"Power Parents" and the Gentrification of the Parent Teacher Association

• In Event: Women Education Scholars and Their Children's Schooling

Abstract

This paper focuses on recent changes in the demographics of parent leadership at a beloved, local, public elementary school located in New York City. While recent scholarship has documented the ways that public schools have been “re-segregated” in the decades post-Brown, (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Frey & Wilson, 2009) for the moment the school can still genuinely be described as both racially and economically diverse. With each passing year in the life of the school, however, the maintenance of this diversity seems increasingly fragile. Changing demographics in the surrounding neighborhood have brought rapid changes in the school. As the school population has changed, there has been an even swifter shift in the demographics of the parent leadership at the school. This paper provides an account of these changes and struggles in the recent history of the school related to this issue. As an involved parent and educational scholar, I have observed these changes with great concern for whose interests are represented by the current leadership. In this paper I document these recent changes in parent leadership as well as some of the tensions that have arisen out of these shifts. Data collected for this small case study includes several years of field notes gathered from my own observations as well as one-on-one interviews with current and former parent leaders and school administration. Analysis of this data is seen through the lens of Critical Race Theory and its applications for educational scholarship as employed by Gloria Ladson Billings (1998), Annette Lareau’s (2000, 2003) research on social and cultural capital as it relates to how families engage with their children’s schools, and Patricia Hill Collins’ (2010) work on the politics of community. These theories are used to reflect on how gentrifying families have deployed their privilege in their dealings with the school community and offer some direction for a more generative process of building community.



References

Collins, P. H. (2010). The New Politics of Community. American Sociological Review 75(1). 7-30.

Frey, A., & Wilson, M. (2009). The Resegregation of Public Schools. Children & Schools, 31(2), 79-86.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what is it doing in a nice field like education? Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7-24.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). Chapter 15 The Meaning of Brown . . . for Now. Yearbook Of The National Society For The Study Of Education (Wiley-Blackwell), 105(2), 298-315.

Lareau, A. (2000). Home Advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal Childhoods: Class, race and family life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Author

• Kirsten Cole, Borough of Manhattan Community College - CUNY