Atole con el Dedo: Learning From Parents' Experiences With the Parent Empowerment Act

• In Event: Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Qualitative Explorations of Policy Implementation in Districts and Schools

Abstract

The Parent Empowerment Act (PEA) provides parents and families the policy mechanism to use democratic methods of grassroots organizing to overhaul their local underachieving schools. The following study takes an in-depth look at PEA from the point of view of the parents that mobilized to implement the law. This is a two-year qualitative ethnographic case study of two school communities within Los Angeles that used PEA. Consistent with a socially constructive lens, I conducted extensive fieldwork in the forms of interviews, observations, document analysis, and fieldnotes to investigate how parents interpreted their participation in the overhaul of the two schools. Findings suggest that parents face structural barriers that prevent them from implementing the law without a specific set of pre-conditions.

Author

• Rodolfo Acosta, California State University - Fullerton