Engagement or Survival? The Corporate Gaslighting of Working-Class Parents
Corporate media blames working-class parents for school failures while ignoring systemic barriers. The real issue isn’t engagement—it’s an education system designed for compliance, not learning.
Introduction
Of all the myths that corporate media relentlessly peddles about education, few are as insidious as the idea that parental engagement is the key to closing learning gaps. It is a narrative designed to shift blame away from a system that has been hollowed out by decades of austerity, market-driven reforms, and corporate extraction, placing the burden instead on families already stretched to their breaking point. Nowhere in this discourse is there any acknowledgement of the material realities facing working-class parents in the United States today: an inflation rate of 13.5% under pre-1980 calculations, record consumer prices on basic necessities like food, housing, and healthcare, and a post-pandemic economy in which trillions have been siphoned from workers to the ruling class oligarchs. In this context, time has become a luxury few can afford. Parents are not disengaged because they don’t care; they are disengaged because they are exhausted, overworked, and fighting to keep their families afloat in a system that demands everything from them while giving nothing in return.
“Nayeli” (name changed for privacy) is a student that I have recently begun to work with. She is Zapotec, an Indigenous identity that—like so many others—has been erased and flattened into “Mexican” by the school system. Her family migrated to the Los Angeles area when she was young, hoping for greater opportunities, yet they quickly realised that their indigeneity did not disappear in the United States; it was simply erased in a different way. The system assumed that because they were from Mexico, they were Mexican, that their home language was Spanish, that Nayeli would be best served by being categorised as a Spanish-speaking English learner. The fact that her family was not native Spanish speakers, that Zapotec was their home language, was irrelevant to the school. Spanish became the only language of instruction available to her—an imposed colonial language treated as a default, even though she had never spoken it fluently.
Her parents, like millions of others, placed their trust in the school system to educate their child—not because they were indifferent, but because they simply had no other choice. Between multiple jobs, unpredictable schedules, and the daily struggle to survive, they could not be present in the ways schools so often demand, nor could they afford to fight an uphill battle against a bureaucracy designed to exclude them. Their absence was not neglect; it was a forced adaptation to an economic system that leaves working-class parents with no time, no energy, and no leverage to challenge decisions that fundamentally shape their children’s lives. When the school removed “Nayeli” from English Language Development (ELD) without input, when they reclassified her as Reclassified Fluent English Proficient (RFEP) despite her continued struggles with language, her parents were not consulted, nor were they given the opportunity to push back. The system made these decisions for them, as it always has, operating under the assumption that parents like them—marginalised, Indigenous, working-class—were not active participants in their daughter’s education but passive recipients of whatever scraps the school chose to offer.
This is the contradiction at the heart of this EdSurge article and countless others like it. It laments the lack of parental engagement, framing it as a critical obstacle to educational success, yet it utterly ignores the economic conditions that have made such engagement an impossibility for millions. It assumes a world in which families have the time and stability to be present, where education exists in isolation from the broader economy, and where the failures of the school system can be neatly ascribed to individual parental shortcomings rather than systemic neglect. It is, at its core, a piece of corporate propaganda—one that seeks not to examine the real barriers to education but to absolve the system of responsibility by placing it on the backs of those with the least power to change it.
The Reality of Working-Class Parents vs. the Myth of Engagement
The reality for working-class parents in the United States is not one of disengagement but of exhaustion. For many, survival requires more than a single income—dual earners, multiple jobs, gig work, and endless hours just to cover the basics. Even families that once considered themselves stable are now feeling the squeeze; the cost of living has outpaced wages for decades, but in recent years, the gap has widened into a chasm. This is not just a crisis for those already at the economic margins. It is a crisis creeping steadily up the class ladder, consuming the time, energy, and financial security of those who, not long ago, might have had the privilege to be “involved.” The economy has left families with nothing to give beyond their labour, and yet, corporate media continues to push the narrative that parental engagement is the missing piece in education, as though parents are simply choosing not to participate.
This is a fundamental misrepresentation of reality. Schools remain one of the last public institutions families can rely on, one of the few places where working-class parents can send their children and expect, at the very least, that they will receive an education. They trust that those six to eight hours will be used to teach, to provide the academic foundation that parents themselves no longer have the time to reinforce. When schools fail to meet this expectation—when students graduate barely literate, when vital support services are cut, when multilingual learners are reclassified as proficient in English and their supports removed before they are ready—the burden is pushed back onto families. And when those families, already stretched beyond capacity, cannot carry that additional weight, the blame is placed squarely on their shoulders. The school system absolves itself of responsibility, and corporate media assists in this erasure by reframing systemic neglect as a failure of individual parental engagement.
The case of “Nayeli’s parents” exemplifies this injustice. They were not uninvolved; they were working every available hour to ensure that their child had a roof over her head and food on the table. They trusted the school to do its job because they had no other choice. They were not attending school events, not because they did not care, but because doing so would have meant sacrificing hours of wages they could not afford to lose. When the school decided to reclassify their daughter as an English-proficient student, despite her continued struggles, they were not consulted. When she was prematurely removed from ELD, it was not a conversation—it was an administrative decision made without their input. The school, like the system as a whole, operated under the assumption that parents like them—working-class, Indigenous, surviving under immense economic strain—were simply not part of the process. The expectation of engagement was never extended to them in a meaningful way; they were only called upon after the fact, when it was too late, when there was nothing left to challenge.
This is the lie at the heart of the “parental engagement” narrative. The system does not want true engagement from working-class families; it wants quiet compliance. It wants parents to show up to parent-teacher nights, to sit through meetings where decisions have already been made, to sign forms and nod along and accept that their role is not to question but to adapt. It has never been structured to accommodate parents who are fighting for survival, because to do so would mean acknowledging that the barriers to engagement are not personal failings but the inevitable consequences of an economic system that has left no time, no space, and no options beyond endurance.
Corporate Media’s Myopia: Systemic Failures as Individual Shortcomings
Corporate media has perfected the art of reframing systemic failures as individual shortcomings, and EdSurge’s take on parental engagement is a textbook example of this strategy. Rather than interrogating why schools are failing to meet the needs of students, it shifts the blame onto parents, suggesting that if only they were more engaged, more proactive, more committed, their children would not be falling behind. Nowhere in this framing is there any acknowledgement that schools themselves are underfunded, understaffed, and designed not to serve students but to function as compliance-driven institutions where efficiency takes precedence over education. Instead, the article implies that the problem lies with parents who simply are not doing enough, ignoring the economic and structural conditions that have made meaningful engagement an impossibility for millions.
This is the classic neoliberal trap—take a problem created by systemic neglect, pretend it is an issue of personal responsibility, and then introduce a “market-driven solution” that does nothing to fix the underlying issue but does generate profit for those invested in the education-industrial complex. In this case, that solution takes the form of ed-tech platforms, AI-powered parent engagement tools, and consultant-run “parental involvement” workshops, all marketed as ways to bridge the so-called engagement gap. None of these initiatives address the root causes of why parents are unable to engage in the first place—wage stagnation, skyrocketing living costs, and the relentless demands of an economy that requires total participation just to survive. But they do have one thing in common: they extract public dollars whilst ensuring that the problem remains unsolved, ready for the next wave of engagement-based grifts to cash in.
“Nayeli’s” story is not an anomaly; it is the norm. When the system failed her, her parents were not even given the opportunity to resist. Bureaucratic decisions were made without them, stripping their daughter of the language support she needed, and when she inevitably struggled, the blame was placed on them rather than the school that had shut them out of the process. The EdSurge narrative assumes that families have the time, resources, and institutional access to push back when, in reality, the system is structured to make their input irrelevant. It is not an accident that working-class, immigrant, and Indigenous parents are the most disenfranchised within education—it is by design. Schools make decisions first and inform families later, and when those decisions lead to predictable failure, corporate media steps in to assure the public that the real issue is parental disengagement, not a system built to exclude them.
This is part of the larger neo-colonial playbook—the enshitification of education. First, introduce barriers that make engagement impossible for working-class parents. Then, frame those parents as ungrateful, irresponsible, or simply unwilling to participate. Finally, use this manufactured crisis as justification for dismantling public education altogether, funnelling resources into charter schools and private institutions under the guise of “choice.” None of this actually addresses the needs of students like “Nayeli,” but that is not the point. The point is to create a narrative that justifies defunding public education whilst enriching the shareholders of the article’s sponsors. The EdSurge piece, like so many others, is not a call to improve education; it is a prelude to its further commodification.
The Real Problem: Schools Are Failing Because They Were Designed to Extract, Not Educate
The fundamental issue is not that schools are failing because parents are disengaged—it is that many schools were never designed to educate in the first place. They were built as systems of extraction, where efficiency and compliance matter more than meaningful learning. Funding is tied to attendance and performance metrics, rewarding schools not for student success, but for keeping students in seats and moving them through the system as quickly as possible. Standardised testing regimes reinforce this, prioritising rote memorisation over mastery, ensuring that students meet the bare minimum proficiency standards needed to satisfy state requirements, regardless of whether they actually understand what they are learning. The result is a system where outcomes are dictated by bureaucratic targets, not by whether students are prepared for the world beyond school.
This logic extends to how multilingual students and those in special education are categorised and shuffled through the system. The decision to reclassify “Nayeli” as “Fluent English Proficient” was not based on her ability to meaningfully engage with academic material in English, nor on whether she could comfortably navigate the linguistic demands of higher education or employment. It was based on administrative convenience. Keeping her in ELD was inconvenient for the school’s scheduling and funding priorities, so she was pushed through the process as quickly as possible, meeting the minimum requirements through her IEP to “pass” the ELPAC whilst still struggling to process and produce language in a way that met her needs. This is not an isolated case—schools across the country routinely reclassify students prematurely, prioritising numbers on a spreadsheet over actual student readiness. Language is treated not as a cognitive tool but as a bureaucratic hurdle to be cleared, and once a student is deemed “proficient” by the system, any struggles they face are no longer the school’s concern.
The idea that parents should be “engaged” in this process is laughable when the system does everything in its power to keep them at arm’s length. Schools do not want real engagement from parents—they want compliance. They want parents who will sign off on decisions that have already been made, who will accept reassurances that their child is “doing fine” without question, who will show up to parent conferences and nod along as they are handed reports filled with metrics that mean nothing outside the system that produced them. They do not want parents who will demand better curricula, smaller class sizes, or language programs that actually support their children’s long-term academic development. Because if parents were truly empowered, if they were given real decision-making power over their children’s education, they would not be asking for more parent-teacher nights or engagement workshops. They would be demanding an entirely different system—one built for learning, not for extraction.
Who Profits? Selling “Engagement” Whilst Ignoring the Root Cause
At the heart of the parental engagement narrative is not a concern for student success, but a market opportunity. Whilst EdSurge and similar outlets frame disengagement as a crisis, they conveniently ignore the fact that the so-called solutions to this crisis are almost always designed to generate profit, not to address the underlying conditions that make engagement impossible for working-class families. Private firms have built an entire industry around “fixing” engagement, selling AI-powered parent communication apps, consultant-led engagement workshops, and training programmes for teachers, all of which extract millions from public education budgets while leaving the core economic barriers untouched. Parents are not given healthcare, living wages, or childcare—just another app to monitor their child’s grades, another webinar explaining how they can be “more involved” in a system that never wanted their input in the first place.
This is the standard neoliberal playbook, a cycle that repeats itself across all public institutions. First, education is underfunded and restructured to prioritise cost-cutting over service, ensuring that schools become places of bureaucratic management rather than meaningful learning. Then, when inevitable failures occur, responsibility is offloaded onto individuals—parents who are not engaged enough, teachers who are not working hard enough, students who are not motivated enough—while the structural issues that create these failures are ignored. Once blame has been successfully placed on individuals, the private sector steps in with a range of profit-driven “solutions,” offering schools engagement tools and training programmes that do nothing to address systemic inequities but do generate lucrative contracts for ed-tech firms and consulting agencies. And when these solutions inevitably fail, the cycle begins again, with yet another round of manufactured crises leading to yet another round of privatisation.
None of this improves the lives of students like “Nayeli.” It does not restore the language support she lost, does not make space for her parents in decision-making, does not undo the economic precarity that keeps them working every available hour to survive. But it does ensure that the shareholders of the companies selling these engagement solutions see another quarter of revenue growth. And that, ultimately, is the real function of this discourse—not to strengthen public education, but to justify its continued enclosure by private interests.
The Real Fix: Structural Change, Not Engagement Gimmicks
The solution to educational inequity has never been parent training sessions, engagement apps, or consultant-led workshops—it has always been material security. Parents do not need to be taught how to care about their children’s education; they need an economy that allows them the time and stability to be present in their children’s lives. A living wage, affordable housing, universal healthcare—these would do far more to improve educational outcomes than any initiative designed to increase parental involvement. If families were not working multiple jobs just to survive, if they had access to healthcare without the constant threat of financial ruin, if housing was not a precarious, extractive industry forcing them into ever-longer commutes, then engagement would not be an issue in the first place. Parents would be able to advocate for their children, not as an exhausting additional task, but as a natural part of their lives.
The same is true for schools. If the goal were truly to educate rather than to manage and extract, we would not need convoluted engagement strategies to mask systemic failures. Smaller class sizes, better teacher retention, multilingual education that acknowledges and supports linguistic diversity—these are the things that improve student outcomes. But they do not create revenue streams for private companies. They do not offer corporate investors a slice of the public education budget. And so, instead of funding the things that actually work, we get yet another round of “solutions” that do nothing to change the material conditions in which students are learning and parents are struggling to survive.
If parental engagement were genuinely valued, it would not be framed as a one-way street, where parents are expected to passively comply with decisions made by administrators and policymakers. Schools should not be seeking to extract engagement; they should be offering power. Parents should have real decision-making authority over curriculum, policy, and funding, rather than being called upon only when it is time to sign a form or sit through a scripted conference. Engagement, in its current form, is just another way of enforcing compliance. Real engagement would mean real influence, real democracy in education, real accountability for the people making decisions that shape children’s futures.
The real problem is not that parents are disengaged—it is that the system was designed for exploitation rather than education. This is not a matter of individual responsibility but of structural design. Instead of debating how to get parents more involved in an inequitable system, we should be asking why they need to fight for basic educational rights in the first place. The answer is clear: because the system is not built to serve them or their children. And until that changes, all the engagement gimmicks in the world will do nothing to fix what is fundamentally broken.
Final thoughts …
“Nayeli’s parents,” like millions of others, are doing everything they can in an economy designed to grind them down. They have worked every available hour, stretched every dollar, and trusted—because they had no other choice—that the school system would do its job and educate their child. They are not disengaged. They are not negligent. They are exhausted. And yet, when that trust was broken, when the system failed their daughter, the blame did not fall on the school that reclassified her prematurely, nor on the policymakers who have turned education into an assembly line of compliance. It fell on them. This is how the system functions: it fails, and then it punishes those with the least power for its own failure.
The real question has never been whether parents are engaged enough—it is why they should have to fight for basic educational services in the first place. Why should a parent have to sacrifice their limited time, their wages, their energy just to ensure their child receives what should already be guaranteed? Why is education something that must be fought for rather than something that simply exists as a public good? The framing of parental engagement as a requirement for student success is not about helping children—it is about justifying a system that refuses to meet their needs unless families can dedicate unpaid labour to filling in the gaps.
In an equitable system, parental engagement would not be a privilege afforded only to those with time, money, and flexibility. It would be irrelevant, because schools would already be serving all children as a matter of course. Parents would not need to chase after teachers for updates, plead for additional support, or navigate a bureaucratic maze just to ensure their child is not left behind. They would not need to attend workshops or download apps or sit through scripted meetings designed to pacify rather than empower. They would know, with certainty, that the school was doing what it was supposed to do: educating their children, not extracting from them.
That is not the system we have. And until we do, no amount of parental involvement will fix what was designed to be broken.