“Educators from any racial background can be successful with any group of students whe the educators have (or are willing to garner) the knowledge, attitudes, dispositions, and skills necessary to understand and to be responsive to their students’ social, instructional, and curriculum needs.” (Milner, 2010, p. 19)
In this paper(1) I have illustrated the many and subtle ways that discourse and policy around parent engagement can reproduce injustice in the classroom. The problems illuminated here – namely deficit discourse, colorblindness, cultural racism, availability bias – reside in multiple settings, both within American culture and within the policy infrastructure. I recognize that these problems were not created exclusively by policy, and they cannot be addressed exclusively through policy. There is no simple strategy for excising the roots of American racism in our public schools. These problems are not exclusively about racial ideology – they are also about how the country socially constructs poverty. In the words of one teacher, families in poverty “are effectively working miracles to present their children in clean clothes at the school door every day” – even when much of the American public has written them off (Jones, 2014).
Yet despite all this I remain hopeful. In my experiences working on parent engagement, teachers across all racial groups have found the process of making visible their own unexamined frames to be extremely valuable for their work with families in poverty, even if the process prompted some surprises and some self-reflection. Do I really believe, they asked themselves, that "All Parents Have Dreams for Their Children and Want the Best for Them? What led me to think otherwise? And was I wrong?" Making visible these frames is the first step in a process by which teachers can reframe families in an affirmative manner and diminish the sense of antagonism between school and family (Henderson et al., 2007b). This shows me that even within existing requirements and regulations, steps can be taken to move teachers and families in a positive direction. Here are four recommendations that could make a difference on these complex challenges:
(1) Scrap the "Replacement Resource" Language in Title I
If federal parent engagement policy is present in the next iteration of Title I, then these policies must be re-centered around strengthening the relationships that benefit student learning – instead of characterizing parents as replacement resources for diminished school financing, or as weapons of administrative accountability. At the very least, reauthorization provisions must allow districts and schools more flexibility in how they meet their §1118 obligations in the context of their own community. A single mandatory annual meeting “ to inform parents of their school’s participation under this part and to explain the requirements of this part, and the right of the parents to be involved” may fulfill a federal requirement, but it does absolutely nothing for the relationships that support classroom-level learning. It seems extremely unlikely that the 113th Congress will reauthorize ESEA, so any slight modification of §1118(c)-(f) could be addressed through administrative regulation.
(2) Prioritize the Hiring of Affirmatively Oriented Candidates
At a local level, district leaders must recognize the importance of an affirmative orientation toward poor and near-poor families by incorporating it into their hiring decisions. Districts with similar student demographic profiles could develop shared strategies for hiring staff and faculty candidates with these affirmative orientations. For example, psychometric tools that address implicit racial bias could be useful filters in identifying candidates who are likely to succeed in building relationships in high-poverty communities.36 Specific interview questions could help to assess a job candidate’s mindset toward families in Title I schools: does the candidate use a deficit discourse? Does the candidate use the language of colorblind meritocracy, or employ the discourse of cultural-racism? Is the candidate likely to actively seek the sources of community capital in poor, near-poor, and racially diverse communities? Subtle tools such as these would be difficult for a job candidate to circumvent, especially if they were developed by individuals with expertise in psychometrics and discourse analysis.
(3) Teacher Preparation Matters... to a Point
The academic literature shows that new teachers report feeling unprepared to work with children in Title I schools (e.g., Epstein & Sanders, 2006; Timmons, 2010; Caspe, Lopez, Chu, & Weiss, 2011; Warren, Noftle, Ganley, & Quintanar, 2011; Desimone et al., 2013; Mehlig & Shumow, 2013). This is an unfortunate but not surprising byproduct of teacher preparation programs that typically employ deficit discourse to describe the social and academic needs of “school dependent” children. It is true that some programs do explicitly focus on helping new teachers to inhabit an affirmative stance toward poor, near-poor, and culturally diverse children – for example, the Teaching and Learning for Urban Schools program at Vanderbilt’s Peabody School of Education and Human Development, and the Urban Teacher Education Program at the University of Chicago. Yet these programs are the exception rather than the rule. Overall, racial bias among aspiring teachers is a real problem – a real problem that must jostle for priority with the many other real problems that teacher prep programs are asked to address.
However, if policymakers are serious about addressing whether teacher preparation programs are successful, then they must be willing to invest in developing valid and multi-faceted indicators of teacher success with children in Title I schools. Given the prevalence of childhood poverty and the sheer number of schools that are served by this legislation, it is almost inevitable that a teacher will, at some point in her career, work in a Title I school. This is also true of the Teacher Prep Review put forth by the National Council on Teacher Quality. If NCTQ is serious about capturing program graduates’ successes and weaknesses, then their research team cannot continue to pass the buck on developing an indicator for “equity”. The “equity” standard of NCTQ’s framework was the only one of seventeen standards that NCTQ declined to grade in its initial Teacher Prep Review in May 2013, noting “Methodological challenges in using the data provided by institutions prevent the incorporation of this standard into the 2013 Review but we will revisit the standard in future editions”. Considering the widespread criticism this report received for methodological challenges in the other 16 indicators, one wonders what made them decide it was not worth the effort for this particular indicator.
(4) An Affirmative School Leader Can Catalyze an Affirmative School Culture
Yet teacher preparation programs only matter up to a certain point, since they cannot reach the millions of teachers who are already in the labor market. For this reason, school leaders are critical: they can establish an affirmative orientation as part of the school’s professional culture. As Bryk et al. found in their research on school reform in Chicago (2010), this is possible, imperative, even. They can provide the time, psychological safety, and mental space for teachers to engage in the important work of examining their own assumptions and frames around race, and poverty. Researchers on teaching and learning have generated significant findings about “warm demanders” and other teachers who are especially successful in working with poor, near-poor and racially diverse children. Surely some of their findings from the classroom can help researchers in educational policy to understand the characteristics and behaviors of school leaders who can respond to the cultural assets of a Title I school.
As people of good will continue to chip away at the structures of racism and poverty in America, these issues will continue to demand our thoughtful attention.
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(1) Excerpt from my major degree-required paper, "Parents and Teachers In Title I Schools: A Critical Race Theory Analysis of Parent Engagement". I am happy to provide a copy of the entire manuscript (PDF) to interested parties.
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