Record: Anat Gofen and Paula Blomqvist, “Parental Entrepreneurship in Public Education: A Social Force or a Policy Problem?” in Journal of Education Policy 29, no. 4 (2014): 546-569. [Abstract]
Summary: Gofen is an assitant professor at The Federmann School of Public Policy and Governance as part of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Blomqvist is an associate professor in the Department of Government at Uppsala University, Sweden. In this article they explore how parents may challenge educational policy.
Over the past several decades, schools and the government have promoted parental involvement in education. However, parental involvement is generally only viewed as a means of complying with current educational policy. Gofen and Blomqvist assert that parents can also act proactively to challenge the existing educational paradigms and to advocate for new policy solutions. Specifically they address three examples of parental entrepreneurship in education: homeschooling, special education, and childcare co-ops.
There are two paradigms that are generally used to discuss the parents’ role in public education. First is the co-production approach to education. In this approach, parents are viewed as partners who participate in decision-making and the provision of education. Administrators in the co-production approach are expected to reduce barriers for parents to co-produce education. Examples of the co-production approach include assisting with homework, encouraging learning, providing cognitively stimulating activities, attending school events, and serving on the parent-teacher association. The second paradigm that is commonly employed is the market-oriented approach to education where parents are viewed as customers and the administrators have to meet parents’ expectations and needs. Examples of this approach to education include magnet schools, open enrollment, tax credits, and vouchers.
While co-production suggests a more active participation of parents in education, both paradigms are limited because they both still see parental involvement as being compliant to the current policy. Gofen and Blomqvist call their paradigm “parental entrepreneurship” where, in order to change the status quo, parents do not comply with educational policies. Parental entrepreneurship is characterized by innovation, risk-taking, pushback by officials, and a struggle for recognition.
The first manifestation of parental entrepreneurship that they discuss is homeschooling. Homeschooling parents take their children’s education into their own hands because they believe that the public schools may be intellectually or morally harmful to their children. Rather than acting as partners or customers, parents take responsibility for their children’s education and thus challenge the meaning of public education. Homeschooling is often risky for parents because they become providers of a specialized and complex service that is usually provided by governmental organizations with professional expertise. Homeschooling represents parental entrepreneurship on the individual and collective levels because parents often collectively fight for legal legitimization in addition to individually educating their children.
Next they discuss the historic parental entrepreneurship of integrating children with special needs into the school. Previously they were either placed into special institutions, or they were isolated within the school building. The parents of children with special needs relentlessly pushed for a major policy and societal change in how people with special needs are viewed and educated.
The final example they consider is childcare co-ops. In childcare co-ops, parents who are dissatisfied with the available options for early childhood education start membership associations to provide childcare services. The co-ops often involve a significant time and capital investment for the parents, and they have been seen as a threat in some countries like Sweden where childcare services are provided by the government. In some countries, preschool co-ops have caused a change in policy to promote greater parental involvement.
These three examples illustrate several points. First, parental entrepreneurship is context dependent. Homeschooling is entrepreneurial in countries where it is illegal and struggling for legitimization, but it is not entrepreneurial in countries like the US where it is regulated and viewed as a legitimate form of education. Parental entrepreneurship reflects dissatisfaction with the government, and it often also requires mutual trust between citizens, collective group efforts, and social capital.
Appraisal: Their main point about the conception of parental involvement in education is not very complicated, but it is important to remember how radical homeschooling can be when it is not viewed as a legitimate form of education. Especially when reading homeschooling research from countries other than the US, the UK, Australia, etc. where homeschooling has been legalized, one must remember that in many countries around the world (like Germany, for instance) homeschooling is a very intentional form of parental entrepreneurship which involves a great deal of risk and pushback from officials. To gain a better understanding of parental entrepreneurship, I would also recommend reading Gofen’s older article about noncompliance. Since entrepreneurship requires noncompliance, the two articles go hand in hand.
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