A School Boards' Response to Black Mothers' Advocacy and Leadership Toward Educational Equity

• In Event: 63.018 - Examining Efforts to Achieve More Inclusive and Equitable Engagement in District Decision Making

Abstract

Abstract
The advocacy of communities of color has long been a lever for educational equity. For instance, Black and Latinx communities were the driving force behind school desegregation policies (Wilson, 2014) and the Bilingual Education Act (Cervantes-Soon, et al., 2017). More recently, communities of color successfully advocated equity issues, such as equitable funding and ending racist discipline policies (Johnson, 2011; Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, 2016). In February of 2018, the Westridge Unified School District school board located in the US Southwest passed the “Resolution Regarding Equity and Inclusion,” condemning “acts of intolerance” in response to an anti-Black incident at a junior high school, among other incidents. Although the resolution states that the school board “reaffirms its commitment” to equity, it was also a response to the advocacy of the Coalition of Black Mothers (CBM), a grassroots organization addressing injustices experienced by Black children.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the strategies of grassroots organizations of color to advocate for educational equity at the district-level. We examine CBM and the Westridge district, asking: a) What public, discursive strategies did a Black mothers organization adopt to urge the school board to address district-wide inequities? and b) What were the public responses of the school board and other district leaders to the strategies adopted by a Black mothers organization? To frame this study, we use Horsford’s (2012) notion of “bridge leadership,” which describes “how the intersection of race and gender as experienced by the Black woman leader has resulted in her serving as a bridge for others, to other, and between others in oppressive and discriminatory contexts over time” (p. 17). Moreover, bridge leadership refers to a democratic, grassroots leadership approach, helping us to better understand the actions of CMB.

We employ a qualitative case study method (Yin, 2014) to address our research questions. We collected publicly available school board meeting materials (including videos), archival documents, and media sources. We analyzed videos using a Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009), which involves considering contexts of discourses along with discursive strategies (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009), as informed by scholarship on color-blind discourses (Bonilla-Silva, 2014). We triangulated our preliminary findings with other archival data. Our preliminary analyses showed how CMB, as “bridge leaders,” deployed strategies to contest the district’s anti-Black incidents and the board’s often apathetic responses. CBM strategies included: a) providing evidence, b) reframing color-blind versions of incidents; c) providing concrete recommendations for change; and d) creating a unitary voice among members. The public responses of the board often demonstrated color-blind racism and other tactics to avoid allowing CBM to publicly denounce the district’s lack of response. Nonetheless, CBM successfully pushed the board to pass the equity resolution and continued to call for concrete changes toward equity.

The significance of this study is twofold. First, it underscores the importance of advocacy groups, as “bridge leaders,” involved in democratic participation aimed at improving educational equity. Second, it highlights how school boards might respond to and coalesce with advocacy groups to advance equity.

Authors

• Carrie Sampson, Arizona State University - West

• Melanie Bertrand, Arizona State University