Abstract: "Home–school partnerships in special education often include parent advocacy that at times requires specific and specialized knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Parent participation is shaped by access to cultural and social capital resources and is critical to assessment and service delivery. This study explores the types of capital resources parents perceived necessary to their participation via five focus groups of participants from a range of socioeconomic, disability, and racial or ethnic backgrounds through 27 in-depth interviews.... Results indicated that intercultural and intracultural differences existed among parents. Advocacy on behalf of one student also required different capital resources than did advocacy for systems change. Discussion focuses on implications of parent advocacy on educational equity."
Concluding paragraph: "Because parent participation is a lynchpin of special education, being culturally responsive includes communicating and collaborating with parents. Effectively educating diverse groups of youth using culturally responsive pedagogy is ultimately about working toward a society in which equality and social justice prevail. One does not want to promulgate a system where one provides a set of services or a standard of quality educational opportunities for youth with disabilities whose parents are effective advocates and another for those who are not."