Doctoral Candidates: Adriane Williams

Genuine Invitations: Middle Schools, Parents,
and Postsecondary Planning

Dissertation Summary

My dissertation focuses on what happens in middle schools to promote or discourage parent involvement around issues of postsecondary preparation. Whether a child will go on to complete a postsecondary degree is determined by a complex set of actions, interactions, and decisions on the part of the child, the family, the school, and other actors in the child's life.

Research shows that regardless of that complexity, parental educational attainment comes close to being a single predictor of a child's educational attainment even with the massive expansion of postsecondary options in the United States after World War II. This consistent research finding presents a serious problem for the children of parents who did not graduate from a postsecondary institution. A major assumption of my study is that the research concerning college knowledge is correct. Parents who have information about the postsecondary choice process, the postsecondary experience, and the outcomes of postsecondary study are in a better position to identify, make decisions about, and act on postsecondary options.

Bio

Adriane Williams is currently a doctoral candidate in the Educational Policy Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received a B.A. in Economics and French from Wellesley College, a women's college in Massachusetts. She also obtained a Master's in Education in Secondary Education with certification in French and English as a second language from the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development. She has been a teacher at the high school and postsecondary levels and worked as a policy researcher for an urban education advocacy organization.

Williams is originally from Memphis, Tennessee. Her family history with education is an essential ingredient both in her life and her research. She is in the first generation of her family to graduate from college. There are six female college graduates in her generation of a very large family. Williams's brother has completed a two-year program and licensing in the funeral services industry. One of her aunts recently returned to school and graduated with both a bachelor's and a master's degree. Five of the women in her family are in the field of education ---four are teachers and Williams herself intends to become a professor after she receives her doctorate.

Williams' papers and publications include:

Genuine Invitations: District Policy, Middle School Parents, and Postsecondary Planning, April 7, 2006. Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
Class, Race, and Power: Interest Group Politics and Education, The Urban Review 37(2), 2005
The Evolving Definition of Parent Involvement in Head Start, November 19, 2003. Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.