Research on urban school systems indicates that they generally lack the capacity to achieve sustained school reform on their own (Schutz, 2006) so that a broader context needs to be taken into account (Anyon, 2005). As a response to urban schools failure, there has been a renewed interest in the role that family‐school relationships and parental involvement can play in the improvement of education. Drawing from two researches analyzing different partnerships programs in Barcelona and London, this communication aims to describe the way in which notions such as ‘participation’, ‘collaboration’ or ‘innovation’ are mobilized and embedded in these programs, creating really persuasive and ambiguous meanings and obfuscating their real implications (Franklin et al.,2003). Following this, we argue that the study of these partnership programs can be particularly useful to assess the potentials and limitations of school reform based on family involvement. In this sense, we added a comparative perspective to both illustrate how very different educational contexts and even diverse partnerships programs can use similar justifications and share similar structural problems. Finally, we discuss how the notion of ‘partnerships’ can help us better understand the way different institutional levels and organizational fields are articulated when researching schools and families.