Community Schools and Community Control: The Possibilities and Limitations of Community Engagement in Community Schools

• In Event: 51.044 - Separate and Equitable: Can Community Schools Offer Equitable but Racially Segregated Educational Opportunities?

Abstract

Over 60 years after the Landmark Brown v. Board decision that overturned segregation laws, public schools remain racially segregated and unequal. The inability of the Federal government to effectively enforce school desegregation together with a neoliberal orientation towards education that unequally distributes resources (Apple, 2006) have created vastly disparate qualities of education along race and class lines (Lipman, 2013). Two main strategies attempt to challenge such disparities in different ways: one through school desegregation efforts and the other through school and community investment to address historical policies and trends that have driven such inequality.

The ideological underpinnings of desegregation often center on the idea that proximity to white children and wealth will help Black students perform better and gain access to increased social and monetary capital (Lipman, 2013). While there are some benefits for Black students who attend integrated schools (Wells, Duran, & White, 2008), the push for integration is at times grounded in a deficit understanding of non‐white communities and doesn’t attend to the underlying structural (Anyon, 1997; Patel, 2016)) and cultural (Carter, 2013) reasons for inequalities in schools (Lipman, 2011). With negative consequences for Black teachers, administrators and students (Horsford, 2010; Morris & Morris, 2002), such as Black students facing tracking and disparate treatment that can cause an internalization of the bias and stigma of segregation, desegregation can arguably be seen as “nullifying the benefits of intraschool integration” (Bell, 2004, p. 112).

Community schools are one alternative to desegregation, grounded in historical movements for egalitarian and racially just schools (Rogers, 1998). Recognizing the need to address out of school factors to improving student learning (Anyon, 2005), community schools seek to provide additional resources and instruction for low‐ income students coupled with collaborative engagement of all stakeholders. By valuing and building on the social capital within oppressed communities (Noguera, 2001; Yosso *, 2005), community schools can engage people who are traditionally relegated to the margins of school reform efforts. Participation, however does not always build power, and can be depoliticizing of issues and tokenizing of marginalized groups. (Williams, 2004; Kothari, 2001). Conversely, it can create new imaginaries of what are considered public goods (Lipsitz, 1994) and politicizing demands for redistribution of resources and increased mechanisms for participation (Gaventa & Cornwall, 2006; Williams, 2004).

Based on two years of observations, interviews and surveys (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013) with families, community school staff, community partners, teachers, and principals, this research analyzes how family and community engagement programs enable and constrain community control in community schools (Sanders, 2001). Findings suggest that programs that invite parents in to schools, value their knowledge, and create ways for them to participate in decisions that affect the schools can increase the level of community control. However, such engagement doesn’t necessarily build forms of engagement in which parents have a deep sense of collective power. This has important implications for understanding how disenfranchised communities of color can practice community control of schools.

Author

• Julia A Daniel, University of Colorado - Boulder