Requirement for Entry: (Un)Accountability and Marginalization in a Community-Based Movement for School Reform

• In Event: Ethnographic Perspectives on Race and (Un)Accountability

Abstract

Objectives

This paper explores the work of community-based popular educators in a high-poverty, high-immigrant, predominantly Latina/o neighborhood of Los Angeles, as they attempted to engage with district-level school reform processes. Their attempt responded, in part, to policy changes meant to increase community participation in schools. Seizing this opportunity to become more involved, this group of mostly Latino/a popular educators began organizing Latina/o immigrant parents through an existing community-based family literacy program, with the goal of participating in district-level reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine this attempt by “the community” to engage with public school reform from a position on the margins—as Latinos/as, immigrants, and “non-experts” in education. Secondly, it aims to show how the discourse of accountability was mobilized, reproduced and contested in this effort, with the ultimate effect of silencing and further marginalizing community voice.

Theoretical Framework

This paper employs the theoretical construct of “figured worlds” (Holland et al 1998) to describe the nature of, and tensions between, the “worlds” represented by community organizing and school reform. Informed by recent critical-ethnographic research on community organizing for school reform (e.g. Dyrness 2011; Lashaw 2008; Sandler 2008), the study assumes that these constitute two distinct “figured worlds” marked by particular casts of characters, roles, and discourses. This theoretical framework undergirds the research questions, which ask: How does the work of community-based popular educators shift as they move from the figured world of community organizing into that of schooling and school reform? What competing goals and discourses emerged as a result of this shift? How did staff reconcile and negotiate among them?

Methods & Data Sources

This paper draws from a 2-year ethnographic study of a community-based nonprofit organization. Data collection procedures included participant-observation at all organizational activities, meetings and workshops; semi-structured interviews with staff and volunteers; video and audio transcripts of staff meetings, parent workshops, and program events; and collection of relevant artifacts (fliers, videos produced by parents, lesson plans for parent workshops and the youth program).

Results

This paper argues that two competing paradigms of educational justice were at play: that of popular education, and of accountability. Though both paradigms employed similar terms like social justice, equity, and closing the racial achievement gap, they reflected drastically different worldviews about the means and ends of “justice” in education. Moreover, the discourse of accountability was positioned as hegemonic, becoming a requirement for entry into any conversation of educational reform: The only way to participate in reform conversations was to speak the language of accountability and adopt its central organizing assumptions. This had the effect of silencing community voice and marginalizing alternative viewpoints—even within a policy context ostensibly aiming to “involve” diverse communities more effectively.

Scholarly Significance

By examining how the discourse of accountability was taken up as “commonsense” in this setting, this paper shows how dominant institutions, practices, and discourses of schooling—particularly those associated with (un)accountability and high-stakes testing—served as invisible barriers to educational change, further marginalizing the most disempowered participants and exacerbating racial inequalities.

Author

• Kysa Nygreen, University of Massachusetts - Amherst