Text messages, email alerts, open houses, fundraising appeals, robocalls – parents know the drill.
They are inundated with requests from children’s schools.
These missives aren’t really asking for engagement. Rather they can be viewed as ways for educators
to tell parents what they should do to support their students or the school. These experiences can
inadvertently communicate that schools alone know what’s best for children – and parents should
listen and follow directions, a dynamic especially present in schools serving working-class
communities of color.
As scholars and parents, my colleagues and I research the intersection of families, schools, and racial
inequities. We have learned new ways for schools and families to work together to help realize
children’s potential. And the answer isn’t fundraising, checking the latest school app, or listening to
robo-calls.
Research tells us that families play a critically important role in the educational success of their
children. We also know from research that schools typically expect parents and families of color to
conform to the values and behaviors of white, middle-class parents.
The hitch is that families of color don’t always participate in ways schools expect. Histories of
distrust and conflict often exist between families of color and schools.
We know, for example, that there are well-documented racial disparities in discipline referrals, in
access to high-quality teachers and instruction, and in resources and robust learning opportunities.
But when parents raise questions about racial bias and inequities, their questioning, our research,
and other work has shown, it is rarely well received by educators and school leaders.
After sharing these experiences, they developed a curriculum for other parents to help them
build relationships with each other to address issues of bullying and to support positive racial
and cultural identities for their children.
Rather than acknowledging these well-documented tensions and revising expectations, educators
can interpret behaviors that deviate from their expectations as evidence that there’s something
wrong or lacking in families of color. A study by Dr. John Diamond and his colleagues found that
when teachers decide parents don’t care or are interfering with their professional authority, they
tend to feel less responsible for those students’ learning. These assumptions rely on age-old
narratives that implicitly blame families of color – and have negative consequences, especially for
Native American, black, Latinx, Pacific Islander and some Asian students.
5 new ways for schools to work with families
Catalyzed by a charge from the 2014 White House Symposium on Transformative Family
Engagement, we have been working on a different set of approaches to co-design more “just
schools” with families. Based on the research of our national network of scholars and family leaders,
Family Leadership Design Collaborative, schools, and policymakers can approach families differently.
They can:
1. Start with families’ and communities’ priorities, not the school’s agenda.
Families and communities need to be the architects of their own futures. That means starting with
family stories, experiences, knowledge, and cultural practices. That might mean recognizing negative
histories with schools before jumping to solutions. For example, in Chicago’s urban Indigenous
community, families discussed the trauma of boarding schools and the erasure of Indigenous
communities. They also shared their ancestral knowledge and stories of raising children to envision
what education would be required to raise “good elders.” Parents in another district shared
experiences of positive relationships with teachers but also their frustrations dealing with bullying
and racism at the school.
After sharing these experiences, they developed a curriculum for other parents to help them build
relationships with each other to address issues of bullying and to support positive racial and cultural
identities for their children.
2. Recognize and treat families of color as experts on their own children.
When schools help families build relationships with each other and recognize their expertise, they
can become powerful leaders in school change. In Los Angeles, black and Latinx parent leaders with
the organizing group CADRE changed the discipline policies in the district. And yet, based on our
research, parents of color still felt blamed and judged in everyday conversations with teachers and
principals about discipline – and there had been little change in the pipeline from school to prison,
especially for black boys. Now those parent leaders are collaborating with faculty at UCLA to help
new teachers reshape everyday conversations to be less about blame and more about enabling
parents to share their expertise on their own children.
3. Give families and communities the resources, time, and space to envision solutions, not just share their pain.
Listening sessions can be powerful but limiting. Families share their traumas with educators, but
school leaders ultimately decide what to do with what they heard. Our research shows how families
can be part of designing solutions if they are provided the time, space, and resources to do so. For
example, in Salt Lake City, a school decision-making body supposedly included parents, but families
of color experienced meetings as alienating and exclusionary. We found rather than airing those
negative experiences and expecting policymakers to do something, parents, teachers, principals,
researchers, and district leaders imagined what a productive council would be like and started to
enact those changes. They got the legislature to let them use funds for outreach to more diverse
families. They created a comic to share with parents whose first language wasn’t English. They are
developing a training for educators on the councils to learn how to engage differently. And they
envisioned spaces prior to formal council meetings for parents to come together to discuss what
their schools need most.
4. Help families and educators learn to facilitate meetings across racial, cultural, and other differences.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, most teachers and leaders in the U.S. are white, and
a growing majority of students and their families are from communities of color. Collaborating
across lines of race, culture and roles requires skillful facilitation. Real tensions emerge between
people and ideas in equity work. School and parent leaders need to be able to intervene in tense
interactions. That might be as simple as asking educators to slow down, listen more and use fewer
acronyms. But imbalances of power often require skilled facilitation, like what to do when one loud
voice dominates the conversation or when white parents inadvertently disregard parents of color.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, most teachers and leaders in the U.S. are white,
and a growing majority of students and their families are from communities of color.
Even parents of color can reinforce these narratives. For instance, one group of immigrant parents in
a diversifying suburban district voiced a belief that other immigrant families are focused on meeting
their immediate needs and don’t care about their children’s education. The facilitator at this session
could have gone with this simplistic explanation that blamed parents for disparate opportunities – a
stereotype that empirical research has proven wrong. Instead, the facilitator leaned into the tension
and shared her own challenges as a working parent who was often away from her child. Her
vulnerability challenged the discourse of blame, and parents began to strategize about how they
could better support each other collectively. Such facilitation skills must be learned, and schools and
systems need to invest in developing those capacities.
5. Ensure families have real influence on important educational decisions
School and district leaders in our study came to see the routine decisions they made in their jobs as
critical opportunities for family and community influence. Educational leaders redesigned key
decisions that impacted students and families, especially those marginalized by typical processes.
For instance, one principal supervisor in an urban district redesigned the hiring process for a new
principal with students, families, and teachers in the school. He enlisted a colleague who helped
families discuss the broken trust they felt with the district due to prior decisions, then they
collectively designed their own questions for principal candidates. They held separate student,
family, and teacher interview panels, then proposed their top choice (which was unanimous, in this
case). The district hired that principal, and several families wrote letters to the school board about
how the process helped repair their broken trust with the district.
These and other actions laid out in our full policy memo can recast families and communities as
essential collaborators in fostering equitable schools and educational systems.