School Leadership for Authentic Family and Community Partnerships

Research Perspectives for Transforming Practice

Susan Auerbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136707148
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

School leaders are increasingly called upon to pursue meaningful partnerships with families and community groups, yet many leaders are unprepared to meet the challenges of partnerships, to cross cultural boundaries, or to be accountable to the community. Alliances are needed among educators, families, and community groups that value relationship building, dialogue, and power-sharing as part of socially just, democratic schools. This book brings together research perspectives that intersect the fields of leadership and partnerships to inform and inspire more authentic collaboration.

Contributors from the fields of educational leadership, family engagement, school-community partnerships, and education for social justice come together to examine the role of educational leaders in promoting partnerships as a dimension of leadership for social justice. The volume offers a mix of empirical, conceptual, and reflective chapters with research representing qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches in urban, suburban, and rural schools. The chapter, "Conversations with Community-Oriented Leaders," includes candid advice from district and school-level administrators on this under-documented aspect of leadership. Situating leadership for partnerships within the leadership literature, this book proposes a model for addressing tensions embedded in home-school relations and leading schools toward more authentic relationships with stakeholders. This collection of original scholarly articles will be a unique resource for new and aspiring administrators and for researchers in both the fields of leadership and school-family-community partnerships.

PART I

Leadership for Partnerships

Delineating the Field

1

Introduction

Why Leadership for Partnerships?

Susan Auerbach

If it’s not the principal leading the charge [to engage families and communities in schools], then it’s not going to happen; we’re just giving it lip service.

If you really have a vision of what you want to accomplish [as a leader], you can’t do it without the parents. And you can’t do it by telling them what to do. You have to work in community with them.

Families are the heartbeat of the school…. As principal, my job is to support them. This is their school; I need to understand them.… I hear the parents’ stories and make a connection at such a human level.

These quotes from three Los Angeles principals (Auerbach, 2007, 2009, 2010) reveal the passion of school leaders who have dedicated much of their practice to working closely with families and community organizations. Voices like theirs do not often surface in the literature on leadership, in the literature on parent and community involvement, or in leadership preparation programs geared to more traditional approaches. This book opens the way to more such voices and to a better understanding of this underdeveloped aspect of leadership.

Why leadership for partnerships? Administrators have tended to buffer the school from outside influence, but in the past 25 years they have been expected to serve as bridges to, and most recently partners with the community. There have been repeated calls for schools to pursue meaningful partnerships with families and community groups and for school leaders to take the initiative in such efforts. Widely adopted standards for administrative candidates stipulate that leaders should collaborate with community members, respond to their diverse interests, and draw on their resources, as well as understand the social, cultural, and economic context of the school (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2008). Federal and state legislation, as well as guidelines for many grants and comprehensive school reform programs, direct schools to have policies and programs in place for involving parents in student learning and school decision-making. Yet many educational leaders are unprepared to meet the challenges of family and community partnerships, especially in diverse schools and districts with a legacy of distrust and marginalization (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Epstein & Sanders, 2006; López, Gonzalez, & Fierro, 2006).

Traditionally, researchers and practitioners have valued parent and community involvement mainly as a tool for improving achievement (Epstein, 1990; Henderson & Mapp, 2002; Henderson, Mapp, Johnson, & Davies, 2007). The well-documented positive association between family engagement and student achievement is now a taken-for-granted, commonsense aspect of education (Pushor, 2010; Tollefson, 2008), though there are still gaps in our knowledge of precisely how this indirect influence operates (Jordan, Orozco, & Averett, 2002). Enhancing student learning is, of course, an essential task for partnerships, and many worthwhile programs address this goal (see, for example, the Web sites of the National Network of Partnership Schools, Harvard’s Family Involvement Network of Educators, and the Coalition for Community Schools). However, if the focus is solely on raising achievement, partnerships are framed narrowly as instrumental in service of the school’s agenda, as Chapter 3 explains. When educators learn from stakeholders and engage in dialogue, multiple purposes for partnership can emerge (Cooper & Christie, 2005; Pushor, 2010; Warren, Hong, Rubin, & Uy, 2009).

This book suggests that partnerships which benefit schools, families, and communities are more than instrumental; they are inherently valuable as an expression of relationship. For schools to engage in such partnerships is to honor the democratic principles of American education, to assert a commitment to the common good, and to seek ways to better serve the public—in other words, to pursue aspects of social justice. Anderson (2009) calls for “authentic social spaces” in schools in which these “cherished, but currently neglected goals” are affirmed (p. 6). Similarly, Riehl (2000) suggests that building strong school-community connections is one of three major tasks of “inclusive administrative practice,” which is “rooted in values of equity and social justice” (p. 55). “The fundamental purpose for engaging the community is not to educate parents, improve test scores, or meet specific accountability criteria,” write López and colleagues (2006), “but to mobilize the community—both socially and politically—toward self-empowerment and self-reliance” (p. 68).

Leadership for social justice has gained popularity in the literature and in some leadership preparation programs in the past decade (Gaetane, Normore, & Brooks, 2009). Social justice leaders are advocates for children, families, and communities that challenge the status quo, address inequities, question power imbalances, and actively intervene to transform schooling (Marshall & Oliva, 2006). Even the revised standards for administrative candidates acknowledge the ethical duties of school leaders to “safeguard the values of democracy, equity, and diversity” and to “promote social justice” (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2008, p. 15). Leaders who are committed to social justice reach out to families and communities as a central part of their leadership practice, not for instrumental reasons but because it is the right thing to do (Theoharis, 2007). Just as there is a moral imperative for leaders to counter forms of oppression, so, too, should leaders nurture democratic community, a climate of belonging, and authentic participation by families and communities (Anderson, 1998, 2009; Auerbach, 2010; Furman & Starratt, 2002; Riehl, 2000; Theoharis, 2009).

This book examines the role of educational leaders in nurturing authentic partnerships with families and communities. Authentic partnerships are defined as respectful alliances among educators, families, and community groups that value relationship building, dialogue across difference, and sharing power in pursuit of common purpose in socially just, democratic schools (Auerbach, 2010). Such collaborations go beyond the limited type of partnerships typically seen in North American schools and beyond managerial approaches to leadership for partnerships that control and contain outside stakeholders.

Authentic partnerships are most urgently needed in low-income communities of color that have been poorly served by urban schools and the shrinking social safety net. Indeed, the critical literature on family and community engagement and on social justice leadership generally focuses on marginalized communities. But marginalization and oppression are not unique to urban schools; demographic change and economic crisis, for example, have increasingly brought equity challenges to suburban and rural schools as they confront new immigrant populations, levels of poverty, or intergroup tensions. Relations with the families of students with special needs remain fraught with misunderstanding and conflict in a variety of school contexts. Middle-class parents, in spite of their relative privilege, may also experience conflict with educators and uncertainty about acceptable roles when they press for change (Graue, Kroeger, & Prager, 2001; Sanders, 2010). There is a place for promoting authentic partnerships in all school communities, regardless of demographics, as a moral obligation of leadership. Readers interested in partnerships in suburban, rural, or middle-class communities will find pertinent information here in Chapters 3, 7, 8, 10, and 13.

Despite expanding expectations for school leaders in working with parents and community organizations, there are few empirical studies of leadership for partnerships (Crowson, Goldring, & Haynes, 2010; Driscoll & Goldring, 2005; Griffith, 2001; Riehl, 2000; Van Voorhis & Sheldon, 2004). Indeed, there is a disconnect among the literatures on school leadership, family-community engagement, and social justice (Auerbach, 2007; Cooper, Riehl, & Hassan, 2010). This book brings together scholars from these fields to encourage crosspollination of ideas and to address gaps in the literature. In so doing, we hope to raise the profile of partnerships generally as a dimension of leadership and to point the way toward more authentic forms of collaboration that can inform and inspire leadership preparation, practice, and research.

Plan of the Book

The book opens with two conceptual chapters that delineate the field of leadership for partnerships, situating it in the leadership literature (Chapter 2) and the family and community engagement literature (Chapter 3). This pairing symbolizes the coming together of the two fields in this volume. In Chapter 2, Carolyn Riehl reviews recent analytic and empirical research within the contrasting discourses of leadership for school effectiveness and leadership for social justice. She proposes ways to bridge these discourses in future research to build greater understanding of leadership for partnerships. In Chapter 3, I draw on the partnerships literature to establish a rationale for more authentic school-family-community connections. I then present a continuum of leadership for partnerships, comparing leadership for authentic partnerships with leadership that prevents partnerships (rare but still existing), leadership for nominal partnerships (business as usual), and leadership for traditional partnerships (more collaborative and responsive).

Understanding the difference that difference makes, confronting issues of power, and proactively addressing inequities are hallmarks of leadership for social justice. Part II highlights perspectives on diversity and leading partnerships across difference in race, class, culture, and ability/disability. Inspired by a visionary leader 100 years ago, John Rogers, Rhoda Freelon, and Veronica Terriquez in Chapter 4 analyze results from a survey of urban principals on parent engagement beliefs and strategies, suggesting that most fall short of pursuing democratic ideals and robust involvement. They contrast higher and lower socioeconomic status (SES) schools to explain varying levels of parent participation in school activities and governance and the role of administrators in supporting parent participation. In Chapter 5, April Ruffin-Adams and Camille Wilson infuse Black feminist theory, critical race theory, and Foucault’s conception of power into an analysis of relations between school officials and African American mothers of students with disabilities, focusing on the marginalization of these parents and the “politics of containment” in the special education placement process. They note the dire effects of inappropriate special education placement for African American male students, calling on leaders to promote advocacy-oriented partnerships attuned to families’ goals for their children. In Chapter 6, Edward Olivos questions appropriate roles and legitimate forms of involvement for bicultural parents, illustrating tensions between Latino parents and school officials with examples from his work in California and Oregon. He offers a framework for school leaders to work through these tensions as they move from “accomodationist” parent involvement to “transformative” engagement with bicultural communities.

Two key functions for educational leaders in partnerships, as in other arenas, are developing policy and programs. Part III examines the dynamics of these efforts in varied contexts in the United States and Canada. Chapters 7 (Joseph Flessa and Hélène Grégoire) and 8 (Molly Gordon) examine how Ontario provincial and U.S. district parent and community engagement policies are interpreted by leaders at the school level, with a focus on factors that promote or hinder meaningful partnerships. Flessa and Grégoire explore the assumptions that underlie policy aspirations and the dilemmas of implementing them, while Gordon documents the challenges of creating organizational cultures of engagement at both the district and school level. In Chapter 9, Janet Chrispeels assesses the work of two intermediary organizations that offer parent education programs in schools and compares their theories of action and their impact on immigrant parents’ human, social, and intellectual capital. She recommends that school leaders partner with intermediary organizations to build parents’ leadership capacity and improve home-school relations. Catherine Hands’s case study of two Canadian high schools in Chapter 10 shifts the focus to teacher leadership, describing how teacher leaders initiated and sustained a wide variety of school-community partnerships to address students’ needs. The school administrators’ role was to support teachers’ work in developing these opportunities for community-based learning.

Among newer, more controversial contexts for leadership for partnerships are community organizing initiatives, charter schools, and district-level reform initiatives, which are covered in Part IV. A pioneering essay in Chapter 11 by Sara McAlister, Heinrich Mintrop, Seenae Chong, and Michelle Renée explores the tensions and possibilities in relations between community organizing groups and school leaders. They draw on the work of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform with community organizing to show how these initiatives harness parent power to bring additional resources to schools and present more of an opportunity than a threat to school leaders who choose to work in alliance with them. In Chapter 12, Marc Stein, Ellen Goldring, and Claire Smrekar report on a study of the dynamics of parent involvement at charter schools in Indianapolis. They analyze parents’ perceptions of school invitations for parent involvement, relating this to principal expectations, the school climate for partnerships, and the potential of small schools of choice to build positive relationships with families. Chapter 13, “Conversations with Community-Oriented Leaders,” presents the voices of two principals, one district reformer, one superintendent, and one assistant superintendent for family engagement from across the United States who reflect on their experience leading a wide range of partnerships. Their candid observations on the challenges of community relations and advice to administrators who aspire to greater collaboration with stakeholders echo themes raised throughout the book.

Finally, the Conclusion in Chapter 14 brings together researchers’ perspectives from this collection with the issues raised by the practitioners in Chapter 13 to suggest lessons presented in the book for current and aspiring school leaders, leadership preparation programs, and future research on leadership for partnerships.

References

Anderson, G. (1998). Toward authentic participation: Deconstructing the discourses of participatory reforms in education. American Educational Research Journal, 35(4), 571–603.

Anderson, G. L. (2009). Advocacy leadership: Toward a post-reform agenda in education. New York: Routledge.

Auerbach, S. (2007). Visioning parent engagement in urban schools: Role constructions of Los Angeles administrators. Journal of School Leadership, 17(6), 699–735.

Auerbach, S. (2009). Walking the walk: Portraits in leadership for family engagement in urban schools. School Community Journal, 19(1), 9–32.

Auerbach, S. (2010). Beyond Coffee with the Principal: Toward leadership for authentic school-family partnerships. Journal of School Leadership, 20(6), 730–759.

Bryk, A. S., & Schneider, B. (2002). Trust in schools: A core resource for improvement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Cooper, C. W., & Christie, C. A. (2005). Evaluating parent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Leadership for Partnerships: Delineating the Field
• Part II: Leading Partnerships across Difference: Navigating Race, Class, Culture, and Power
• Part III: Leading Partnerships through Policy and Program Development
• Part IV: New Contexts and Challenges in Leadership for Partnerships
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index