Title: "A new relationship"
Description: In this dissertation, I examine a collaboration between district leadership and a low-income Latino parent organizing group in the Salem-Keizer district of Oregon, a "new immigrant" destination. I use a mixed-methods, embedded-case study design to understand how the district leadership and community organizing group have built a collaboration to improve schooling for Latino English language learner students and how it has impacted the district and its schools. Using resource dependence and civic capacity theories, I analyze interview, observation, and document data collected over a year and a half to understand the processes, strategies, and mutual influences of the collaboration. Using teacher-survey data, I fit multi-level regression models to examine whether schools with organized parents have more inclusive parent-teacher relations.

Although many low-income parents of color experience their children's public schools as alienating and disempowering, Salem-Keizer district leaders and low-income, immigrant Latino parents have developed relationships that appear to be shifting the practice and culture of schooling district-wide. Through educator professional development, parent capacity-building, and a civic engagement initiative, the players worked to balance the power between them and shift the district culture from denial to shared responsibility. Schools with high levels of organizing had more inclusive parent-teacher relations, though not greater parent-teacher trust or collective responsibility. My findings suggest a new model of school-community collaboration that contrasts with traditional family-school partnerships. New collaborations focus on capacity-building for systemic transformation, engage low-income parents of color as educational leaders, alter relationships to build civic capacity, and address the broader political context of schools. As our communities become more diverse and the ranks of new Americans swell, the dramas that play out on the stage of our public schools hold both promise and peril for how we, as a nation, engage with issues of equity, culture, integration, and democratic participation. Districts faced with rapidly changing student populations do not have to undertake the task of transforming schools alone. Parents and community members can play a critical role, and the notion of mutual accountability can be a powerful catalyst for building schools capable of moving beyond "demographic denial" to educate all students equitably.
Subjects: Community and school, Educational change, Parent-teacher relationships, Educational leadership, School management and organization
Places: Oregon, United States