‘The parents are locked out’: policies, practices, and perspectives undermining family engagement

Family involvement has become increasingly recognized as essential to academic success. However, the racial and cultural gap between the teaching force and students in American schools is large and expanding, leading to increased challenges associated with relationship-building between families and schools. This is a study of teachers in a school district in the State of Florida that has high rates of poverty, large numbers of new and undocumented immigrants, and many families who speak languages other than English at home. Using a Bourdieusian theoretical framework, this study investigates teachers’ recognition of their own habitus and that of families and of the doxa within the field of the school. This study asks the teachers, by their own accounts, what prevents them from greater success in developing and sustaining culturally sustaining family-school partnerships.