A Taxonomy of Work-School Interaction Among Low-Paid Working Parents with Elementary-Aged Children

Introduction: Policy leaders in education advocate for parent engagement in their children’s education, which has been shown to positively impact educational outcomes. However, parents with poor job quality (e.g., low wages, few benefits, inflexible or inconsistent shifts) are likely to face employment-based barriers when trying to engage with their children’s schools. This reveals a disconnect between policy and practice advocating school-related outcomes and those advocating labor-related outcomes. As a response, this study pioneers a new area of research by specifically examining how single mothers navigate both low-paying jobs and school engagement with their children’s elementary schools. In doing so, it contributes to gaps in research and practice on improving both school outcomes and labor quality.

Method: The current research is drawn from a qualitative study examining how parents navigate low-paying healthcare jobs, their children’s schools, and home. A convenience sample was drawn from an urban county in Pennsylvania. Twenty-one unmarried parents earning less than a living wage for their family size ($11.90-$21.36) and raising elementary-aged children participated in two semi-structured interviews. Parents were nearly all mothers (n=20) and mostly identified as Black or African American. Analysis began with open coding through which two authors identified key factors that affected parental engagement with their children’s schools. We coded data for these factors and identified four patterns of behavior to build a taxonomy. In a final analytic step, we built matrices of the key factors (e.g., job quality, schedule flexibility, social support) to uncover patterns that might determine parents’ placement in the taxonomy.

Results: We found a significant mismatch between workplaces and schools that created work-school conflict. In the workplace, limited paid time off, low workplace autonomy, and scheduling policies conflicted with features of children’s schools, including the timing and modalities of school communication and the effectiveness and equity of schools’ behavior management. In response to their experience of work-school interaction, we found that parents shaped their school engagement into one of four modalities: active parent-supported (parent performs school-centric engagement as designated by schools), active parent-led (parent rejects school-centric engagement priorities and shapes their relationship with the school on their own terms), passive disengagement (parent limits engagement to child-centric engagement), and active disengagement (parent plans to change child’s school context).

Conclusions & Implications: This research suggests that we should center parents’ perspectives when developing policy and practice to benefit children, especially those parents who may be disproportionately likely to experience work-school conflict due to having particularly poor jobs, family structures not recognized by schools that center whiteness, and/or children disproportionately affected by school discipline. By identifying a taxonomy of how parents navigate work-school interaction and the factors that drive their choices in this spectrum of options, we offer a framework that may support school social workers to improve family engagement and communication approaches for low-income working families. Similarly, working with local employers to better facilitate both parents’ wage-labor and their school involvement may be a novel approach to sharing accountability for education outcomes across the community.