ABSTRACT
As G. Baron and A. Tropp have pointed out, the area of teacher-community relationships has constantly attracted the attention of American sociologists of education because it was seen as a 'social problem' affecting the whole success of the educational enterprise. The efforts to form Parent-Teachers' Associations in England have been essentially attempts to enlist parental support for the work of the school. R. Sharp and A. Green argue that it promotes in the parents a perception of the teachers as, in some sense, psychiatrists possessing the appropriate specialist knowledge. The relative powerlessness of the working class in respect to schooling must be seen in relation to studies which have explored the extent of similarity/dissimilarity between the views of parents from various social strata and the proponent of innovation. The importance of parents' value conceptions of what they think education ought to be doing is shown again in the studies of large-scale innovation in the secondary school.
