Kelley Fong, UC Irvine sociology assistant professor, has been named a 2025 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. The one-year, $70,000 fellowship supports scholars who promise to make significant contributions to the field of education. Fong is one of just 25 scholars selected from a pool of 270 applicants for the 2025 cohort. Joining her as a fellow this year is Andreas de Barros, UCI education assistant professor.

With funding from the fellowship, Fong will further her work at the intersection of state institutions and family life by examining schools’ involvement in parenting.

“Families and schools are arguably the two primary institutions in children's lives, so understanding how these domains intersect is central to promoting child development and well-being,” she says. “Most work on family-school relations focuses on parental involvement in education, but this provides only a partial picture.”

Her project shifts the focus to study schools' interventions in parenting and home conditions, from offering childrearing workshops to calling child protection authorities.

In her previous research on the child welfare system – presented in her recent book, Investigating Families – she says, “I remember interviewing a childcare center director who told me that she didn’t just see her job as teaching children, but teaching their parents as well – which made me wonder whether that approach was shared by elementary educators too.” She added that educators' parenting suggestions, corrections, threats, and referrals may be a critical yet understudied component of family-school relations, with implications for families' engagement with schools.

Drawing on interviews with educators in diverse school contexts, she will develop a typology of activities schools undertake to influence parenting and examine how educators understand parenting interventions, with particular attention to inequality in the form, content, and goals of these interventions.

“Analyzing this ‘other side’ of family-school relations is poised to open up new directions for scholars regarding how, why, and for whom schools reach beyond the curricular,” she says. “The study also aims to inform policy and practice efforts to cultivate positive, equitable family-school relations.”

The National Academy of Education, an honorary educational society, manages this fellowship with generous financial support from the Spencer Foundation. The fellowship has over eight hundred alum who include many of today’s leading education researchers. Learn more about the work of this year’s cohort online.