Parents in the General Council of schools: Between the rhetoric of strategic action and multiple subordination

Abstract

What do parents think about the role of the General Council of schools, what value do they give it as a “strategic management” organ, how do they get involved and consider themselves in the role they play there, these are the key issues to which we’d like to answer. To do so, we sent a survey by questionnaire to parents who had a place in this organ, which was composed by 28 items categorized later into six dimensions: participation, deliberation, focus, dissemination, importance and relationship between parents and the school director. The questionnaire was sent to be answered through a link between December 18 and January 26, 2018 and 213 valid answers were collected. The questionnaire results were processed by using a descriptive statistics method to get the frequency, mean and standard deviation and analysis of relations between variables. As main conclusions, we emphasize those related to a significant dispersal of results which demonstrate an heterogeneous view about the roles of its members and the strategic importance of the General Council, the recognition of the conditioning of the external forces (placed in the Education Ministry) and the internal forces related to the cognitive power of the teachers and the director, a symbolic overvaluation of this organ which will not correspond to its concrete action and a limited view of the educational community where there’s no place either for the local council or the students.