Parental Involvement: Barriers Hispanic Parents Face

Abstract

Abstract Parental involvement in education is considered to be one of the key contributing factors to students’ academic success whose benefits have been well established. In spite of this, lack of parental involvement continues to be one of the leading concerns schools in the United States face, especially among Hispanic parents whose children have long been characterized by low levels of high school completion and highest dropout rates of any other ethnicity. Findings indicate that Hispanic parents face unique barriers, such as language barriers, low levels of education, and economic hardships that hinder their involvement in their children’s education and that traditional approaches aimed at increasing parental involvement, which focus on school-based involvement, have proved largely ineffective with Hispanic parents as they fail to consider the factors that dissuade parents from becoming involved. These insights can inform schools and educators’ efforts of increasing parental involvement by identifying and creating awareness about the factors that influence and preclude parental involvement among Hispanic parents.