ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters, we have retold mothers’ stories about the different kinds of work that they do for their children’s schooling. Mothers’ educational and managerial work-their discursive understandings of mothering, their coordination of uncoordinated family schedules, and their household pedagogy-mediates their children’s participation in the everyday lives of schools. Embedded in their stories are descriptions of the schools in Turner’s Crossing and Maltby. They present educators and their schools as relating differently to parents in middle-class and working-class areas. In Maltby, we were able to interview the school administrators, both principals and vice principals, and the superintendent and assistant superintendents at the level of the board. Their practices and policies recognize and build on the different kinds of contributions that parents, principally mothers, make to the operation of the schools in different situations of middle-and working-class communities. Parents’ contributions to the work of schooling provide the conditions under which educational policies are put into practice in the actualities of particular school districts.
