Public Engagement for Public Education

Joining Forces to Revitalize Democracy and Equalize Schools

John Rogers, Marion Orr, John Rogers, Marion Orr

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804776387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Community participation plays a large role in the success or failure of our public schools. This book focuses attention on the problem of inequality in public engagement, considering how race, class, ethnicity, language, and immigration status shape opportunities for engagement. Without the active participation of the public, chances for improving school systems are limited. Without equal opportunity for public engagement, those in the lower reaches of stratified society are left largely on the outside looking in—and that all too easily becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

Public Engagement for Public Education speaks to the potential for students, parents, community members, and civic leaders to join forces and create more equitable schooling. Such engagement can expand access to quality educational pathways which in turn paves the way to a stronger voice in society and the promise of the American dream. If segments of society are blocked access to those pathways, the book argues, nothing less than the health of American democracy is at stake.

1 Unequal Schools, Unequal Voice

The Need for Public Engagement for Public Education

Marion Orr and John Rogers

SOME YEARS AGO Jonathan Kozol (1992) compared wealthy and poor schools located within a few miles of one another. The harsh contrasts of physical surroundings and learning environments—in cities from a variety of states—highlighted just how different school can be for poor and minority-race children as opposed to middle-class and white children. Today, inequality in public education persists across many metropolitan areas (Akiba, LeTendre, and Scribner 2007; Ladson-Billings 2006; Schrag 2003). Some public schools provide first-rate education. In general, these schools enroll students from the most affluent neighborhoods and communities. Their teachers are well trained in the subject areas they teach. Their classrooms have cutting-edge media technology and science laboratories. Their curriculum offers students a wide range of advanced placement (AP) courses. Students who attend these schools are often accepted to the most selective colleges and universities in the country.

Many other schools, however, are much worse off. Their school buildings are older, their classrooms are more outdated, their science laboratories are nonfunctioning, and their curricular offerings seldom, if ever, include AP courses. These schools disproportionately enroll students from low-income, high-poverty, African American, and Latino communities. The inequalities in America's public schools that Kozol wrote about so passionately remain a challenge for the nation (Darling-Hammond 2007; Oakes 2005).

In addition to the issue of unequal schools, there is also the matter of unequal voice. In 1960, political scientist E. E. Schattsneider famously observed that “the problem with the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a decidedly upper class accent” (p. 36). Forty-five years later, a report produced by a group of political scientists affiliated with the American Political Science Association (APSA) reached the same conclusion, arguing that “the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally” (American Political Science Association 2004, 1). The highly educated and wealthy hold resources and participate in networks that allow their voices to be heard over the voices of others. The APSA report argued that our democracy is at “risk” because of the “bias in civic engagement that stems from inequalities in material conditions, social status, and political privilege” (Macedo et al. 2005, 99).

Generations of Americans have worked to equalize citizen voice across lines of income, race, and gender. Today, however, the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally. The privileged participate more than others and are increasingly well organized to press their demands on government. Public officials, in turn, are much more responsive to the privileged than to average citizens and the least affluent. Citizens with lower or moderate incomes speak with a whisper that is lost on the ears of inattentive government officials, while the advantaged roar with clarity and consistency that policy makers readily hear and routinely follow (American Political Science Association 2004, 1).

Consider, for example, what has happened in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the years since the federal school desegregation order was lifted in 2000. After three decades of white withdrawal from the public schools, 75 percent of Tuscaloosa's public-school students are African American, although the majority of Tuscaloosa's residents are white. Tuscaloosa's African Americans are seven times as likely as its white residents to be poor, and the city is characterized by continuing patterns of residential segregation (U.S. Census Bureau, 2006–2008). According to Sam Dillon, in early 2005, affluent white parents from the city's “northern enclave” of “mansions and lake homes” began expressing concern about school attendance patterns established by the desegregation order that sent their children to a middle school outside of their neighborhood. “Scores” of parents from the affluent northern section of town attended a school board meeting to complain of overcrowding and discipline problems at the middle school. As Dillon reports, “The white parents clamored for a new middle school closer to their home.” Other white parents urged school officials “to consider sending students being bused into northern cluster [elementary] schools back to their own neighborhood.” Only three blacks were in attendance—two school board members and a teacher. A few months later, in May 2005, the school board adopted a “sweeping rezoning plan” that “redrew school boundaries in ways that, among other changes, required students from black neighborhoods and from a low-income housing project who had been attending the more integrated elementary schools in the northern zone to leave them for nearly all-black [and low-performing] schools in the west end.” The zoning change required few white students to move. Across the country, many public officials are influenced by the kind of public engagement displayed by Tuscaloosa's white and affluent parents (2007, A18).

We believe that the problems of unequal schools and unequal voices are interrelated. Schooling advantages enable the privileged to attain the skills, degrees, and access to power that amplifies their voice. Political advantages in turn allow the privileged to secure preferred educational resources. There is a good deal of ethnographic evidence that highly educated middle-class parents use their social networks and their threat of withdrawal from the public school system to press their interests—interests that often advantage their children at the expense of others (Oakes and Rogers 2006; Wells and Crain 1997). Disrupting this cycle requires working simultaneously to equalize schools and equalize voice. By becoming involved in the process of governing and reforming public education, poor and working-class community members can develop the skills necessary to counteract the elevated voices of the affluent. In short, we believe that public engagement for public education is an essential strategy for equalizing voice and bringing equality to public schools.

This understanding of how to address inequality has not always prevailed. A century ago a major reform idea was to take the public out of public education. In those days, reformers embraced the view that a larger role for professional educators and a freer hand for them in running schools would be the surest path to creating a well-performing system of public education (Tyack 2003). Today that pathway no longer looks so promising. The notion that professional educators could or should operate in isolation from community members has been called into question (Warren 2005). Public engagement is seen as very important to student learning, and many school reformers now look to members of the public to energize students and educators, improve conditions, counter calcified bureaucracies, or secure additional resources.

This book explores how members of the public have come together to equalize schools and equalize voice. The essays in this volume are concerned with public engagement through collective action manifested in coalitions, alliances, public deliberation, and other forms of community collaboration. The volume includes examples of various kinds of public engagement in communities from Maryland to California. Public engagement for public education includes, for example, the “Grow Your Own” effort in Chicago, in which community members secured public funding for an innovative program that trains residents of low-to moderate-income communities to become fully certified teachers. It also includes efforts of Mobile, Alabama's business and civic leaders, who joined with parents to establish a “community agreement,” triggering a series of school improvements, including extra educational resources for Mobile's most troubled public schools. There are also examples of public engagement in Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore, and other inner cities where community groups have developed after-school programs to shore up the inadequacies in the public school systems. Alongside such efforts to bring new resources into the schools, public engagement for public education encompasses efforts to transform the system by developing a critical analysis of its performance, enlisting allies, and seeking to alter public awareness.

These seemingly diverse activities collectively constitute a field we call “public engagement for public education.” The field seeks to simultaneously address educational and civic inequality through collective action of parents, community members, youth, and organized civic groups. Before offering a fuller description of this emerging field, we turn first to a discussion of the problems it seeks to address.

Education and Engagement Matters

Over the last two decades, American families have increasingly recognized that economic restructuring at home, heightened economic integration abroad, and an expanding global workforce require their children to compete for an increasingly limited supply of high-skilled and high-paying jobs that characterize the new economy. Globalization and economic restructuring have stamped a premium on technical training, verbal and written communication skills, and higher education credentials (Levy and Murnane 2004). Across the country parents and other community groups are engaged in helping develop and support pathways that would lead their children toward opportunities and careers in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. Few public school systems in the United States have demonstrated that they are ready to meet this new opportunity and challenge alone.

Parents who actively engage the school system—meet with teachers, attend PTA meetings, vote in school board elections, and attend school board meetings—are more likely to obtain information and develop social networks that help their children attain academic success (Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003; Jeynes 2003). Participation in formal political structures, however, is also unequal by class and race—an inequality that stems from factors beyond a lack of interest, minimal concern about public issues, and low levels of political efficacy. Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady provide good evidence that “the resources of time, money, and skills are…powerful predictors of political participation in America” (1995b, 285) and these resources amplify the voice of those who have them. According to these political scientists, “the voices of citizens…are decidedly not equal” (1995a, 511).

In the area of public education, the affluent and educated middle class has a long history of extensive involvement from the level of the individual household to the activities of such organized stakeholders as the PTA (Crawford and Levitt 1999). Ironically, the affluent middle class is quick to invoke the rhetoric of individual responsibility but is itself highly experienced and skilled in working in groups and in finding ways to become part of the fabric of schools and other public institutions. As a result, teachers and other school officials come to see middle-income and affluent parents as partners in the process of schooling. In addition, the precarious fiscal conditions of many cities and urban school districts and the need to attract and hold on to the dwindling number of white middle-class households is such that public officials are especially eager to listen and respond to parents’ concerns in the face of threats to pull their children out of public schools (see Peterson 1981). This heightens the desire of school officials to pay special attention to the needs and concerns of the affluent, essentially giving white and affluent parents more power in determining school policies (Oakes and Rogers 2006).

Don McAdams (2005), a former Houston school board member, described the parents of the largely affluent neighborhoods he represented as being “persistent” in engaging the school system to address the educational needs of their children. McAdams recalled that at one elementary school, it was usual for him to have a monthly breakfast with a group of parents. When these parents had a greater number of concerns, they met more frequently over breakfast and lunch. When those parents engaged the public school system, things changed. For example, if parents complained about a principal, the superintendent usually removed him or her. According to McAdams, “nine times this happened. Nine times principals were removed” (p. 48). Public school officials take seriously the concerns of white and affluent parents and are more likely to act on them.

Race, Class, Culture and the Problem of Unequal Engagement

Education researchers have written extensively about the differences between suburban and urban schools serving middle- and working-class communities, paying a good deal of attention to uneven patterns of parent engagement (Lareau and Weininger 2003; Reay 1998). Much of this literature has focused on presumed deficits of low-income parents of color (Calabrese-Barton et al. 2004). Yet, as long ago as 1981, Sara Lawrence Lightfoot noted that school officials receive different parents differently. According to Lightfoot, “For a long time we have understood that the magic of suburban schools is not merely the relative affluence and abundant resources of the citizens (nor their whiteness), but also the balance of power between families and schools, the sense of responsibility and accountability teachers feel for the educational success of children, and the parents’ sense of entitlement in demanding results from schools” (Lightfoot 1981, 101). Hence, Don McAdams (2005, 61) viewed the affluent activist parents in his Houston school board district not as troublemakers but as an asset, noting that “without them it was difficult to build an effective school.”

Ethnographic research focusing on inner city schools, however, shows that race, class, culture, and language tend to structure how parents and education activists participate in public schools as individuals and as groups and how they are received by school officials (Rogers 2004; Smrekar and Cohen-Vogel 2001). For example, when parents in a low-income community in the Bronx complained that their children's school lacked basic supplies, the building was in disrepair, and students could not bring textbooks home, the principal took no action. As Medirata and Karp write, “Whenever parents raised these problems individually, teachers and administrators virtually ignored them or reacted defensively.” School officials were not only “unresponsive to parents and the community,” they “also blamed parents for the school's poor performance” As one parent put it, “They treated us like we were kids—like we were uneducated and knew nothing about anything” (2003, 7). Lareau (2003, 239) compared the interaction between parents and school personnel in a large urban school district and found that “when working-class and poor parents did try to intervene in their children's educational experiences, they often felt ineffectual.” One working-class mother in Lareau's study said she “felt bullied and powerless” when she visited teachers and principals (p. 243).

Many low-income parents also encounter a divide between their culture and that of the school. These cultural differences impact how and to what extent parents engage the school system on their children's behalf. In her research on school and community culture, Maria Eulina P. de Carvalho (2000, 12) identified what she called “symbolic violence” taking place between communities and schools, triggered by divergent class and ethnic cultures. “Symbolic violence” is enacted when a parent enters the school and finds that school officials do not value his or her cultural background. This cultural dissonance can lead to discomfort, alienation, and disengagement. Further, many low-income African American parents who had bad experiences with schools when they were students now find that they do not have the “cultural capital” valued in many educational settings. Not surprisingly, they sometimes are reluctant to engage with their children's schools (Lareau and Horvat 1999; Lightfoot 2003).

Parents of inner-city school children often face unequal opportunities to participate meaningfully in public schools. For example, parents of immigrant children want just as much for their children as do other parents. However, many non-English speaking immigrants must confront the huge obstacle of school systems that communicate exclusively in English (Arias and Morillo-Campbell 2008). When letters and announcements are written only in English, these parents have difficulty gaining basic information about the place and time of meetings and announcements about important school matters. English-language learning (ELL) parents also must overcome communication barriers to participate in school meetings. Many school districts still fail to provide translators for Spanish-speaking parents. In his ethnographic study of a predominantly Latino immigrant community, Ramirez (2003, 98) found that “the school board meetings did not offer language support for Spanish speakers. One parent became so frustrated they brought their own translator to the next meeting.” Many Latino immigrant parents confront similar communication problems when attending open house and other school meetings. Schools that do not ...