Most of these studies reveal a system experiencing and encouraging processes of change, but one in which these changes are isolated islands, leaving the pedagogical core of the school as it was – a teacher in the centre of the learning process as the source of knowledge, engaged in frontal teaching most of the time (Kolikant, 2019).

Parental involvement and processes of change in schools

One of the factors that influence change in schools is parental involvement in the education system (Fisher, 2018; Nir & Bogler, 2012; Yemini & Maxwell, 2021). In most cases the literature refers to parental involvement as activity that parents engage in in relation to their own child so as to enhance the child’s learning in school or at home (Epstein et al., 2018; Yemini et al., 2019). This has been studied extensively, and many findings confirm that parental involvement that includes emphasising high expectations, a positive attitude, help with school assignments, communication, and presence at school activities has a positive influence on the child’s academic achievement (Boonk et al., 2018; Park et al., 2017; Wilder, 2014). The current study, however, focuses on involvement consisting of collective activity vis-à-vis the school, usually of an active, even initiatory, nature. That is, it is activity of parents’ committees directed at the school’s management with the aim of influencing systemic behaviour and not only the status of a particular child (Gofen & Blomqvist, 2014; Yemini et al., 2016).

In terms of gender, studies show that in most cases the involvement is of mothers rather than of fathers (Jezierski & Wall, 2019). Even when the fathers are involved more in the education and rearing of the children, they seek primarily the emotional experience with the children. The “parents’ work,” which includes managing the children’s schedule and decision-making regarding most topics, including homework and communication with the teachers, is done mostly by mothers (Vincent, 2017). A study that examined mothers from various Israeli middle-class groups (Golden et al., 2017) found that in Israel the situation is similar. That is, the mothers are the ones who in practice undertake most of the communication with the children’s education frameworks.

In general, parents and teachers do not agree regarding what parental involvement is legitimate and in which areas it makes a contribution. One of the key points of controversy is parental involvement in pedagogical issues. Whereas in some cases parents think it is legitimate for them to be involved in these core issues, most teachers think this is a clear infringement of their professional authority (Addi-Raccah & Arviv-Elyashiv, 2008; Fisher & Kostelitz, 2015). Addi-Raccah and Grinshtain (2016) found that teachers view parental involvement negatively when they sense that they have less power than the parents and feel that their status is threatened, although their relative advantage lies in their pedagogical knowledge.

The literature that examines the intersection of parental involvement and pedagogical change is in its infancy (Yemini & Maxwell, 2021). Even current literature on processes of change (Harpaz, 2018; Levin & Riffel, 2019) or parental involvement (Addi-Raccah & Grinshtain, 2016; Hornby & Blackwell, 2018) hardly touches on the connection between the two. The current study aims to fill this important gap.

The research question and research methods

This study seeks to answer the following questions: (1) What is the meaning that parents of children in elementary school (in grades 3 to 6) ascribe to their involvement in processes of pedagogical change in their children’s schools? (2) Which characteristics of the school do the parents consider to be the most important for advancing or delaying change?

Harpaz (2013) describes pedagogy as the combination of ideology and technology, that is, goals and means. For the current study, and to examine the process of pedagogical change, we adopt his definition. In examining parents’ involvement and their attitudes towards the school’s pedagogy, we refer mainly to the aspects that are connected to teaching, learning, and evaluation, and less, for example, to social activity in the school.

The study is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 22 participants affiliated with two elementary schools in two neighbouring local authorities, conducted in 2019–2021 and including the COVID-19 crisis period. To maintain the participants’ privacy, one school is called Green and the other one Blue. Seventeen of the interviewees were parents of children in the two schools, 2 were principals, 2 managed the municipal education branches of the two localities, and 1 was an educator with expertise in managing pedagogical change in schools. Participants were recruited using the snowball method, starting with the school principals and chairs of the parents’ committees. The parents included both those who were active in the parents’ committees and those who were not. The majority of the interviewees were university graduates. Seventeen were women and 5 were men. Their ages ranged between 30 and 45 years and their occupations included management, university teaching, law, graphic design, psychology, advertising, group facilitation, and high-tech. The two localities are in central Israel and both schools are part of the country’s Jewish education system. The Green locality, governed by a regional council (mo’etza ezorit), is ranked 8 out of 10 in socioeconomic level (10 is the highest) and the Blue city is ranked 6 (Central Bureau of Statistics [CBS], 2019). The interviewees’ details appear in Table 1.

Table 1. Demographic details of the Interviewees, N = 22

#	Name (pseudonym) and place of residence: G (Green) or B (Blue)	Gender	Education	Occupation	Income level	No. of children	Ages of children	Member of a parents’ committee
1	Noa (G)	Woman	BA	Lactation adviser	Above average	3	5, 7, 10	No
2	Anat (G)	Woman	MA	Commercial manager in a company	Above	2	7, 10	No
3	Michal (G)	Woman	PhD	University lecturer	Above average	3	10, 12, 15	No
4	Chen (G)	Woman	BA	Graphic designer	Above average	3	6, 10, 12	No
5	Yoav (G)	Man	MA	Director of an NGO for at-risk youth	Average	2	10, 12	No
6	Nurit (G)	Woman	MA	Advertising agent	High	3	7, 10, 13	Chair of parents’ committee
7	Orli (G)	Woman	MA	Lawyer	High	2	13, 18	Chair of parents’ committee
8	Shaked (G)	Woman	MA	Occupational therapist	Average	2	9, 11	Member
9	Yifat (G)	Woman	PhD	Psychologist	High	3	10, 16, 18	Member
10	Oren (G)	Man	MA	Lawyer	High	3	9, 15, 18	Member
11	Mor (B)	Woman	MA	Organizational consultant	High	3	9, 13, 18	No
12	Ben (B)	Man	MA	Engineer	High	3	5, 9, 11	Chair of parents’ committee
13	Tal (B)	Woman	PhD	University lecturer	Above average	3	11, 16, 18	Member
14	Aaron (B)	Man	BA	Engineer	Above average	3	9, 11, 13	Member
15	Irit (B)	Woman	MA	Engineer	High	2	5, 8	Member
16	Iris (B)	Woman	BA	Kindergarten teacher	Above average	2	9, 11	Member
17	Galit (B)	Woman	MA	Banker	Above average	3	5, 9, 11	Member
18	Rina (G)	Woman	MA	School principal	Above average			Principal, Green school
19	Hadass (B)	Woman	MA	School principal	Above average			Principal, Blue school
20	Nira (G)	Woman	MA	Pedagogical adviser in the locality’s education branch	Above average			Green regional council
21	Nava (B)	Woman	MA	Head of town’s education branch	High			Blue city
22	Amos	Man	MA	Consultant on processes of change	Above average			NA

The Green school is in a relatively old area of Israel with a population characterised by a humanistic approach and liberal values. The school is under the auspices of a regional council, which initiated a process of pedagogical innovation in all its elementary schools. To jump-start this process, a year-long course of study about educational innovation was conducted for the principals and teachers of all the schools, accompanied by representatives of the parents. Together, they participated in a lecture series by academics and educators about such issues as learning in the 21^st century, innovative teaching methods, future-oriented pedagogy, new architecture of schools, and evaluation in education. They also met with innovative teachers and principals.

The Blue school, which started with only first grade and grew in subsequent years, had a vision of innovative pedagogy from the start. The school attracts children from the entire town (that is, the parents choose to enrol their children in the school), and among its characteristics are cross-disciplinary learning, enhanced Nova Techsettion of the arts in the curriculum, and architecture that allows for study outside the classroom. Although the school is in a neighbourhood with a relatively lower socioeconomic level, its students include children from other neighbourhoods, allowing Nova Techsettion of both children and parents from various levels. However, the school’s vision is mainly its unique pedagogy, rather than any attempt to create social equality or multicultural encounters.

The interviews

This is a qualitative study, based on grounded theory (Schwandt et al., 2000). The interviews were conducted in 2019–2021 in places chosen by the interviewees. Each interview lasted about one hour, was recorded and transcribed, and then was analysed with the help of Atlas.ti software. The parents interviewed were asked to talk about issues related to their relationship with the school and their attitude towards the pedagogical changes that the school was about to undergo. In addition, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, four telephone interviews were conducted in March 2021 with the principal of the Blue school and three parents to obtain their initial impressions of the period during which distance learning occurred. Our aim was to learn how studies were conducted during this period and the meaning that the period gave to the topic of this study and the findings that we describe below. We chose the Blue school because of increasing testimony in the literature regarding the effect of the school closures on the increase in inequality, and we wanted to examine the situation in a school in which educational gentrification was taking place, that is, the influx of middle-class pupils in a low-income neighbourhood that negatively affects school achievement of pupils living in that neighbourhood (Cappelletti, 2017).

To elicit information about the parents’ relationship with the school, we asked questions such as, “How would you describe the relationships between the parents and the teachers in the school?”; “In which areas is the parents’ committee active and what are the ways in which you are active within the school?” To understand the degree and type of involvement and the meaning ascribed to it with regard to pedagogical matters, we asked, for example, “What weight do pedagogical topics have in the parents’ committee? How do the principal and the teachers respond to your involvement in these matters?” In interviews with the school principal and the senior education official in the locality, we sought to find out their position – in policy and in practice – on parental involvement in general and parents’ involvement in pedagogical issues in particular. Examples of the questions we asked were, “What are your expectations of the activities of the parents’ committees?”; “How do you respond to a discussion or desire of parents for activities in the area of pedagogy?”

Ethics

All the interviewees signed consent forms regarding the publication of their responses, and it was made clear to them that confidentiality and anonymity would be strictly maintained. Therefore, pseudonyms were assigned to the interviewees, the schools, and the localities where the study was conducted.

Results

The two topics that came up most frequently in the interviews were the pedagogy favoured by the parents and parental involvement in the school’s pedagogy. With regard to the latter topic, two issues arose: The first concerned the critical nature of the parents’ involvement in the pedagogy and the second concerned the principal as the pedagogical leader. In the interviews following the COVID-19 crisis, these topics received even greater emphasis. Parental involvement increased, as did the parents’ view of the principal’s central role as well as their criticism of the principal. Their esteem for the teachers was very high, although that was mainly because the teachers had had to work hard and adapt their teaching methods to distance learning. However, the perception of the principal’s key role in leading processes remained unchanged – though, as argued above, it was criticised more.

The pedagogy favoured by the parents

The parents described education as becoming a popular field of interest, as reflected, for example, on social media, in the daily press, on commercial television, in lectures for the general public, and in trade literature (Fisher et al., 2016; Willingham, 2009). The internet and stores offer such titles as You, Your Child, and School by Sir Ken Robinson (Robinson & Aronica, 2018) or popular literature about the success of the education system in Finland (Sahlberg, 2014). Ted talks on these topics have tens of millions of views.

The lecture series described above, held by the Green regional council for principals, parents, and teachers in all its elementary schools to jump-start pedagogical change in that locality, was moderated by a professor of education. Oren, a father of a child in the Green school and a member of the parents’ committee who attended the lecture series, described his experience: “The first time I heard him, my jaw dropped. He impressed me very, very much with his statements and his worldview, which is new and very different.”

The topics included learning in the 21^st century, alternative evaluation in education, and school architecture. Lecturers offered examples of schools that were trying out experiential learning, such as democratic schools based on choice as a central value. That is, the parents received structured, university-level educational-pedagogical information. A mother who was at the time the chair of the parents’ committee said, “These meetings gave us the foundation for thinking and understanding that the school needs to change.”

And indeed, the parents adopted the new ideas and started examining where the desired changes could be implemented. For example, Orli, a mother in the Green school and a lawyer by profession, said,

In the end, you have to break the framework of the schedule, the 45-minute [period], and the bell, and open it up to areas that are much more interdisciplinary and provide much more room for the children to choose.

But the parents’ approach to the new pedagogy was not the same in each school. The Blue school in the neighbouring town had adopted an innovative pedagogical approach from the start. This approach Nova Techsettes the arts at all age levels and in all subjects; learning is cross-disciplinary (not in separate disciplines) and more active. The parents are aware that they chose the school because of its special educational approach. But alongside the parents who are interested in preserving the school’s innovative character, there are many voices that support a return to a more traditional pedagogy. That is, instead of innovative teaching by means of the arts, and flexible, verbal evaluation, they prefer more traditional teaching and a focus on many tests and grades. Ben, employed in high-tech and chair of the parents’ committee, reflected the parents’ feelings in the committee’s meetings:

I think that already in the school’s first year parents started saying in parents’ committee meetings that they are afraid that the school’s scholastic level will be lower and that they are worried about what will happen two, three, four years from now, when the children go on to middle school, at what level they will be.

One mother, an organisational consultant, described discussions with parents who compare the pace of learning with that of their friends’ children in other schools in the town: “Many parents look at the schoolbooks and ask why [their children] have not reached the advanced pages like their neighbours’ child who attends a regular school.”

There are, however, parents who love the innovative character of the school. Galit, for example, a banker and a mother in the Blue school who is active in the parents’ committee, loves the style and found herself arguing with parents who were interested in changing it. She said to them, “You chose to come here because there is a different spirit here, not like that in which we studied. If you want a regular school … go to another place.”

These disagreements continued during the COVID-19 period of distance learning. For nearly a year, elementary school children in Israel studied remotely and did not meet physically in a classroom. This period was very difficult for the parents of young children, who had to combine work with providing educational and emotional support for their children. Ben described the dynamic between parents in the Blue school with regard to distance learning:

Some parents are very frustrated and say, “We don’t care that the children are not learning at all. [We just don’t want them] to sit in front of the screens all day”. And there are some who are pressing to give them more and more hours of study so that they make progress with the material.

Ben himself believes that the children should be taught as much as possible, even at the cost of there being children who lag behind and increase their academic deficits.

Parental involvement in the school’s pedagogy

Although the desired pedagogy was different in each of the two schools, there was great similarity in how the parents acted. Two topics arose in this context: The first was the critical nature of their pedagogical involvement. The second was the parents’ perception of the principal as the school’s pedagogical leader, combined with nearly no consideration of the teachers’ role in the pedagogical process of change – an approach that was only slightly changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The critical nature of pedagogical involvement

As we can see, the parents addressed pedagogical topics, which are usually reserved for the professional staff. Oren, a lawyer and a member of the parents’ committee in the Green school, was aware of this situation:

The parents get involved when they see that the situation is stuck, and they try to … interfere with the teachers regarding pedagogy. I think this is very, very bad, because it creates … introversion on the part of the teachers … And today parents are exposed to education; they take an interest and see it on Facebook and all that.

This description was repeated in many of the interviews at the Green school. The parents felt that the existing teaching methods were not up-to-date and wanted the school to change them. They started putting pressure on the system (the school and the regional council), but they knew that as parents they could offer no solution. Oren clarified their expectation of the school:

Our approach [was to say], “We know that there are all kinds of new teaching technologies, techniques, and methods. We will not impose it. We are not even proposing one system or another. We are saying, ‘Do something, do something that you really believe in and that you will go with.’”

The parents are not alone in this criticism. Nira, the pedagogical consultant in the Green regional council’s education branch and one of the leaders of the move towards innovative pedagogy in that locality, agreed with him.

I am not certain that the parents know exactly how the teachers are [supposed to teach] … .But what do the parents have? Very, very healthy intuitions. And they understand that today you can teach differently. They turn to people with abilities and that is how they get to know about innovative practices.

The view of Nava, a former principal and currently the head of the education department in the Blue municipality, was different. She said clearly, “Most of the time the parents simply want to influence who will teach their child … A few are parents who really come [regarding] the pedagogy, to the heart of what is done.” She expressed mainly frustration that in general the parents’ relations with the schools are in the nature of conflicts and complaints. She added that parents do not have the professional tools for expressing their views on pedagogy, and certainly not for making decisions.

And she may be right. Processes of change are highly complex and take a long time (Bascia & Hargreaves, 2014), and this frustrates the parents. The exposure to popular knowledge and even to studies on education can worsen the situation and increase the frustration, because the parents expect changes to take place quickly, though the school has difficulty doing that, even when it is trying. And indeed, mothers described their frustration at the slow pace of change. Michal, a university lecturer and mother of three children, ages 10, 12, and 15, in the Green school, expressed the views of other parents when she said,

The principal disclosed all kinds of plans at the start of the year which she really didn’t know anything about. She said, “We will do a different kind of mathematics learning.” And indeed, some of their intentions are good, but it doesn’t really happen.

In the Blue school, too, pedagogical issues came up in the parents’ committee meetings, but whereas the parents in the Green school talked mostly about broad principles, the parents in the Blue school focused mostly on details. Galit, a banker, described it this way:

[There was] a teacher who wasn’t teaching arithmetic well enough. We discussed this in all the parents’ committee meetings and we proposed that if the homeroom teacher is not strong enough in arithmetic, from grade 2 or grade 3 a professional arithmetic or language teacher should replace her. And indeed they did that. Such changes work very, very slowly, but in the end they happen.

Asked how the Blue school responded to their views on these topics, Galit replied, “The school does not like our involvement on this topic. I have the feeling that the principal hears but doesn’t agree to change things. She explains that the system ties her hands.” That is, with regard to a specific matter, the school’s management responds to the parents’ requests, but there is no room for a broad discussion that includes the pedagogical policy.

However, during the period of distance learning, the parents exhibited great understanding for the school’s staff. In general, they directed their criticism at the Ministry of Education and its frenetic and unclear policy, but not at the principal or the teachers. In an interview following the COVID-19 year, Ben said, “There is a lot of criticism of the system, but not specifically regarding the school. The principal and the staff did everything possible so that the children would succeed.” Galit volunteered during the period of distance learning to give a digital lesson to her daughter’s third-grade class and experienced firsthand the difficulty of teaching in this way. She admitted that she “knew it was hard, but … didn’t know how frustrating it is.” Other parents described how the classes organised to send flowers to the teachers for the holidays and during vacations as thanks for their great investment.

The principal as the pedagogical leader

In both schools, the parents saw the principal as the pedagogical leader, and the pandemic did not really change that. Thus, in the Green school, alongside the general expectation of change, it was clear to the parents that the deciding factor in bringing about change is the principal. They understood this from their work in the parents’ committee and from studying the topic of change. The parents ascribed such weight to the principal that when the long-time principal at the Green school left, they sought to be involved in choosing her replacement. Orli, a lawyer and the chair of the parents’ committee at the time, described what happened: “We thought this was an amazing opportunity to bring in someone who was more of a path-breaker, who spoke more in the language that we wanted to bring to the school, something more innovative, more open, less frontal.”

They took this demand as far as the Ministry of Education’s supervisor and the head of the regional council, and the new principal arrived, bringing with her the experience of having managed an elementary school and self-confidence in managing communication with the parents. She addressed directly their expectation of creating change and the areas in which they could collaborate:

When it is clear to the parents that you want change and it is clear to them what you want, they leave you alone and let you work … [In] the end they expect something to happen … [and not] only at the level of pretty presentations at parent-teacher meetings.

Nira, a former principal and currently in the Green regional council’s education department, was heartened by the principal’s positive approach, but taking the long view, she admitted candidly.

All this will depend solely on the principal’s openness. If the principal understands the added value of working with the parents and how this can greatly influence the school’s development, there won’t be any problem. But if the principal is convinced that the parents are just being a nuisance, you can’t do anything.

The parents in the Blue school, too, considered the principal to be the person in charge of the school’s pedagogical character. They demonstrated this by describing the change in the school from the time it was run by the founding principal, who built the pedagogical concept, to the years when the vice-principal replaced her. Ben, an engineer and the parents’ committee chair, said,

The person who founded the school is a very, very impressive woman, very intelligent, very articulate, with a very clear vision. She persuaded us, together with the rest of the staff that was there, that despite all the difficulties and despite all the uncertainties, it was worth our while to join in the adventure of establishing a school.

Then – and mainly following the entry of the new principal, the school’s growth, and the absorption of new teachers and new parents – the topics the school addressed in communication with the parents changed to such matters as construction, transportation, and discipline. Pedagogy lost its central position in their dialogue.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, this approach did not really change.

Alongside the appreciation of the teachers’ intensive work, the fundamental comments were directed at the principal. Galit, who was appointed chair of the parents’ committee in the Blue school during the COVID-19 year, described the activity in one of the online parents’ meetings:

We wanted to improve the schedule because it was not full enough in terms of content. I asked all the class [representatives] in the steering committee to tell me what problems they had with the school, what they were experiencing. I took all their feedback, arranged it by classes, and presented it to the principal. And they really sat and made a real improvement in the schedule. We’re on it, all the time.

The parents’ active nature and their professional work in the field of pedagogy were evident in the topics they raised, including improving the digital platform the school was using, adding lessons in Hebrew and arithmetic, and dividing the work between the teachers and the aides. All the requests were directed at the principal, with no mention of the teachers.

We now turn to the discussion.

Discussion

At the heart of this study are parents, mostly mothers, of the Israeli Jewish middle class, most of them university graduates. These parents took an active role in the school’s work with the intention of influencing it, especially in the area of pedagogy. Their pedagogical involvement was conducted critically, vis-à-vis the principal as the school’s pedagogical leader. But whereas their strategies of action were similar, as we have seen, they had opposing expectations of the school’s pedagogical character. To discover the source of these differing expectations, we must remember that parental involvement in their children’s studies is linked to the parents’ socioeconomic status and their cultural capital (Lareau, 2011). The parents interviewed in the current study are college graduates with at least average income. However, they come from localities with diverse levels of education and income. The composition of the student body in the two schools is different: In the Green school it is homogeneous whereas in the Blue school it is not, bringing together parents and children from various neighbourhoods that differ in socioeconomic status. Because of the Blue school’s innovative character and generous funding by the municipality, parents with relatively high income choose to send their children to it, preferring it over schools in their neighbourhoods (see Roda et al., 2021).

In light of this, we propose three explanations for the parents’ differing paths of action. One is linked to the parents’ cultural capital and how they perceive the meaning and role of studies and higher education. The second is connected to the competitive environment in which the Blue school functions and which causes parents to compare it with other schools in their neighbourhood. The third touches on how the school communicates its pedagogical policy to the parents and explains to them both its vision and the constraints under which it operates.

Cultural capital

The Green school’s environment has been characterised for years by a hegemonic population (mostly middle-class Jews of European origin), with cultural capital that values higher education as an indicator of class affiliation. Therefore, the parents do not need their children’s studies to achieve social mobility; they are certain of their high place in society (Weininger & Lareau, 2018). In contrast, some of the parents in the Blue school come from a lower educational background and therefore see studies as enabling social mobility, or at least maintaining the socioeconomic status they have attained (Curl, Lareau, & Wu, 2018). Consequently, they tend to encourage achievement orientation in their children’s studies and to ascertain that the school is providing the children the tools that will help them continue to the next level of education in the existing system. It appears that this difference is linked to the school’s pedagogical policy: The parents in the Green school do not need educational achievement in the form of high grades to evaluate the school’s quality. Conversely, they prefer the school to encourage the pupils’ development of soft skills, such as creativity and teamwork. In contrast, the parents at the Blue school expect the school, after the first two or three years, to provide its graduates “an educational insurance policy” that will enable success in the existing system. High grades on a standard report card are one of the ways in which success is measured. Mor, an organisational consultant and a Blue school mother, describes it thus:

Most of the parents around me are very competitive and they want to show off through their children. They expect high grades and they keep asking, “Why did this question appear on the exam?” “Why did they lower the grade?”

Competitive environment

Another cause of the differences between the schools, especially the desire of the parents in the Blue school to return to more traditional pedagogy, lies in the comparison they make with regular schools in their environs – through comparisons with the neighbours’ children who attend regular neighbourhood schools and sometimes even with their own children who attend regular schools. The differences they see in teaching, learning, and evaluation lead them to seek a uniform measure of comparison. The parents adopt measures familiar to them from traditional pedagogy, including the pace of learning and the structure of the report card. When measured this way, the regular schools have the “lead”. But the Blue school set different measures of success deriving from an alternative pedagogical approach that includes the relationship between teacher and student, fostering of creativity, and personalised learning, as the principal and some of the parents described it. This phenomenon exists in other places where parents of high socioeconomic status choose for their children a school in a neighbourhood with a lower socioeconomic status and in which gentrification is taking place. In the case of educational gentrification, the parents with higher socioeconomic status are interested in maintaining their children’s relative advantage over children from families with lower socioeconomic status, and they may see their children’s high grades as evidence of such educational success (Roda et al., 2021).

Ben, a parent at the Blue school, summarised it thus in an interview following the COVID-19 period in Israel when he addressed the gaps created in the classes between children from different backgrounds:

What is preferable, to maintain unanimity and for everyone to lag behind the curriculum, or to make progress in their studies? I think that the second solution is the correct one. Even if some get ahead according to their ability and some lag behind.

Ben understands the social meaning and yet he prefers to have the studies continue among the stronger students at the price of increasing the academic and social gaps.

Pedagogical policy

The third explanation that we propose is the school’s responsibility to communicate its pedagogical policy and limitations to the parents. In both groups it was evident that the parents were studying and discussing pedagogical topics without a comprehensive knowledge of the school’s abilities and constraints. Consequently, there were deep differences between the parents’ expectations and those of the school, parental expectations that could stymie the school’s pedagogical intentions. These gaps between the parents and the school were manifested in two ways: understanding the school environment and understanding the within-school work routine.

Epstein (2018) – who contributed to the transition from use of the concept of parental involvement to use of the concept of a partnership of the school, the family, and the community – argues that today more than in the past there is a need not only to train teachers to act individually in relation to the child’s parents but also to train the school’s staff to act collectively with regard to the parents and the community. The current study broadens this argument and points to the school’s need to clarify to the parents its pedagogical policy and the constraints under which it operates. Thus, the school’s management must mediate actively not only regarding issues that have traditionally been the focus of parent-school relations, such as social activity, fundraising, parental volunteering, and construction, but also regarding current pedagogical topics.

The new situation is challenging for the school. Not only is the parents’ collaboration characterised fundamentally by complex and sometimes conflictual relations, the pedagogical issues are on the teachers’ professional turf. When parents threaten the teachers’ territory, professionalism requires the teachers to be highly self-confident in discussing these matters with them. Unfortunately, most of the teachers find it difficult to contend with the parents, and this causes the parents’ to lower their esteem of the teachers.

Another challenge lies in the weakening of the status of the teachers vis-à-vis the parents. Whereas regarding individual issues pertaining to their children, such as social Nova Techsettion in the classroom and solving discipline problems, the parents turn to the teachers, with regard to broad pedagogical issues the parents behave differently. As we have seen, they bypass the teachers and turn directly to the principal, because they see the principal as being influential. This may be related to such variables as gender and social class. Teaching, especially in primary schools in Israel, has long been considered “women’s work,” that is, a low-paid and low-status occupation (Addi-Raccah, 2002). Moreover, primary school teachers have lower education and income than the parents who participated in this study (see Harpaz & Grinshtain, 2020).

From a gendered perspective, we see that even the parents maintained the traditional division of roles, that is, despite the existence of “new fathers”, “new masculinities” (Perez-Vaisvidovsky, 2020), and “new families” (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2020), the mothers were the ones who managed most of the communication with the school. This remained unchanged during the pandemic, so that teaching and childcare at home fell on the mothers’ shoulders. In that context, the role of young teachers was especially complex: They had to teach from home while looking after their own young children. This situation was clear to the parents, and overall they expressed great appreciation for the efforts the teachers made. At the same time, regarding the responsibility for implementing pedagogical changes, it appears, as argued above, that the principal remained the one whom the parents saw as leading significant processes of change, as the parents themselves stated.

Conclusion

In light of the background provided above, the COVID-19 period has been a catalyst for parents’ involvement in pedagogy: It has created a new situation in which the distinction between school and home has been forcibly erased. Parents have been exposed directly to the work of teachers, their communication with pupils, and their ability to adopt new technology and new approaches. All these are processes that had begun before but that were accelerated by the pandemic, as initial studies conducted thus far have found (Garbe et al., 2020).

On the basis of our study, it can be argued that the parents were interested mainly in how the children were learning rather than in what they were learning. These findings are evidence of the parents’ interest in pedagogical matters and they signal to the schools that even after the return to the old-new routine, it will be very important to share pedagogical issues with the parents. The schools’ initiative in this direction could help in much-needed updating and change, could strengthen the dialogue between the teachers and the parents, and could raise the public status of the teachers.

The new situation holds many opportunities for the school. Having to mediate the pedagogical policy and issues requires the staff to have a deeper understanding of these issues that will enable them to base their activity on a stable pedagogical rationale. Thus, there is a double opportunity for the school: To communicate their activity to the parents, the school’s staff must formulate an up-to-date and coherent pedagogical vision. And there is an opportunity to realise this vision by enlisting the parents as a force that can help the school change. Because the school’s processes of pedagogical change are so complex, parents can help the school undergo a process of pedagogical renewal and come out of it with strong collaboration between them.

Finally, the current study can provide the basis for educators and teacher trainers to develop tools aimed at pedagogical mediation between the school and the parents. A future study will be needed to examine over time the meaning of enlisting the parents in the task of pedagogical renewal and the extent to which such support on the part of the parents indeed helps the school adapt to the 21^st century, all in light of the effect of the pandemic (Azorín, 2020). Also needed is an examination of the meaning of communicating the pedagogical vision to parents who are members of other social groups, such as migrants and minorities. Parents from these disadvantaged groups tend to be less involved in school activity and in trying to influence pedagogy. They hope to find their place in society and achieve social mobility and therefore are likely to avoid challenging the system (Horvat et al., 2003). It is important to hear their point of view regarding these issues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).