Parental participation in schooling: A divorce of convenience

Resumen

Although since the 1993 Education Act in Mexico established parental participation in schools through the newly created school participation councils (CEPs), these have rarely been more than a dead letter. Most of the studies on the subject have attempted to explain why this is so in the general terms. However these have lacked close ethnographic study of school processes that include the CEPSs. This article draws on three years of field research in a rural school zone in Jalisco. Not satisfied with culturally essentialist notions of parental apathy of disinterest the authors examine the reason why this couture of silence occurs. Through a journey of understanding of school-community relations of several primary and one secondary school that included classroom observation of teaching, ethnographic interviews and conversations with parents we reached the conclusion that the relationship between school and community is “a divorce of convenience”. Each party finds it more convenient to keep it from the other rather than collaborating to improve the education of the students. The details of this phenomenon are discussed in the article.