Parent engagement in the achievement society: the intensification of parenting for the datafied student subject

Abstract

Parent engagement is promoted in educational policy and literature as being an effective mechanism for raising student achievement. Schools collect and report on vast amounts of student data for the purposes of school improvement and parents are increasingly privy to this data. Yet, surpringly little is known about the implications for parents when data is entwined with parent engagement. This institutional ethnographic inquiry explored the everyday experiences of parents and school staff in one Australian school as they navigated parent engagement. School efforts to increase parent engagement included providing parents with detailed information about students’ achievement, which resulted in intensive, teacher-like forms of parenting. We show how family and school orientations to data and achievement reshaped family relations. We use the concept parenting-for-schooling to highlight the impact of parent engagement on the thoughts, feelings and actions of parents as they parent for schooling, rather than for children.