A brief review of a school system in Alum Rock, California that uses the voucher, this paper focuses on an educational strategy intended to maximize the school's responsiveness to the expressed needs of the parents. The ideas and values underlying the development of the voucher school, the problems of operationalization, as these are said to influence the measures used in the research cited, are discussed. The paper also deals with (1) some of the Alum Rock data on rates of parental participation, where the indices of participation include both school and non-school context and rely on both attitudinal and reported behavioral measures of participation; and (2) some correlates of parental participation such as education, ethnicity, income, and occupation in the voucher schools, drawing inferences about the implications of these varying rates of participation on the educational processes shaped by the voucher school system. The pattern of findings is said to be interpretable in terms of social class differences, parental participation being of key importance in the voucher school plan. The intentions of the planners of the voucher school system are considered not to have been fulfilled in the Alum Rock school system by the time of its first evaluation. (Author/AM)