Mayor De Blasio Administration Case Study

Kate Taylor of The New York Times reports on how the administration of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is focusing efforts and committing serious funding to improving underperforming schools with incentives to make parents become more involved in their children’s education through increasing mutual relations between parents and schools. With the second full school year of Mayor de Blasio’s administration underway, pressure exists to show improvement at lower-ranking schools at risk for a state takeover program. Mayor de Blasio’s administration’s approach is to get parents more involved with schools for an improvement in their child’s educational experience. The plan backed by expensive funding (a $106 million campaign spanning two years)

She has made parent involvement with schools and engagement in their children’s education a key focal point to boost struggling public school’s annual ratings. Differing from Mayor de Blasio’s approach of attempting renovation, the Bloomberg administration previously dealt with the underperforming schools directly in identifying ineffective personnel and inefficient administration and thus replacing them. Instead, the de Blasio administration has committed an estimated one million dollars directed towards organizing volunteers to actually go door-to-door to about 35,000 of the parents of these public school children. These hired people would inform these parents of the new changes to the school and ultimately encourage them to take on a more engaged role in their children’s

Parents who practiced concerted cultivation, mainly coming from relatively affluent middle class families, took on an overarching, active role in their children’s life, and served as a guiding role in education. Parents from this class possessed the cultural capital, likely from their job and life experiences, to navigate the bureaucracy of a school administration to address their child’s needs. These parents, actively engaged, know how to make the schooling system work best for them in dealing directly with the school. The children of these families innately gain a certain sense of entitlement, so the students also know how to interact with the school. On the other hand, parents from the working and poor class utilized the accomplishment of natural growth. These parents distanced themselves from dealing with the school administration directly, adopting a deference to the professionals that worked at the school to facilitate their children’s education. Perhaps these parents lacked the cultural capital to deal with the schools, and felt their role was to care for the basic needs of their child and to let the educators do their job