I kept noticing how "parental engagement" is usually framed as a school project rather than a shared one. Garcia et al. describes how traditional models still center parents as helpers who plug into school-defined goals, like checking homework, attending conferences and aligning with achievement targets.
But Cioe-Pena shows mothers of emergent bilinguals labeled as disabled navigating something very different. Their days are filled with medical appointments, care work, immigration stress and low-wage jobs, while IDEA technically grants them extensive rights in special education. Schools read "low meeting attendance" as disinterest, even though these mothers are intensely involved in keeping their children safe, fed, regulated and spiritually ground (forms of engagement that do not fit the general, dominant checklist). I kept thinking about how rarely educators ask families what support actually looks like on their terms. Those questions are often glossed over because they require teachers to rethink their own routines and timelines. When those conversations start to happen, they tend to expose how much families have already been doing without recognition.
Gallo and Link's portrait of Julia asking researchers to "diles la verdad" about her husband's detention brings up another clash. Julia wants teachers to know the full context of her son's life, including deportation threats, while many educators either do not know how to talk about immigration or fear that naming it is too political. The child, meanwhile, is already living those politics, building what the authors call "politicized funds of knowledge" around documentation, policing and borders. It struck me how the child becomes the translator between two places (home and school) because the adults on the school side hesitate to take up that responsibility.
I make sense of these discrepancies as questions of power and definition. Schools still hold the authority to decide what "counts" as engagement and what "counts" as knowledge. Parents in these studies often expect something more basic and more profound: safety, honesty, respect for linguistic practices and recognition that survival work is educational work. When those expectations are not met, the burden shifts back onto families, who have to navigate both the consequences of school decisions and the instability produced by external systems like immigration enforcement.
Bridging this gap, for me, means at least three shifts. First, redefining engagement to include home-based and community practices, like education, moral guidance, navigating clinics and courts, and treating those as expertise, not side notes. Second, building structures where families can shape agendas, like co-designing IEP meetings, immigration-aware safety plans and curriculum that deliberately draws on politicized funds of knowledge. Third, preparing teachers to talk about disability, race, language and immigration without shutting down or retreating to "neutrality."
If schools moved in these directions, I imagine students experiencing classrooms as aligned with, rather than separate from, their family worlds. That alignment would not automatically raise test scores, but it could increase trust, participation and a sense that school is a place where their full lives matter.