ABSTRACT
Teachers often see parents' goals and values as impediments to students' academic accomplishments. Parents in turn believe that teachers are antagonistic toward them and fail to appreciate the actual conditions that shape their children's lives. The idea that teachers should interact with families and in neighborhoods and communities has a long history in modern American education. The movement to create "schools as social centers" during the Progressive Era recognized "the necessity of getting better teamwork between the school and the home". The engagement approach attempts to "flip the script" from the involvement paradigm. Instead of teachers and school staff as the knowledgeable participants, this approach stresses the knowledge that families, CBO staff, and community mentors can impart to teachers. Underlying the solidarity approach is an understanding that educational inequalities are part and parcel of broad, deep, and racialized structural inequalities in housing, health, employment, and intergenerational transfers of wealth.
