Parents as Partners for Racial Equity: What's Possible?

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Race, Power, and Parental Involvement: Naming the Limits and Drafting the Future of Contemporary Discourse and Practice

Abstract

Recently, a number of scholars have written about parent engagement with district policies and in particular captured the general pattern that privileged parents are typically not good partners for equity (Lewis & Diamond 2015; Hagerman 2018; Lewis-McCoy, Lareau, etc.). These patterns echo research that has chronicled histories of white and middle-class parents organizing resistance to busing and other desegregation efforts or patterns of parent resistance to detracking and parents engaged in a range of opportunity hoarding behaviors to protect their children’s advantages and block change (Lewis-McCoy, Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Wells). Over the last several years, however, new parent organizing efforts have emerged in many of these districts. Districts that have for decades had to manage parent resistance to reform are now faced with quite different challenges – newly formed or expanded parent groups organizing to push for racial equity.

Herein we ask the question, what happens when districts that have struggled for years with white resistance to school reforms targeted at racial equity suddenly have organized multi-racial parent groups not only supporting such reforms but advocating for them to move faster? We examine cases of several districts that once bemoaned the work and distraction of dealing with privileged (mostly white) parents who narrowly and relentlessly advocated on behalf of their individual children that are now faced with collectives of parents organizing to push districts to advance equity – pushing for deeper, faster or more substantial changes. In these cases, even as districts suggest they share parents’ values and want similar outcomes, parents’ experience district officials and school administrators as, at best, ambivalent about this newly emerging “support.” Rather than welcoming these efforts or working to develop partnerships with parents, administrators work to manage, limit and contain such efforts.

These efforts to manage rather than embrace parent organizing echoes a fundamental paradox in the literature on parent involvement in schools. While parent involvement is often heralded as a key to educational success, districts, schools and educational leaders have historically often been deeply ambivalent about more substantial forms of parent engagement (e.g., shared governance), particularly when it comes to parents of color advocating for more community control.

The presenting scholar will outline the tensions and opportunities outlined above as they have been articulated in extant research on parental involvement and have been evidenced in her own research in one such district. The presenting organizer will comment on these same dynamics from her vantage as an activist in one these multiracial organizations that is waging the fighting for racial equity and is also encouraging and supporting the social activism of their children and other students towards this same end.

Author

• Amanda E. Lewis, University of Illinois at Chicago