Power, Privilege, and Parental Involvement: Sustaining Justice in Community Organizing for School Reform

• In Event: The Power of Parent and Youth Organizing in School Reform

Abstract

This study examines the challenges of sustaining a community-driven vision for school reform and educational justice in a racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse school community. Drawing on data generated in a yearlong ethnographic case study of a dual-language immersion school founded through community organizing, this study examines how privilege, power, and exclusion are reproduced within ostensibly successful organizing efforts. While all members of this community claim to work for the same ideals of educational justice, patterns of participation and leadership have come to marginalize and exclude Latino and Spanish-speaking families—the very families the school was organized and designed to serve. What possibilities exist for more actively resisting the reproduction of inequality seeping into this school’s organizing work?

Author

• Melissa Leigh Gibson, University of Wisconsin - Madison