Katie LaZelle

Re-envisioning Education and Democracy

Public Intellectual Essay

April 26, 2002

Getting beyond Goldie Locks: involving communities in America’s public schools

what?

There are many fixed notions within American society and politics that are often difficult to discuss and problematize. The most familiar example of such an American euphemism is the dogmatic idea that America is, to its core, ‘incredibly committed to democracy.’ Anyone who has studied American politics or any political theory knows that ‘democracy’ is a concept wrought with ambiguity, possessing more complex meanings than it does actual followers. Thus, claiming that America is connected to something so complex in problematic. As much as we acknowledge the complexities of ‘democracy’ or any given idea, we nevertheless hammer into our children a plethora ridiculously vague and indefinable concepts. ‘Communities’ and ‘community involvement’ are another two such over used and under critiqued notions of American civil society.

Just as democratic principles can be argued about until the end of time because of the multiple meanings and implications involved, what ‘community involvement’ actually means is just as confusing—if not made more so by the lack of academic interest in the subject. In effect, each of us has our own idea of ‘community involvement.’ An individual’s conception of how involved any given community is able to be in its local schools is something that varies greatly due to many things, including geographic and socioeconomic differences. But we really don’t talk about how our misunderstanding of ‘community involvement’ might connect with the larger purposes of public education within the democratic project.

I would argue that ‘community involvement’ in schools is about a heightened level of reliance on and connection to each party by the other. Such a relationship relies on a high level of shared knowledge within the groups and creates a society of a stronger civic community to benefit all. However, certain socioeconomic factors keep this from being achieved. Class and income play a role not just in determining how a resident of any given location might define ‘community involvement,’ it also has a bearing on what types of involvement are or are not engaged in. No matter how you choose to define a community’s involvement in its neighborhood schools, those communities located in poor areas will almost always have lower involvement at all levels than wealthy white suburbs. This lack of political engagement or community involvement (by anyone’s definition) in what are primarily urban settings complicates my plan. Urban situations involve more than a specification about what community involvement should be about in a perfect world—it requires a movement toward more general political mobilization of these impoverished neighborhoods. Only in places where active participation is an attainable goal do we have the explicit luxury of worrying about what the specific goals of community involvement should be. In urban communities overcrowded schools, high dropout rates, and high incidence of violence and crime demand change not just in theories.

We are faced with a dilemma that involves two different tactics. First we must redefine community involvement so that those already active within communities or schools understand their purpose, do not exert too much control, are separate in their role as community members as opposed to administrators or teachers, and are open to change. While at the same time we must concern ourselves with communities that, regardless of their adopted definition of involvement, do not possess the abilities to participate in any piece of the process. We fear too much community involvement because it might mean tyranny of PTA soccer moms (and dads), but we fear too little community involvement because it contributes to feelings of isolation separatism from society, like in urban settings. At either side of the spectrum we are taken away from a deeper more deliberative democracy. Thus a community plan of action must be able to move these extremities inward in order to create more cohesion and less disillusionment when one looks at the differences and frustrations of the situations.

come again?

Just this April in South Bronx, New York, active parents were furious to find themselves not as involved in the selection process of their district’s superintendent as they thought themselves due (reference?). In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a small coalition of parents raised a rucus when they were not adequately notified of their superintendent’s job termination. In both Wisconsin and New York mobilized parents are trying to place themselves in a more determinate role within district administration. Perhaps, the active and participating parents in these cases believe that community connections exist, but are desperate to become more involved. Some would agree with this limited definition of community (parent) involvement in schools, and other would not.

In The Jefferson Community School of New Orleans, Louisiana, parents play instrumental roles in fundraising for their students’ elaborately liberal child-based education. The Jefferson Community School is Louisiana’s first charter school that provides a safe environment for at-risk students who have been expelled from their schools. The parents of The Jefferson Community School thus are highly involved in creating an environment for students, teachers, and staff, that allows the participants within the class room walls to be involved and engaged. Each of the cases mentioned involves a movement toward an increase in community involvement (respectively defined by each group), but how did these communities get to a place where connecting themselves to local schools became a goal? And who was involved in defining what were to be the appropriate types of participation for the members of these communities? These are questions that do not need to be answered, so much as discussed, before one can determine if any one of these situations involves an extreme level of community involvement by a small group of people in the schools or whether or not an increase in the amount of participation needs to occur.

One thing is certain; if any community feels that it might somehow be in danger, or that the children who attend the local school might be subject to violence, there is an enormous movement to ‘come together’ and quickly affect organized change. This should remind policy makers and administrators that problem solving is a unifying agent, and part of what some consider the apathy problem might simply have to do with unawareness about what a school’s most pressing problems actually are.

Shortly after September 11, 2001 the safety of every American school suddenly became (again) a concern for both educators and parents. Although the Columbine shootings that wrecked a white suburban Arizona neighborhood shed the public eye on school (and thus community) wherewithal to protect students, our rapidly increasing concern with national security might mean that community involvement implies contribution to a safe environment. This certainly deviates from what most educational activists have been saying in the last 10 years, and very much from what Tokyo is attempting to implement in a handful of its public primary and middle schools. The Tokyo idea is that the school shall have more freedom from the status quo than the average public school, as well as a greater level of accountability and reliance on the public than most schools of its kind. These new community schools will:

-Involve residents in the local communities to participate in the management of the schools.

-Allow schools greater flexibility in creating curriculum

-Give municipal governments the authority to assign administrators by an open application process, rather than through designated board of education bureaucratic paths.

What these new community involvement standards will mean for Tokyo’s public schools depends on who you talk to. However, I see putting community members into the management of schools as an active movement to more specifically define where it is appropriate for communities to involve themselves. If management of school grounds by communities and a non-popularly elected administration mean an unambiguous definition as to the permanent role a community should play in its school

Perhaps according to the Pittsburgh’s Chartiers Valley school district, notable to some for having responded so strongly to graffiti threats around some of its campuses, as to have imposed early evening lock downs and the cancellation of community and school sponsored events for an entire week, Tokyo’s priorities might seem confusing. For instance, if a school is located in a community where graffiti is a risk, thoughts of turning the maintenance of that school over to the community might seem like looking for trouble. Some of Tokyo’s most recent movements toward broad-community based reforms might seem very radical or unnecessary to a group of parents so concerned with safety. On the other hand, the mobilized South Bronx parents who are currently demanding that the school superintendent termination and selection process needs to have more accountability to community voices might support such an intense movement away from a tradition of apathy.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to create a meaningful philosophy of involvement, let alone an effective piece of legislature when one person’s experiences, preferences, current involvement, and goals continue to be so divergent from another’s. Academics disagree in turn about what sort of relationship should exist between communities and their neighborhood schools. However, academic scholars and policy makers all agree that whatever the community and school relationship, cases of either too much control or too little participation will always exist. However, to accept this Goldie Locks reasoning as absolute is to do an injustice to the importance of communities in public schools. Instead of focusing on what level of involvement y works the best, we should examine what type of involvement would do the greatest good.

but why?

The idea of community involvement in public schools never affected me while I was a part of them. Though it’s not that I would have expected, in grade school, to question whether my community was connected enough to that of the greater whole. However, had I made judgements about my early public education they would have been positive—there was never a day that went by that didn’t involve interacting with a parent, helping out in a younger classroom, calling my teachers by their first names, and being appreciative of our school’s surroundings. I believe that my parents would have considered our school (an unevolved version of today’s liberal parent-based charter schools) to be both community based and involved. And they claim that this environment of intense community awareness and involvement (by their definitions of this word) contributed to my interest in bettering civic society.

Perhaps my parents are right (something I rarely concede), that it was my placement within a group of people who actively cared about and worked toward a collective goal of cooperation and strong group identity that had such a positive effect on my psyche. If so, then I wouldn’t have found myself as I am had I gone to a regular public school, had my parents not been able to afford being a single-income family, had our neighborhood not been upper class and white, or had another form of commitment taken place. These thoughts are problematic to say the least. Because my digressions seem to be very reminiscent of democratic theorists who argue that democratic ideals simply cannot be realized without economic prosperity, thus we are to strive for economic success before democratic achievement. If such a premise is true, it means that any school reform that involves a call for an increase in community involvement (at all levels) would call upon numerous other alterations in the community structure and organization in order to be successful. Now there’s a revolutionary call for action.

I look back on my days in grade school differently than do my parents, though. I remember not knowing what on earth the kids in regular education did in school all day at those horrid desk-looking things. I remember attending events with other families from our elite group of concerned suburban nuclei that were hosted by the same group of involved individuals hosted these events. With eighty hours of mandatory volunteering in the classroom per child per set of parents per year, no one would dare say that my parents were apathetic about their children’s early years of education. However, does this qualify as an involved community? Granted, a community is a ‘bounded conditional concept’ because it requires the identification of whom is an insider and who is an outsider in order to exist. But can we really consider such exclusive and disconnected-to-the-whole communities (as that of my grade school) adequately ‘involved’ per se? We cannot, if indeed involvement is to be defined as taking part in a reliance on and a connection to others in order to further the democratic project of heightened deliberation.

My parents were certainly involved, but they were (and are) parents. Reflecting back on this, I wonder how much of what policy makers and educators mean when they tote ‘increasing community involvement’ is really ‘putting parents back in the classrooms.’ It’s useful, though, to not blur the lines between teachers and parents. Instead, policy makers should create a more permanent place for both teachers and parents to work together within a classroom and community meeting setting. Do we want communities running our schools or coalitions of active parents wielding power? In my particular situation, beyond the minimum service hours requirement, there weren’t any institutional methods through which my parents exerted their control within the classroom. If indeed people believe parents in classrooms to be the best situation possible right now for community involvement, why is that?

where’s this coming from?

Research that Sandra M. Wilson, Richard Iverson, and Joe Chrastil (2001) did on integrating democratic practices in public education discusses the role communities should take in reforming their local public schools. With an acknowledgement to people fearful of “narrow webs of power” that would factor out those interests that might run in conflict with the interests of concentrated wealth, Wilson and her colleages argue that right now control is already being exercised through the same feared elite. Opening curriculum up to the community would do nothing but open venues in which community members could challenge the status quo currently in place. Therefore, people who already feel isolated and dislocated from American governmental institutions would not feel more so or be equally as exploited when, in fact, they were given some determination in student learning.

However, Mary Bushnell (2001) would beg to differ about “narrow webs of power” being merely a catch phrase and petty concern. In Bushnell’s examination of the cultural assumptions that are involved in community make up, she studies a liberal charter school in the overwhelmingly white Foothill County of Virginia. Her involvement within this community led to many supported theories against the movement toward a more community focused public school system. The fact that most community maintenance must choose homogeneity over difference as a means of survival, is a chief argument against local control. In addition to this, Bushnell reminds us that a lack of commitment to challenging homogeneity is closely related with the traditional gender divided labor roles and racial differences in who is privileged enough to afford both time and money. A relationship in which all members of the community actively participated in contributing to local schools is what would need to exist in order to prevent dominance by mainstream and traditional groups.

Because public school curriculum choices and budgeting decisions are made by members of the school’s immediate district, as well as members of the state and nation, a reform initiative specifically built for a particular district is only going to be successful if all parties are involved. The public must possess the optimal level of knowledge and awareness in order to make what Yankevolich has deemed a “public judgement” (1991). With deeper democracy begun within the classrooms, Wilson sees community involvement as beginning as a movement on the part of the schools, to educate the areas that surround it. Such an effort would involve numerous community forums, a relationship between local grassroots organizations and students, as well as a high level of respect on behalf of all parties. A movement toward greater knowledge would then work to create a forum in which difficult issues could be analyzed, discussed, and confronted. Thus community involvement in schools is based on the principle that those who surround the school are part of the deliberative process that the school engages in when issues arise. Such a process would move control over what topics get discussed away from centralized governmental bureaucracies and toward parents, students, teachers, and community members. The difficulty with this, however, is that rarely when policy makers attempt to enact a piece of legislation that raises consciousness is their goal reached. The best that can be done is to create new arrangements and connections between schools and others so that locals find themselves in the most control of their local schools.

Though by this discussion I do not mean to discount the particular importance of parents in having a personal investment in schools appreciating and cultivating every child. Parent organizing needs to involve the constant challenge of examining and changing the relationships between schools and communities. Parental involvement is key to any discussion of community involvement, but it is not a replacement for the broad range of people and diverse ideas that communities bring. Partnerships with schools need to be formed because it gives the parents a sense of real determination for how ideas deeply connected to civic life are dispersed and discussed amongst their kids. For parents to form critical judgements about public education that go beyond complaints about funding or class size, we all require a greater understanding of the complexities at play.

The involvedness of moving toward any one of these reform goals is obviously a very large and complicated task. One that’s processes often are more concentrated on immediate change than on far away goals. Unfortunately, popular media rarely lets this type of development in community and school configurations get beyond being unrealistic and unavailable. American communities rarely find themselves an example of what we and others remember and idealize from our pasts. In the same way, schools often fail to live up to fabled standards and thus the construal of interactions between the two are bound to be misinterpreted.

what now?

In an effort to create a space for deliberation and a community-created definition of the role that the public should play in its public schools, I urge community members and those associated with education to talk. A better and more connected relationship between schools and communities is a movement toward a better and more connected civil society, and a movement away from the fear of ever increasing citizen apathy. Worry about what type of involvement is needed, and how to involve all socioeconomic levels within this process.

By creating community forums that align themselves with local interests and problems we might initiate the unification of many things, and that’s a good idea.

Resources

Brener, Nancy D. et al. “Family & Community Involvement in Schools: Results from the School Policies and Programs Study 2000,’ in Journal of School Health, Sept 2001 v71 i7 p340.

Bushnell, Mary. “This Bed of Roses Has Thorns: Cultural Assumptions and Community in Elementary School,” in Anthropology & Education, June 2001 v 32 i2 p139(28).

Giroux, Henry A. Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture’s War on Children. Palgrave, New York, NY: 2000.

Lia-Hoagberg, Betty et al. “Community interdisciplinary education to promote partnerships in family violence prevention,” in Family and Community Health April 2001 v24 i1 p15(1).

McDonnell, Lorraine M., et al ed. Rediscovering the Democratic Purposes of Education. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas: 2000.

Wilson, Sandra et al. “School Reform that Integrates Public Education and Democratic Principles,” in Equity & Excellence in Education, v34 n1.