Organizing Parents for Culturally Responsive Education in Community Schools and Beyond

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Multistakeholder Collaborations for Culturally Sustaining Community Schools

Abstract

This presentation addresses the evolving dynamics between community organizing groups, a Department of Education, and a Mayor’s office throughout a 5-year process of mobilizing, advancing, and implementing both community schools and culturally responsive education in one of the largest districts in the country. This process occurred in a shifting political terrain in which community organizers recognized opportunities and strategically moved membership to important large victories for educational justice. I explore the political and educational context for these victories as well as the oppositional forces that we continue to confront in the implementation of the two related initiatives. Finally, I explore the relationship between community schools and culturally-relevant education, and how both approaches are necessary in order to begin to address the centuries of unjust and unequal educational policies and funding endemic to our educational system.
From the perspective of a community organizer that has been working with low-income Black and Brown parents and students through coalition organizing to win these initiatives, this presentation offers the opportunity to highlight the essential role of this work in creating systems change. Because educational reforms happen within political contexts (Welner, 2001), if they don’t have the buy-in of those impacted by their implementation, they can be ineffective and discouraging to different stakeholders (Payne, 2008). Community organizers, by attending to the dominant discourse (Laclau & Mouffe, 2014) and moving political opinion and will towards a more equitable orientation (Renée, Welner, & Oakes, 2009), offer a promising approach to sustainable reform efforts.
This is a feminist auto-ethnographic exploration (Harding, 2004), in which I locate my positionality as a Black mother and community organizer of a district-level coalition for educational justice. These experiences have taught me of the tremendous need for continued organizing for racially just policies and practices. These experiences form my primary data source, and centering them subverts ideas of what knowledge is considered valid. Through organizing meetings with parents, university-based researchers, DOE officials, and the Mayor’s office, I draw on many different experiences over time that create an extensive amount of data. I supplement these with public facing documents such as flyers and report by my organization and the DOE as well as local newspaper articles that help demonstrate the context and the work we do to change that context.
My raising consciousness among parents and students who are impacted by unjust policies, my organization and our allies have been able to not only help shift the political terrain in which we organize, but also have had significant policy wins that have made improvements in students’ lives. As expected, there has been substantial pushback from those who seek to defend the status quo, requiring us to remain both nimble in our tactical approach and steadfast in our strategy.
This study informs our understanding of what is required to create sustainable, equity-oriented change given existing political and normative contexts.

Author

• Natasha Capers, Coalition for Educational Justice