Article Review: Addressing School-Community Relations in a Cross-Cultural Context by Agbo - Essay Example

When parents remain unaware of the behavior of their children in school, they find it difficult to ensure whether their children are performing well in school. With the involvement of parents in schools, the students feel responsible and the parents are able to keep track of the progress of the students in schools.

Thus, an effective balance is created through public relations in schools. The author has used numerous secondary sources in order to add concreteness to the article. The author provides this information in the literature review part of the article and the sources of the information are also provided. Thus, it can be said that the information provided in the article can be relied upon and the sources used by the author are authentic. Schools that depend only on teachers are limited to the knowledge base that is brought by the teachers, however, schools that utilize public relations and bring people from different aspects of society in classrooms enrich the knowledge base of students. Parents from working-class or lower class tend to turn over the responsibility for their children’s education to the school completely.

The involvement of parents in schools may mobilize and create resources that are not generated otherwise. The resources like the knowledge of local traditions and customs that could be useful to students are held by the community and the faculty at schools may lack this knowledge. Therefore, by using public relations, schools can involve the representatives of the community in the system of education and enrich the educational experience of the students. With the involvement in schools, parents would be able to understand what resources are necessary for the improvement of the education of their children thus parents would be able to help the schools in pooling the resources.

The close contact of teachers with the families of the students will also help the teachers understand the background of the students and in this manner, the teachers will better understand the students’ behavior. The article highlights one of the main issues with public relations in schools, that is, power relations. The minority parents are not involved in the schools therefore they do not have their say with regard to the improvement of the educational system at schools. The opinion of the powerful parents is given more importance therefore their opinion dominates over the opinion of the minority parents.

This is one of the problems with public relations in schools. The article also highlights that schools do not provide opportunities for empowering students in society. The traditional curriculum focuses mainly on the transmission of knowledge but not on the development of the personality of the students.