Giving voice to urban parents: Using a community-based survey to leverage school reform

PARENT INVOLVEMENT HAS BEEN identified as a critical element in the improvement of urban schools by teachers, administrators, policy makers, and researchers (Comer, Ben-Avie, Haynes, & Joyner, 1999; Sanders, 1999). Educators who aim to increase parent involvement often uncritically adopt well-known national models (Epstein, 1995) or design local outreach programs for parents. This topdown approach to involving parents in the life of the school assumes that as educators we understand parents' perspectives on schooling and their views on parent involvement. As Fine (1993) notes, however, this top-down approach to decision making can result in (ap)parent involvement, where programs designed by others fail to authentically involve parents or to challenge existing power relations at the individual school site and the district level. Studies about parent involvement have often focused on either descriptions or evaluations of actual parent involvement programs and the processes through which these programs were developed and/or implemented (e.g., Cochran & Henderson, 1986). Similarly, efforts to assess parents' views about urban school reform have also been limited, often focusing on parent support for specific reform proposals. For instance, surveys have been conducted to assess urban parents' views concerning magnet schools (Smrekar & Goldring, 1999), school choice (Wells & Crain, 1992), charter schools (Becker, Nakagawa, & Corwin, 1997), vouchers (Morken & Formicola, 1999), desegregation efforts (Wells & Crain, 1997), and the racial achievement gap (Public Education Network, 2001). There have been few open-ended attempts to examine how urban parents view parent involvement and to give voice to their concerns about their children's schooling as part of a conscious strategy for urban school reform. The importance of listening and documenting urban parents' views is underscored by long-term ethnographic studies that have demonstrated that parents who are poor or working class or from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds may have different notions about parent involvement than white, middle-class educators (see e.g., Lareau, 2000; Macias & Garcia Ramos, 1995;Valdes, 1996). Listening to urban parents' concerns and documenting their visions of good schooling also provides an avenue for the involvement of parents in the "public engagement" aspect of school reform. Public engagement holds out the promise that school reforms are more likely to succeed if the public's concerns are heard and addressed (Farkas, Foley, & Duffet, 2001).The hope is that by inviting diverse stakeholders (e.g., parents, teachers, administrators, community members) to have more say in what schools should look like, support and commitment for urban public schools will increase. This chapter examines the question: How might an open-ended parent survey designed by a coalition of parent advocacy groups give voice to diverse parents' concerns and create public spaces for dialogue and deliberation by parents, teachers, administrators, and community members about the schools we have and the schools we need (Katz, Fine, & Simon, 1997)? I begin by describing how a partnership of parents, community activists, and university faculty implemented a democratic, grassroots survey in a high poverty, urban school district to assess parent perceptions of their children's schools and their views on parent involvement and good schooling. The results of the parent survey are summarized, as well as the responses of the participants about the development and implementation of the survey. Finally I discuss how the process of collaborating on the parent survey jumpstarted several other parent involvement projects and public engagement efforts to dialogue about urban school reform.