Transformational Resistance as Educational Leadership: The Role of African American Parent Leaders in School District Decision Making

• In Event: Inverting the Leadership Paradigm: Voices of Youth and Parent Leaders for Social Justice

Abstract

Objective:
This study examines how the voices of parent leaders that emerged during a city-wide movement to influence a school district’s decisions on school closings may be viewed as a form of transformational resistance (Solorzano & Bernal, 2001). By examining the activist efforts of African American parent leaders, this study documents the potential and limitations of parent voice to influence local education policy in a data-driven decision making context.

Context, Methods, and Data:
Since 2001, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has proposed a series of school actions that has resulted in over 100 schools being closed or reconstituted through turn-around policies (Lipman & Person, 2007; de la Torre & Gwynne, 2009; Lipman, Vaughn, & Gutierrez, 2014; de la Torre et al, 2015). In spring 2013, the Board of Education recommended 47 elementary schools close beginning in Fall 2013. The school district argued that by consolidating underutilized and underperforming elementary schools, they could produce necessary cost savings.

This study examines the experiences of four parent leaders who reside in a predominantly working class African American community where four schools were directly impacted by the closures. It relies on field notes and observations at five district-sponsored public hearings, several community meetings and three grassroots protests about school closures in Chicago. It also includes a critical analysis of CPS documents about the closures. Data from the parents consist of observing them at various meetings and protests between Fall 2012 and Spring 2013. Data also include in-depth semi-structured interviews with the four focal parent leaders after their respective schools were closed or consolidated.

Theoretical Framework:
This work draws on the concept of transformational resistance (Solorzano & Bernal, 2001) to frame how the parent activism that emerged during Chicago’s school closure process may have impacted district decisions. Transformational resistance emerges in response to systemic oppression and is characterized by participants possessing a strong social justice orientation. This form of resistance has the potential to elevate a coherent critique of the social conditions of marginalized communities and may help construct more socially just educational leadership practices through the voices of parents (Olivos, 2004).

Results:
The analysis shows district leadership data weighed more heavily than the voices and experiences of parents in the decision to close schools. Parents felt their narratives had a limited ability to alter the final decision of school board members. However, there was an emergent resistance movement among parents that challenged district decisions. This movement highlighted the action of parents and created a more justice oriented cadre of parent leaders at their respective school communities. In this way, the transformational resistance of the focal parent leaders demonstrated their potential to reframe what counts as educational leadership in a local context and provides a counter narrative to common trope of the uninvolved African American parent.

Significance:
This work provides new understandings about the way African American parents interact with school districts through organized resistance for the purposes of broadening who is considered educational leaders and what counts as data in decision making.

Author

• Rhoda Freelon, Spencer Foundation