We are the parents. Is anyone listening?

Language and cultural barriers, which have traditionally stood between urban families and their schools, add still another layer of complication.

In Denver, where more than half of students are Latino, many come from families with parents who are recent immigrants, some undocumented.

Though NCLB recommends that districts and schools translate important materials whenever possible, Pam Martinez, codirector of the community group Padres Unidos, or Parents United, doubts that the parents she works with understand NCLB, let alone the options it offers them.

Of the country's urban school districts, Chicago parents may be best integrated into decisionmaking at their schools. In that city, parents elect a local school council that in turn hires a principal and controls the school budget.

Shortly after NCLB was in place, the Illinois branch of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the nation's largest organization of low and moderate-income families, resolved to determine whether Chicago teachers were "highly qualified," as required by federal law.

"We saw NCLB as a possible tool for parents to really improve the quality of instruction in the classrooms," says Madeline Talbott, head organizer for Illinois ACORN in Chicago.

Yet even for a savvy group like ACORN, just finding the state's definition of qualified proved problematic. Currently, highly qualified teachers are those who have passed a state test in their subject area and hold an Illinois teacher's certification.

But the hurdles encountered by ACORN underscore the challenges a parent trying to uncover this information on her own would face.

Today, the district regularly sends out letters about its teachers, says Ms. Talbott, but often they aren't particularly informative.

One laudatory note might sing the praises of a Yale educated teacher who earned his Master's from Harvard and taught students in South Africa - without any mention of his preparation to teach chemistry to Chicago schoolchildren.

"We have some tools, but we're still on this long march to get to the point where they're useful," says Ms. Talbott. "We're not there yet, but we'll get there."

John Beam, executive director of the National Center for Schools and Communities at Fordham University in New York - which, along with Cross City Campaign and the Center for Community Change in Washington, conducted the conversations with the 26 grass-roots organizations - wonders what happens once parents have discovered that their teachers are flawed.

"So we've demonstrated ... that we need to get better teachers in our classrooms," he says. "But nothing in No Child Left Behind makes it easier to do that."

In another effort to foster stronger partnerships between parents and schools, New York this year hired parent coordinators to act as liaisons in each of the city's 1,200 schools.

The degree to which they've opened lines of communication varies by school, says Gail Gadsden, who fills the position at PS 212 in the Bronx and is a member of MOM.

At her school, Ms. Gadsden boasts, parents now volunteer one day a week to tutor their children in their classrooms.

But most of the parents Gadsden works with understand only fragments of NCLB. They may know, for instance, about the option to switch their child out of a struggling school, but not how to go about doing that.

Whose fault is this gap in understanding?

"I'm not going to blame the government," she says. "They put the information out there, and we have to read it."

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