The Contradictory Logics of School District Leaders' Efforts at Engaging Community

• In Event: 72.030 - Examining School District-Community Relations: Perspectives on Local Governance as a Lever for Educational Opportunity

Abstract

Objectives
“Whereas much research has been focused on the strategies parents can use to engage with school reform, attention is needed on the other half of the equation: the district’s decision-making process…” (Martinez-Cosio, 2009, p. 302-303). This paper examines how and why school districts are embracing community engagement practices in this historical moment. In particular, given extensive research documenting how school district decision-makers are typically disconnected from and unresponsive to low-income communities of color (Dorner, 2011; Finnigan & Lavner, 2012; Frankenberg & Diem, 2012; Stone, 1998), there is a need to examine the role of race in these dynamics.

Theoretical Framework
This paper brings together a sociocultural policy lens which centers policy as the social production of meaning (Levinson & Sutton, 2001; Yanow, 1996), with a critical race lens which offers for conceptual tools, such as whiteness as property, for understanding educational inequality in a racialized society (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), to examine the logics that district leaders draw on in the community engagement efforts they adopt, and the role of race in these logics.

Methods and Data
I analyze these policy logics through an in-depth, comparative case study of two Wisconsin school districts that vary by economic context and racial climate. Breaking with norms and practices of professional and bureaucratic autonomy, the administrators and school board members in both districts sought to engage advocates outside of district offices in an array of taskforces, one-on-one relationships, and partnerships. The data include interviews with 52 participants (district administrators, school board members, community leaders), observations of over 35 district meetings, and numerous archival documents.

Findings
I find that in both locales, district administrators’ and school board members’ enthusiasm for community participation in policymaking was grounded in an effort to recognize the multicultural and multiracial composition of the student population and to broaden the voices involved in policymaking, actions that also contributed to the legitimacy of local policymaking amidst multiple challenges to public schools. District leaders sought out a subset of Black and Latino community groups, individuals, and university-based diversity staff for assistance in improving academic achievement for students of color. Yet, illustrating the contradictory nature of many school district policies and practices, they also sought to involve middle-class White parents, teachers, and anti-tax advocates who wielded significant influence in district decision-making (through their social networks, voting power, and property rights) in an effort to limit opposition from among these groups and garner additional resources for school systems that were rapidly becoming districts of “other people’s children” (Delpit, 2006). Thus, the community engagement efforts appeared to reinforce White middle class influence, influence that was being wielded to limit equal educational opportunity and educational resources.

Significance
The paper contributes to studies of local governance and educational change by asking us to rethink how we understand current community engagement policies and practices, the racial politics of those efforts, and school district administrators’ and board members’ roles in advancing and contesting race inequity.

Author

• Erica Owyang Turner, University of Wisconsin - Madison