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Motivating Participation: The Symbolic Effects of Latino Representation on Parent School Involvement *
Author(s) -
Shah Paru
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
social science quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.482
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1540-6237
pISSN - 0038-4941
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-6237.2009.00612.x
Subject(s) - representation (politics) , diversity (politics) , psychology , argument (complex analysis) , test (biology) , social psychology , enforcement , power (physics) , survey data collection , developmental psychology , political science , medicine , politics , law , paleontology , physics , quantum mechanics , biology , statistics , mathematics
Objective. Decades of research suggest that parental involvement is vital for positive student academic achievement and thus one often‐proposed solution to alleviate the poor educational outcomes of minority students is to increase their parents' participation in school. Building on a psychological motivation argument, I investigate how the symbolic effects of minority representation impact minority parent involvement. Method. I test my hypotheses with original survey data from 324 Latino parents in Chicago. Results. My analysis suggests that, as hypothesized in the symbolic representation literature, Latinos in positions of power within schools send important heuristic cues to Latino parents that change their orientations to participation and ultimately manifest as increased school involvement. Conclusions. These results support education policies that attempt to increase the minority presence in schools at the administrative and governance levels, and highlight the need for greater enforcement of current diversity requirements under NCLB.