In Europe as well as in the USA we have results that indicate that the school-home cooperation is a research field that has been observed as important for 30 years, but which still remains a problem to accomplish (Vincent 2000). The governments have initiated many approaches, but the explanation to the problem seems to be the same; parents are not willing or teachers resist letting parents participate (Ravn 2005, Nordahl 2003). The question more likely seams to be; the school/home - cooperation is the solution, but to what problem? (Midtsundstad, 2005) It seams to have become a question about whom to blame. When something is wrong in society, we blame the school and the teachers. When something is wrong in school, the teachers and society blame the parents. In my PhD; A School – based Theoretical Framework for Comparative Research, I focus on the single school as a functional system and understood as an organization (Luhmann, 1995). The perspective of the school-based theoretical framework is unlike many other approaches to the subject that attempt to explain school and society with each other (Young 2008, s. 11). To avoid this I make use of Niklas Luhmann’s (1995) theoretical approach, which provides the opportunity to understand school and society as being separate environments. This means that society and school are two self-referential systems that understand their own chosen environment from their own point of view. In this way, how the relationship between societies and the individual school emerges, becomes an empirical question. The main research question behind my empirical approach is the following: How do the nation-state expectations of the school create premises for the individual school’s organisation and performance as regards the individual? By focusing on school and society as separate environments, the individual school may be understood as an organization with its own program and values and its own members as parents, teachers and pupils. The members’ possibilities to be teachers, parents and pupils become observable and dependable of where the school is, whom the members are and what the individual school understands as its function.

Methodologically I focus on the communication between parents, teachers and the pupil who every semester have a meeting about the individual pupil’s school situation. In this meeting the communication will make the school’s performance clear both as the school’s understanding of it own intention and confronted with the expectations from society. The school/home conference, parent’s meeting, and teachers’ communication about school/home cooperation are therefore chosen as the empirical field. In this approach the individual school is “the unit of analysis”. Moritz Rosenmund (2000), a comparative researcher, criticises comparative research for its dichotomy between culture-free and context-specific premises. In my doctoral dissertation a comparative research methodology is developed and has been used to analyse the performance of two schools in two different countries, Denmark and Norway, one public and one private. The research method employed is that of group interviews, text analyses, questionnaires and transcribed school/home conferences.

Results from the comparative research from four schools within the school-based theoretical framework, gives the possibility to describe the observations of the school’s performance. Which possibilities the school organisation gives teacher, parents and pupils as members, did vary a lot. As for this paper’s question this empirical approach shows that the problem we want school/home cooperation to solve is the upbringing and socialisation. As long as the school sees its function only connected to teaching and not to socialisation into the school organization, we have to believe that parents can educate to school. The problem with this understanding is that parents are unable to do anything about the pupil’s discipline in school, since they are not present. Only the school as an organization with responsibility for its members’ learning and socialisation, its cultivation and qualification, can solve the problem. Parents educate to family, individual schools to organization (Midtsundstad,in print).