The Laboratory was established as a public nonprofit organization in 1966 under a Joint Powers Agreement. The Laboratory has five major development divisions, each of which is responsible for different areas of educational research and development. Division IV identifies and investigates problems relating to home-school linkage. This position paper was initiated by Division IV in January of 1973 at the recommendation of a special panel of the National Institute of Education. The goals for this position paper were: (1) to expose the reader to the assessment of educational research in our problem area; (2) to help to clarify a set of complex problems associated with interactions of low-income, urban black children and their teachers; and (3) to identify research areas in which more research is needed. Our immediate purpose was to provide a base from which to identify a target area for further research and study. The position paper is organized by sections. Section 1 includes a set of discussions of the boundaries of the larger problem area. The next section (section 2) is composed of material associated with the delimited problem area and our intellectual framework. Section 3 includes reviews of the literature; and summaries, conclusions, and recommendations. These sections are followed by a bibliography and a set of appendixes. The paper's form is circular in that the sections can be read in any order depending on the user's purposes. (Author/JM)