Fitting It All in: Considering the Influence of Work on Mothers' School Engagement
The call for family engagement has reached a fever pitch in federal, state, and local district education reform initiatives, given its association with student academic success and contribution to bridging public schools’ resource gaps (Posey-Maddox, 2013; U.S. DoE, 2010). As a result, parents and particularly mothers are increasingly pressed into school involvement (Landeros, 2011). This backdrop combines with rising intensity and unpredictability of American working conditions to create social tensions around the community engagement of working parents, and conflicts between families’ work and community roles.
Using recent scholarship on American working conditions for framing, the paper examines how, in a traditional work-dominant context, employed mothers leverage job supports like paid and unpaid time off and scheduling flexibility to participate at school; how aspects of workplace and school operations render some job supports hard to use to facilitate engagement; and strategies mothers undertake to be school-engaged when their jobs are unsupportive and unpredictable.
Methods
Data come from in-depth interviews in a mid-size Midwestern city with 17 employed mothers, recruited at three summer camps serving elementary school-aged children (Summer 2012) and at a public elementary school one mile from the camps (Fall 2012). The mothers were purposively chosen to secure occupational, racial/ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, reflecting the schools’ student bodies. The interviews, including 2 conducted in Spanish, lasted about 1.5 hours, and were audio-recorded and transcribed; questions asked about employment, dependent care responsibilities, school engagement, and work-life balance. Data were analyzed with Dedoose. The creation of coding schemes based on our research questions was complemented by new codes that emerged from the data; transcripts were coded twice, once by a research assistant and again by the authors. Codes utilized here relate to time and place constraints and supports arising from mothers’ employment and their children’s schools.
Results
Across diverse employment contexts – front-line and professional occupations; knowledge, technical and service work; hourly and salaried and part- and full-time jobs – work emerged as setting variable parameters for whether, and how, mothers were school-involved. Work requiring specific time or place presence often clashed with school activities requiring parents’ participation at specific locations and times, with work taking precedence. Last minute work demands often meant mothers had to cancel planned work leave, or had their non-work hours encroached upon. Arranging time off was also frequently required in more advance than a school posted event information. For mothers holding the lowest wage jobs, being school-engaged meant foregoing income due to lack of paid leave and scheduling flexibility, and facing hardships from extended commutes and gas costs or bus fare.
Conclusions/Implications
The findings reveal the dominant influence of work on these mothers’ fulfillment of their multiple other roles, suggesting a need for a recalibration of the status of paid and community work to facilitate participation across domains of life. Such a transformation of work requires knowing both the nature of contemporary American employment conditions, as the papers in this symposium investigate, and the goals and processes associated with workers’ home and community commitments.