Exciting news... Critical Race Studies in Education Association

This weekend I received one of those emails that makes a researcher's heart skip a beat:

This year the Critical Race Studies in Education Association (CRSEA) received a record number of proposals. Therefore, it is with great excitement that the CRSEA Program Chair Committee is pleased to inform you that your paper proposal, Parents, Teachers, and Title I: A CRT Analysis of Parent Engagement, has been accepted for the 2015 CRSEA Annual National Conference in Nashville, Tennessee May 27 – 29, 2015.

Needless to say, I jumped around like I had just won the lottery. So now I just have to figure out exactly what I will (and will not!) say. But it will be great to work on this important topic, and share my findings with other folks across the country who are thinking about race and schools.

In the meantime, I've had a couple requests to share the longer document(s) that will inform this presentation. I post the chapters here for all three of you that will be interested ;)


Chapter 1 : How Parent Engagement Has Been Understood
Chapter 2 : Parent Engagement as a Policy Strategy
Chapter 3 : Conflict and Sensemaking in the Parent-Teacher Relationship
Conclusion & Appendices : So where do we go from here?

So where do we go from here? Parents and Teachers in Title I Schools

“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:

Acknowledgements: Parents and Teachers in Title I Schools

I wish to express my thanks to those individuals without whom this project -- my major research and analysis paper for my MPP -- would not have been possible.

First, my deepest thanks to Dr. Catherine Gavin Loss, for patience and counsel, for encouragement for my unorthodox framing to an important question, and for helping me think about the issues at hand from multiple perspectives. This project is not the sum total of everything I have wanted to write about over the course of this project (and thank goodness!) but it certainly represents the best of what I have learned at Peabody. And that is thanks to the unwavering advocacy and support of Dr. Loss.

My gratitude also to Dr. Sandra Barnes, for the introduction to the wide world of sociological inquiry, and for demonstrating the power of rigor and precision in the service of justice. She was (metaphorically!) looking over my shoulder as this paper came together, and I can only hope that I have done these texts justice.

I must also thank Dr. Joe Murphy, whose wisdom, scholarship, and humor were steadying even my most skeptical moments. (This is "seed-bed work'' indeed, Murph.)

My gratitude also to fellow Peabody students Chelsea Henkel, for taming my chaotic early drafts, and Joanna Geller, for sharing the riches of her research and welcoming me into her own inquiry.

I also wish to acknowledge Dr. H. Richard Milner IV, for welcoming this stray policy student into his course on culturally responsive pedagogy, and for demonstrating the power of these CRT frames in the teacher education classroom.

In the Nashville community, I am deeply grateful to Robin Veenstra-VanderWeele and Laura Bilbrey, for the richness of my practicum experiences with TIP in the Promise Neighborhood. I also wish to thank the TIP groups at Kirkpatrick Enhanced Option Elementary School and the Early Learning Center at Martha O'Bryan Center.

On a personal note, I thank Bridget O'Brien, for counsel and expertise, Andrew Remick, for cheering me along toward the finish line, and Jennifer Muñoz, for patience and for keeping me human these last many years. I would also like to thank my own "first teachers'', Elizabeth Abeyta-Price and Craig Price, for raising all three of their children to love justice and to fight oppression. Surely this paper is part of that mission.

Above all, I must express gratitude for my partner Matthew Smedberg. At every step of this project he has encouraged, cajoled, coaxed, nudged, catalyzed, soothed, supported, chivvied, cheered, consoled, proofread, clarified, debugged, championed, advised, edited, prodded, challenged, and now, finally, celebrated. I may be the sole author of this paper, but he is the reason it is out of my brain and onto the page.


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Acknowledgements in frontmatter of "Parents and Teachers In Title I Schools: A Critical Race Theory Analysis of Parent Engagement". I am happy to provide a copy of the manuscript (PDF) to interested parties.
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Intro: Parents and Teachers In Title I Schools

Parent Engagement is Good for Student Achievement

A broad body of research demonstrates that students do better in school when their learning is supported at home. Teachers write newsletters and make phone calls, principals host back-to-school nights, and districts hire family outreach coordinators – all with the goal of encouraging parents to interact with their children in particular ways. These strategies are rooted in the assumption that if some engagement is good for student learning, then more is better. But what exactly are parents supposed to do more of? The consensus definition of parent engagement may exist only on the school side of the school-family dynamic – that is, consensus between teachers, policymakers, and school leaders. How parent engagement is defined by these school-side actors, then, may not reflect the ways in which some parents choose to be engaged in their child’s academic development. What does this mean for student learning, when parents and teachers have different understandings of parent engagement?

A naïve observer might assume that there is an easy confluence of interests around increasing parent engagement. Policymakers, for example, put tremendous pressure on schools that serve low-income children of color; increasing parent involvement is seen as a policy strategy for addressing school achievement goals. Most teachers and principals would love for parents to be involved in the student’s learning, and parents across all race and class profiles want what’s best for their children. In the best scenarios, teachers and parents both act to support the student’s growth and learning. Yet as it is currently understood by teachers and policymakers alike, parent engagement policies and practices are rife with cross-cultural misunderstandings. This is particularly true for schools serving communities in concentrated poverty, or where there is racial incongruence between the community and the school faculty. For these schools, existing concepts and policies actually may be counterproductive for the parent-teacher relationship and consequently for student learning.

In this paper(1), I situate parent engagement practice and policy in the context of school improvement pressures, and review the research about how teachers make sense of parents. First I illustrate the three main ways in which teachers understand parent engagement. Using Tennessee data to illustrate nationwide trends, I then situate my analysis in the comparative demographics of students and teachers in Title I schools. Using a lens informed by critical race theory, I illuminate the negative images and racialized discourse around parent engagement, identify ways in which bias can enter into a teacher’s understanding of parents, and show the paths by which these subtle attitudes can actually disincentivize parents from certain engagement behaviors. Finally, I offer suggestions to move from the current models of parent engagement toward a more robust and affirmative understanding of families.


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(1) Introduction to 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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