ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, in the Americas, neoliberal educational policy has been calling for family-school partnerships, parental involvement in schooling, and family educational accountability as an important strategy to enhance learning outcomes and school productivity. The family has become an explicit object of educational policy within the decentralization/social participation framework, either with purposes of state intervention and regulation (family education/colonization) or of family empowerment, considering that parents are important actors for the social control of the quality of state services (for instance, via participation in School Councils). Low income disadvantaged families of at-risk students, often served by substandard public schools, are the specifi c targets of this policy.
