Politics of Belonging: Families and Communities Building Power to Transform Schools

The past decade of California’s education policy landscape has been shaped by two significant events and the interaction between them. First, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), signed into law in 2013, shifted the way that the state distributes money to local school districts and implemented mandatory stakeholder engagement in allocating the funds. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic was a shock to the public school system, and though there is ample research underscoring how difficult it is to change institutions, this crisis may have created the necessary conditions for enacting consequential change. The LCFF created the potential to restructure relationships between multiple stakeholders—district leadership, school site-level administrators, families, and communities—and we can examine how groups navigated a landscape of nascent education finance reform and implemented a new process of state-mandated stakeholder engagement. The COVID-19 crisis represented a much deeper and more destabilizing shock to the relationships between families and schools. During the initial onset of emergency stay-at-home orders, the global pandemic blurred the division between home and school—living rooms became classrooms with many parents and caregivers acting as de facto teaching assistants and school coordinators. These two events offer the opportunity to study ways that the relationships between families and educators may have changed and to evaluate the extent to which these changes have allowed families to influence local education policy discussions and share in decision-making./nThis dissertation project consists of three substantive chapters and uses qualitative methods to examine how, if at all, a process of state-mandated stakeholder engagement in district-wide decision-making builds power for families to influence local education policy. Additionally, I illustrate how engaging in this process impacts both the micro-level experience of the individual and the organizational level of the district. Drawing on theories that examine institutional stability and change, collective action, and the role of families in schools, the overarching questions guiding my research are the following: (a) In what ways, if any, have school finance and accountability reform changed the balance of power between families and district administrators?; (b) In what ways, if any, has state-mandated stakeholder engagement expanded participation in decision-making and the process by which decisions are made?; and (c) How has participating in mandatory stakeholder engagement during various crises and shocks shifted the role and influence of families and communities in district-wide planning and decision-making?/nIn Chapter 1, I conduct a research synthesis that analyzes the literature on family and community engagement, with a focus on the policies and practices that empower diverse stakeholders to participate in discussions and decision-making related to education policy. The synthesis is guided by a framework used to map school-community literature along two dimensions—social stance and power and control. These dimensions help identify the extent to which families claim ownership of physical or symbolic spaces of engagement, author and control the agenda for engagement, and co-construct or shift the norms and beliefs of the education system. Based on a review of the literature, I conclude that conflict, not collaboration, is the status quo and that rather than mitigating conflict, family engagement may create structures and support venues for open negotiation of power. Additionally, although when families own engagement spaces and author agendas, they build political power to challenge status quo policies, there is minimal evidence to suggest they shift the norms and values of the existing education system./nThe case study in Chapter 2 is a micro-level analysis of the parents who participated in a district-wide advisory committee; the chapter presents the motivations that drove parents to act collectively as they sought to impact the planning process. Drawing from interview data and parents’ reports, I investigate how parents conceptualized and framed what it means to build power to influence change and to engage in the process and how this framing contributed to the collective identity and shared understandings of the parent members of the advisory committee. Based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted in a diverse urban school district in California, this study shows how families engage in local-level decision-making and build power to influence the policies and institutions that structure their lives; the findings speak to the limitations and affordances of state-mandated stakeholder engagement./nFinally, in Chapter 3, I conduct a field-level analysis of a diverse urban school district in California to explore the implementation of school finance and accountability reform and the influence of democratic participation in expanding inclusion within policy discussions and to identify potential shifts in the balance of power between stakeholder groups seeking to impact district-wide planning. Based on participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis, my findings describe how school reform created and protected a relatively vague structure and process of mandated stakeholder engagement. It is because this engagement was codified into law that when conditions were ripe, the community could push and exert force. Therefore, while the law did not guarantee community power, it codified a process and created potential for collective action to push back against the status quo.

Advisor: Fuller, Bruce