Few would quarrel with the goal of increasing parents' and families' engagement in education in the name of school improvement. But there is far less consensus on what that engagement should look like--and on how educators and policymakers should be promoting it. Those questions are evident in the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which requires that all districts receiving more than $500,000 in Title I aid for disadvantaged students must devote at least 1 percent of those funds to family-engagement activities, and that they must distribute 95 percent of that money to Title I schools. The law also requires Title I schools to have written parent-involvement policies and school-parent compacts, describing how parents should be involved in schools and how they will take part in improving student achievement. Both sets of policies are to be developed and approved by parents. Many researchers and advocates, however, say the current law has not lived up even to expectations on that front. Some say the NCLB law encourages a focus on compliance, rather than fostering creative and sustained cooperation between schools and parents. Others say it offers districts and schools too little guidance on how to engage parents in a meaningful way. And some argue that superintendents and principals--already saddled with NCLB's other mandates, particularly in testing--have little incentive to take parent engagement seriously.