Keeping Black Children Pushed Into,Not Pushed Out of,Classrooms: Developing a Race-Conscious Parent Engagement Project

Abstract

Black students in prekindergarten through Grade 12 (P-12) schools across the United States experience persistent educational disparities involving disproportionate disciplinary practices. This research study, using a qualitative methodological approach, describes and analyzes the impact of the Parent Mentor Program, which brings together Black parents, community members, school district personnel and university researchers working together to implement a race-conscious parent engagement project to transform the experiences of Black parents and Black children in the school district. Themes that emerged from the qualitative narratives include Black parents moving from marginalized outsiders to feeling accepted, teachers’ perspectives on the impact of the program, and the final theme—pushing kids into, not out of the classroom—which delineates the critical role of Black parents in addressing pervasive racialized disciplinary practices within school systems. Findings provide support for this culturally responsive innovative parent engagement program with Black parents based on a model that does not subscribe to a traditional framework of race neutrality and colorblindness situated in educational systems. This program instead proposes a race-conscious parent engagement model.

Keywords

Black children Black parents racial socialization race conscious qualitative

Introduction

As Black students in prekindergarten through Grade 12 (P-12) schools across the United States continue to face large disparities in educational resources and opportunities, the themes of struggle and persistence continue to anchor the Black educational experience (Cokley, 2014; Hale-Benson & Hilliard, 1986; McAdoo, 2001). For some Black children, education has not served as the guarantor of the American dream; instead, education has functioned as the means through which historical inequities have been reproduced (Bowles & Gintis, 1976/2011; Chapman-Hilliard & Adams-Bass, 2016; Gonzalez, 2012; Spring, 2016). For example, disproportionate disciplinary practices have further limited the educational opportunities afforded to Black children (Gibson & Haight, 2013; Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010; Losen, & Martinez, 2013; Losen & Orfield, 2002). These disproportionate practices have resulted in a discipline gap (Gregory & Mosely, 2004) in which Black students are overrepresented in discipline referrals. Federal statistics show that Black students are nearly four times as likely as their White classmates to be suspended from school systems (U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2014). According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2015), Black secondary students have a national suspension rate of 24.3%, in comparison with 7.1% for White secondary students. Taken together, the alarming rates of suspensions of Black students are a clear indication of the need to address these educational inequities in order to promote positive academic outcomes for Black children (Morris, 2016).

In the Rivertown City School District in upstate New York,¹ the geographic location where this study took place, we find a situation that closely mirrors the national problem of disproportionate disciplining of Black students (Noguera, 2001; Raible & Irizarry, 2010; Wald & Losen, 2003). In Rivertown, 26.7% of Black middle and high school students received out-of-school suspensions in 2014, compared with 8.3% of White middle and high school students in the same year (New York State Education Department [NYSED], 2016). In response to the localized version of this situation in our district, we worked with Black parents, teachers, administrators, social workers, and community members to collaboratively create a vision for a parent engagement program that would allow Black parents a presence in the schools to advocate for their children and improve the quality of their schooling experiences.

The Parent Mentor Program (Yull, Wilson, Murray, & Parham, in press) is a parent engagement project that we initiated in 2014 in collaboration with school district administrators, social workers, community organizers, parents, and university researchers.The purpose of the program is to introduce a more race-conscious parent engagement model to the school district, which differs from the conventional parent engagement models that privilege “White middle class behavior norms” (Yull, Blitz, Thompson, & Murray, 2014). The program purposefully centers the domain of race by bringing Black parents into the schools and classrooms to work alongside White teachers. The project emerged out of a series of conversations with Black parents to respond to a community-identified need for processes that would help these parents navigate the school system and change the school culture around the hostile environment that Black parents reported experiencing whenever they entered the school building. We have written about the details of this program elsewhere (Yull, Wilson, Murray & Parham, in press), but what bears noting here is that the goals of the program initially were simple: Black families wanted to be accepted and respected when they engaged actors in the education system. Our goal was to facilitate this process without requiring Black parents to assimilate into Whiteness—to modify their dress, speech, culture, and interactional styles—in order to be palatable to the Eurocentric culture of the school (Wilson & Yull, 2016). It is this assimilation into Whiteness that most traditional parent engagement programs model (Cooper, 2009). We learned from Black parents’ stories that the entering of Black bodies into the school building often elicited disrespect and disregard. Parents were routinely viewed through a deficit lens and were treated as if one’s Blackness was responsible for their children’s failures in schools. The reimaging of parent engagement through the Parent Mentor Program is seen as a way for Black parents to come together through a process of community building that would strengthen Black parents’ determination to resist the deficit constructions of them and their children.

Black Parents Seen as Problems

Research has shown that discussions in schools around engaging Black parents often start with a critique of them as parents who do not care about their children’s education (Baquedano-López, Alexander, & Hernandez, 2013; Cooper, 2009; McAdoo, 2006). The justification for this critique is based on evaluating Black parents within the framework of a school-centered and White middle-class notion of involvement, that is, attending Parent Teacher Association meetings and/or parent teacher conferences (Boyd-Franklin, 2006; Lewis & Forman, 2002). The absence of some Black parents from these traditional parent involvement venues signals to teachers who come from primarily White middle-class backgrounds that these parents are not like us and do not meet the traditional standard of parent involvement (D. E. Thomas, Coard, Stevenson, Bentley, & Zamel, 2009). Black parents, and in particular Black mothers, are often constructed by school personnel as disconnected, aggressive, confrontational, or lacking the skills and strengths to be advocates for their children (Allvidrez & Weinstein, 1999; Cooper, 2009; Howard & Reynolds, 2008; Roberts, 2002; Yull, Blitz, Thompson, & Murray, 2014). This cultural/racial divide between school personnel and Black families often results in Black families and their children being negatively impacted during their school experiences (Grills et al., 2016). The racial bias of school personnel that interacts with Black children, whether implicit or explicit, can impact students’ educational and disciplinary outcomes (Hughes, McGill, Ford, & Tubbs, 2011; Taylor, 2016). Motivated to change this paradigm, we proposed a parent engagement model, which is race conscious and informed by the lens of critical race theory (CRT; Bell, 1992; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012).

Theoretical Framework: CRT and CBPAR

To better understand the experiences of Black parents in a predominately White educational context and how a race-conscious parent engagement program can ameliorate educational inequities among Black youth, we used CRT in combination with a community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) model (McAlister, 2013; Swantz, 2008). The Parent Mentor Program was conceptualized based on the community experiences of Black parents from poor and low-income status contexts, community leaders, teachers, and school personnel. These constituencies were interested in developing strategies to counteract the racialized experiences of Black children as well as their parents in the schools. The manifestations of these racialized dynamics involved disproportionate discipline for the students coalesced with a disrespect and deficit construction of their parents as inadequate when they came to the school. The question became how would we get these parents entry into the school buildings that their children attended and how would we get the school personnel to respect and not engage in a process of racialized dehumanization with the parents.

The theoretical framework to understand the problems facing Black parents and their children is most easily understood using a lens of CRT. The fundamental premise of CRT is that the confluence of race and racism has been pervasive in U.S. society and that the embodiment of race systematically disadvantages Black people and other people of color, while granting advantages to White people (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012). Along with recognizing the ubiquity of structural racism in a White supremacist society, CRT recognizes the importance of counterstories or narratives that challenge and disrupt dominant deficit-based ideologies that describe the experiences of Black families navigating the educational system in the United Studies (Guinier & Torres, 2002). CRT and CBPAR have common theoretical and methodological assumptions in that CRT posits that those at the lowest position of a racialized social hierarchy have understandings about structural domains that underlie these stratifications. The underlying assumption here is that the parents are coresearchers in the project and have unique knowledge that makes their contribution to the research project vital (e.g., design, data analysis, and creation of meaningful knowledge and pathways for action). For example, in this research, the direction of the project is discussed and decided in weekly meetings with the parents, researchers, community participants, and school personnel. The discussions are often driven by the concerns and needs of the parents, as the core tenets of CBPAR and CRT contend that educational and social transformation begins with those oppressed by these structures (Freire, 1970). The weekly meetings allow for all the participants to fully use their collective voices to generate plans of action for intervening in schools in specific ways. For instance, when Black parents suggested that their role as parent mentors could be expanded to include outreach to other Black parents, this idea led us to incorporate making telephone calls to facilitate positive messages about their children. These strategies were foundational to building a strong sense of community and solidarity among the parents. In this context, CRT allows an exploration of how Black parents and White teachers understand the complexities of racism as it influences the disparate disciplinary and academic outcomes of Black children in school. CRT has been employed by a growing body of researchers in a constellation of interdisciplinary fields as a basis to examine racism as a structural determinant on the educational experiences for Black youth (Delpit, 2012; Leonardo, 2009). In addition, researchers have examined the role of CRT in understanding the racialized experiences of Black families and parents in relation to engagement with educational systems (Cooper, 2009).

The Current Study

In this article, we describe and analyze the impact of the Parent Mentor Program using a qualitative methodological approach based on the experiences of Black parents and White teachers who participated in this project in the Rivertown School District. This project builds on the research of existing grassroots parent engagement projects in schools (Beckett, Glass, & Moreno, 2012; Delgado-Gaitan, 1991, 1993; Dyrness, 2008; Pérez Carreón, Drake, & Calabrese Barton, 2005), which involves developing collaborations to promote family engagement particularly among marginalized families. These projects are similar to the parent-mentoring project in that they seek to prepare and position parents to be advocates for the educational reforms that address their specific needs based on a CBPAR framework positioning parents as co-researchers. In contrast, the Parent Mentor Program uses a CBPAR and CRT framework to understand and analyze Black parent empowerment, community building, and classroom involvement to affect structural change in schools. Through the Parent Mentor Program, Black parents bring in an awareness of racial stratification systems and are cognizant of the acts of survival needed for racialized people to exist within education systems (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008).

Method

The Rivertown Community and School District

The Rivertown City School District, situated in the small city of Rivertown in upstate New York, has 5,601 students enrolled in its seven elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school. Over the past 10 years, the district has observed an increase in racial and cultural diversity, an increase in poverty, and a decrease in graduation rates—particularly for Black students, low-income students, and students with disabilities. Students of color comprise approximately 52% of the students in the Rivertown School District (27% Black, 13% Hispanic Latina(o), 9% multiracial, and 3% Asian or Pacific Islander; NYSED, 2016). Seventy-six percent of the student population in the district has been identified as low-income, and the high school graduation rate was 54% in 2015 (down from 60% in 2014, and significantly lagging behind the 2015 New York state average of 78%; NYSED, 2016). Parallel to the increase in the number of Black families moving to Rivertown, community members have raised concern about disproportionate educational outcomes for Black students as compared to their White peers (e.g., lower graduation rates, higher discipline referral rates).

The Parent Mentor Program: Disrupting Disproportionate Disciplinary Practices

Participants

In collaboration with parents, community members, school district and building administrators, teachers, and social workers, we began the Parent Mentor Program in the Rivertown City School District. Specific details about the roles of the parents and teachers have been described in our prior publications (Yull, Wilson, Murray & Parham, in press). The program started in the high school with four Black mothers and three White teachers, two male and one female. In the first year of the program, we had a simple quest: to place Black parents in classrooms to assist the White teaching staff in their attempts to engage Black students.

The parents were given a small stipend and provided with a bus pass. The parents specifically targeted are low-income Black parents who have Black children in the school district. Parent participants were required to be a parent or caregiver who self-identified as Black and had one or more children currently attending school in the Rivertown district. Over the course of 4 years, a total of 15 parents have participated in the project including, 11 mothers and 4 fathers.

Teacher Participants

The teacher participants were volunteers. In the first year, they were selected by the school principal as personnel who would treat the low-income parent participants with respect. The teachers participating in the study were selected from referrals made by school administrators, teachers, and parents participating in the project. Twelve teachers participated in the study, with 11 self-identified as White, 1 identified as Native American, and included 4 men and 8 women.

Role of Parents

Initially, parents were present in the classroom for 2 hours, 1 day per week. At the end of the first year, the teachers who participated were enthusiastic about the project and requested that the parents participate in their classrooms more frequently. In subsequent years, the program was expanded to include not only teachers in the high school but also teachers in one middle school. At the request of the participating teachers, there has also been an increase in the frequency of the parents’ visits to the classrooms from 1 to 2 days per week. In the classroom, the parents assumed a number of roles. They were not just passive observers but actively involved in encouraging student engagement and positive communication between the teacher, students, and their parents. They arrived early to the classroom, before the period started, and waited outside the classroom to greet the students as they entered. This simple gesture set the tone for the entire class and provided the parent mentor and teacher an opportunity to check-in with the students and identify any potential issues that the students may be dealing with on entering the classroom. Without being distracted by multiple teaching responsibilities, the parents were able to observe which students needed help, to anticipate disciplinary or behavioral challenges, and to interact one-on-one with students who may need extra help. Additionally, these parents—who were some of the only Black adults in the school building—provided a race-conscious frame of understanding which enabled them to intervene in situations and prevent Black students from being removed from the classroom through suspensions. In addition, they made telephone calls home to the parents of Black children in their classrooms, highlighting the strengths and value they see in their child. In this way, they provided a primary positive connection with the school for these parents who often experienced multiple forms of exclusion and marginalization, thereby encouraging school engagement based on a parent-to-parent level. An unforeseen benefit that the program provided involved new Black employees for the district that has struggled to employ Black adults. Each year, parent mentors have moved from this part-time primarily volunteer program to full-time employment with the school district. To date, four former parent mentors are currently working full-time in different schools throughout the district as teacher aides.

Data Collection

The parents participated in weekly formal focus groups; teachers participated separately in three focus groups at the beginning, midpoint, and end of the project. Parents and teachers participated in multiple focus groups throughout the project. All the focus groups were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Ethnographic field notes of focus group meetings and parents’ weekly activity logs of their time in the classroom documented program implementation, and their observations in the classroom served as additional sources of data. Ethnographic research necessarily involves an iterative process in which the research questions are rearticulated and refined as data are collected (Watson-Gegeo, 1988). In this study, the research questions emerged from the initial implementation of the program. From the focus groups, we developed and refined the following overarching question: What impact does the Parent Mentor Program have on the parents, teachers, and general engagement of the schools in the Rivertown district? The institutional review board at the authors’ university as well as the participating school district where the research was conducted approved the study.

Data Analysis

Data analysis used a grounded theory method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) in two phases. In the first phase, each of the researchers used open coding to generate categories of analysis from the transcripts of the weekly focus groups/parent mentoring meetings along with the qualitative data including the parent field notes and notebooks they maintained to record their reflections. Researchers compared their codes and refined the categories as needed to reach intercoder reliability. In the second phase, the researchers used the refined list of codes to categorize the data into relevant themes. Member checks were used with the parent mentor participants, teachers, and community participants in the program to reflect the accuracy of the researchers’ interpretations (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Based on this process, the themes that emerged from the qualitative narratives were further refined in relation to the feedback of the participants. Findings were discussed with the school district administrators and the district’s board of education, and the collaboration provided additional data for use in future revisions to the school district’s strategic plan, particularly, with regard to expanding family engagement opportunities for Black families.

Researchers’ Positionality

Researcher 1

In qualitative studies, the positionality of the researcher is an important component in the research process. As Jones, Torres, and Arminio (2006) suggest, the positionality of the researcher will influence how the data are collected, analyzed, and interpreted for meaning. Patton (2002) argues that rigorous qualitative research involves becoming a part of the community so as to gain key insights while at the same time remaining apart and separate from the community. In this study, which considers the experiences of Black parents in the U.S. educational system, I found it challenging to heed Patton’s advice. I am a Black woman and I am a parent. I recognize that my positionalities vis-à-vis race, gender, and parental status converge and influence my subjectivity as a researcher with the Parent Mentor Program. Based on the work of scholars such as Nieto (1994) and Milner (2007), researchers can acquire “truth” in their own work when they affirm and provide careful consideration in listening to self and other people. This critical reflexivity also involves engaging the act of listening to self in relation to others. With this in mind, I recognize that my life experiences as a Black parent uniquely position me to be able to connect with the participants in this study. Yet I am critically aware of the position of power that my role as researcher may place me in. In this research, my emic perspective is useful in connecting and understanding the parents’ experiences. My theoretical framework of CRT helps facilitate my understanding of affirming the importance of respecting the voices of the participants in the Parent Mentor Program in the Rivertown School District.

Researcher 2

As a White middle-class woman with no children of my own, my positionality is very different than the positionality of Black parents. Growing up in an affluent, predominantly White, suburban school district in California, I had very little contact with people of color. One might wonder why someone from such a privileged background who benefited from the racial segregation in my community would end up as an academic activist working toward racial justice in education. I benefited from attending an overwhelmingly White public school that, due to its location in a wealthy neighborhood, had plentiful resources and opportunities such as Advanced Placement classes, gifted and talented programs, and numerous pathways to college admission. It was not until college and graduate school, when my life became more desegregated, that I had access to the stories of students of color and working-class students whose educational lives had been structured very differently than my own. I realized then how much privilege I had taken for granted.

Now, in participating in coordinating and researching the Parent Mentor Program as a White ally, I am aware of the fact that, as a White person entering into a space created by and for people of color, my presence changes that dynamic. I remain conflicted about my role to be in such a space, and I respond to this conflicted-ness by primarily positioning myself as a listener. In these meetings with parents, I have heard story after story in the Rivertown School District that has brought me to believe that the disproportionate disciplining of Black youth represents a core manifestation in the disenfranchisement of Black youth. I recognize that this stance of advocacy—this nonneutrality—sometimes causes me to interpret the data in ways that favor the parents’ stories while remaining suspicious of the goals and motives of school teachers and administrators. However, critical ethnographers do not shy away from the partiality and subjectivity of this critical positionality; rather, we incorporate the perspectives of the researchers with the understanding that critical ethnographic work must “aid emancipatory goals or [ . . . ] negate the repressive influences that lead to unnecessary social domination” (J. Thomas, 1993, p. 4).

Results

In this section, we summarize the three main themes that emerge from this study. For the first theme, we examine the parents moving from marginalized outsiders to feeling accepted. Within this area, the subthemes that emerged are (a) feeling disrespected and (b) feeling respected in the school. In the second theme, teachers’ perspectives on the impact of the program, teachers describe their interactions with the parents and the benefits they see in the Parent Mentor Program. The final theme, pushing kids into, not out of the, classrooms, speaks to the influence that experiential knowledge along with culturally relevant, race-conscious parenting practices have in enabling parents to de-escalate conflict situations in the classrooms keeping children in the classroom and avoiding potential disciplinary actions.

Moving From Marginalized Outsiders to Feeling Accepted

This theme discusses the evolution of the parents’ experience with school personnel. It begins with their marginalized experiences, which made them feel like outsiders. It ends with the parents beginning to experience acceptance and feeling that they are a part of the school community when they enter the school as parent mentors.

Feeling Disrespected

The parents in this study had already experienced school-based marginalization before starting their work with the Parent Mentor Program. Every parent participating in this project had at one time found themselves in a disciplinary meeting with school administrators about their children. In fact, prior to their participation in this project, parents shared that their only interaction with the school system was when their children were being disciplined or suspended. All the parents in this project, therefore, had become programmed to understand school primarily as a site of conflict in which their voices were silenced. Even the sight of the school’s telephone number on incoming phone calls had become a powerful symbol of anxiety, embarrassment, and struggle with the school in which the needs of their children were systematically disregarded. Their children were repeatedly viewed as problems—as throwaways. One mother with two children in the middle school stated succinctly, “The only time the school interacts with me is when my children is being disciplined.” Another parent chimed in, “When the school calls I automatically just say, ‘What’s wrong?’” Another parent, a single mother with one child in the high school elaborated on this statement, sharing an incident of punitive discipline that was common among the parents we talked to. She said,

I was called to a disciplinary meeting and there were a bunch of administrators. They have a thick file with all the things my son had done wrong. I had never heard of most the things that were in that file. The principal was rattling off the list of infractions, and I keep asking, why didn’t someone contact me when the first incident occurred? Now we are here looking a suspension and possible expulsion and I just hearing about all the things my son did, it was like he was being set up to fail. I don’t understand how this system works? We need to be working to push kids into the classroom, not push them out of the classroom.

A father with four children in the district, one in elementary school, one in the middle school, and two in the high school shared,

. . . they target our kids, you know Black kids, they send them down to the office, suspend them and never once do they even ask them to share their side of the story. My son in the middle school was suspended for supposedly calling a teacher a name. He was with a group of friends who said the teacher accused him of calling her a b____, but he never said it. When he tried to explain to the principal what happened she didn’t want to hear it, it was just, you’re out, your suspended. She wouldn’t even investigate it was just the teacher’s word. They sent him home, I didn’t even get a call. I didn’t know he was suspended until I got home. When I contacted the school, the principal told me that the paperwork was sent in the mail and that they didn’t have time to call. They didn’t have time to call but they sent him home for five days for some nonsense.

As these parents’ narratives indicate, they had repeated experiences of when they felt systematically marginalized and excluded from key conversations with the school around discipline. They were aware, furthermore, of the racialized nature of the disciplinary process and their marginalization as parents. Story after story related to us by these parents indicated that their children as well as other Black children were punished more severely than White children, even when the behavior was identical. Many of these narratives indicated that fights at the school resulted in a lesser punishment for the White students. This was true even in instances where the fights were initiated by White students who threatened the Black youth and their families with racialized violence, such as KKK attacks. We have also observed an increase in policing at the high school and an increased reliance on school resource officers to handle disciplinary issues. These situations have resulted in an increase in the number of Black students being arrested and paraded around the school in handcuffs on their way into custody. These accounts echo the national narratives of the school-to-prison pipeline that criminalize, rather than educate, Black youth (Gonzalez, 2012; Wald & Losen, 2003).

At the beginning of the project, parents reported that they continued to have difficult interactions with school personnel who made them feel like they did not belong and sometimes treated them with suspicion. Parents reported walking into the school building and being met with hostility from school staff, who drew upon the “angry Black woman” stereotype (Collins, 2006; Harris-Perry, 2013) and assumed the parents were there to create trouble. One mother with five children in the district shared, “When I walked in, even after I signed in, some people would be looking at me like, what are you doing here? I would walk over to the class I was working in and I swear they would be following me.” A father with one child in kindergarten shared:

One day after a training we were all walking out to the elevator, we were laughing and joking and watching students walking to their classes, one of the School Resource Officers was walking away from us; he must have heard us because he turned around and starting walking toward us . . . it was wild. When he was walking toward us he put his hand on his gun and he stopped, asked us if we were looking for somebody. We told him we were Parent Mentors and he asked where were we going, what were we doing. He was trying to intimidate us. We answered, we got it sorted out, we’re ok, but damn he put his hand on his gun. What the hell.

However, reports from parents on their classroom experiences after being in the Parent Mentor Program indicated a shift in their relationships with the classroom teachers and other staff members in the school. They began to see themselves as part of the school, not just as strangers trying to gain entry into a space where they were not welcomed. Still, we argue, this sense of belonging is fleeting and unstable; at any moment, Black parents can be placed into the “problem” category by school staff, particularly, when they enter the school to advocate on behalf of their own children. We elaborate on this tension in the next section.

Feeling Respected in the School

As the parents spent more time in the schools in their role as parent mentors, they began to see a shift in how they were treated by school personnel. They began to feel that they were part of the community as they gained respect from the teachers with whom they worked. It was often relatively small gestures of belonging, such as having their own designated space in the classroom or being issued an official school badge that communicated belonging in ways that were meaningful to the parents. As one mother shared, “When we first started, it was like we don’t belong here, they don’t want us here, but now they call us to help out in rooms with teachers we are not even working with.” Another parent with one child in the high school shared,

When I come to work now, I have my badge, I don’t even have to sign in, I feel respected. The other day the principal introduced me to one of the guidance counselors, she said, this is Katie, she is a Parent Mentor, I felt proud.

The parents also indicated that the tone of their interactions with school staff was changing toward more positive. One father shared, “Now teachers will say good morning; before, they wouldn’t say anything to me.” A mother of a senior in the high school shared,

Now that I have been there for a while, they [school personnel] are friendly, at first they were apprehensive but now it’s like I volunteer, but I always looked at this as going to work, it has been getting better and better with the people in the building.

Each parent had stories sharing their gratitude and excitement with being a part of the Parent Mentor Program. Through their participation in the program, they gained both social and cultural capital in the schools. Through their work as parent mentors, they were beginning to feel they are part of a school community. However, one parent shared that even though they felt more respected in their official capacity as parent mentors, they still faced the same dehumanization when they come to the school to advocate on behalf of their own children:

I walk in as a parent mentor and it’s like hi hello how you doing? . . . and then I get a call about my daughter from the high school they call me the day after she gets suspended I get home and it’s d___the same old stuff . . . I was in the building and they know I’m a parent mentor . . . they know I was in the building and no one came to get me . . . they just sent my child home.

Teachers’ Perspectives on the Impact of the Program

The analysis of the data collected from focus groups, interviews, and field notes suggest that there has been a shift in some of the teachers’ perspectives on race of the parents in the school district. As parent mentors work to redirect students and help them stay focused and remain in the classroom, teachers see not only these Black parents from a different perspective but they also see their students differently. As one ninth-grade social studies teacher shares, the parents helped him experience students in a different light, to not only see their negative behavior but also their positive behavior:

I would say the value of a second set of eyes, the parents saw things that I didn’t see and saw things in a different light it was so beneficial to me to get their perspective. It was always a reminder to me when I had the parents in the room to look a little deeper for the positive aspects the parents came into the classroom looking for positive behaviors in the students, I realized that I didn’t always see the positive. We had one student who came in every morning and just laid his down, when I asked him what was going on he just said, I’m tired, I’m tired, I’m sleepy. My parent mentor K_________ talked to him, but he was so tired he wouldn’t engage. Later after the class left, K_________mentioned to me that the student might be babysitting his other siblings at night and that might be why he was tired. I walked him to the bathroom and we had a conversation. I learned that what K__________ said was true, from that day I changed how I interacted with him. When he came in I would check in with in and give him some time if he needed before I expected him to engage in classwork.

The following teachers share the cultural insights they gained about Black students and parents from the parent mentors.

9th-grade English teacher: I have another perspective, a parent perspective. Raising children parents bring in a different perspective as teachers we are motivated to help this age group of students and we study about what different strategies might work but we are thinking about the group; which is very different from parents who look at the individual and try to determine the strategies that will help them. For instance I really gained insight when K_____ would share with me the struggles she had to help her children get through as an African American and a single mom. This community is predominately White, she . . . she helped me to begin to think of the students as individuals not just the group.

7th-grade teacher: K____ brings something into the classroom that I can’t an instant connection with the students. She understands the cultural nuances, for example one day two of my female students started fighting about hair. K____jumped in an separated the girls calmed them down and she was able to get them to focus on their work. She later explained a number of things about getting a weave. K ___has been able to provide for me a cultural connection that I would never have with my students and their families. I understand that something as simply as a hairstyle is not easily accomplished in this community and that some people just can’t walk into cost cutters.

Math teacher: I learned this year that many of these parents I dismissed as not interested in their children’s education are doing the best they can. They send their best to the school and they want the best for their kids. I saw the struggles that N____was having with her son and after spending a year with N____I know she is a good parent, but even her son keeps getting into trouble. They send their best . . . it’s funny how I never considered that before.

A ninth-grade social studies teacher captures the sentiments of many of the teachers who have participated in the Parent Mentor Program by allowing parents in their classroom:

Yeah, this is awesome. Well thank you so much, um, you know I gotta say at the first, you know when we first hear about the program, and you’re like, well what’s this gonna be like? And um, um, it’s been really beneficial for me, um, too, um, because, like what I was saying with these guys, like, I don’t catch every conversation, uh that kids have or that, you know, or even that you guys have with, with the kids, so, um, I think just having like that extra adult in the room and them seeing somebody who takes their time and wants to come in and be part of the school community, um, I think that can go a long way, and um, I can definitely see in the future, you know this having net benefits, you know as the program kind of branches out and maybe more parents are in the building, maybe they’re having more conversations with other parents about what’s going on in the building, and I think it can really create buy-in in the community so I’m really happy with like the outcome of the program and what, what it ended up being, um I thought it was completely positive.

Pushing Kids Into, Not Out of the Classroom

Teachers have suggested that the presence of Black parents within these classrooms has had a positive effect on classroom disciplinary practices, since the parents are able to encourage options besides removing a student from the classroom. Parents share stories of redirecting students to focus on their classwork. A father with two children attending schools in the district shares his experience with redirecting students and keeping them in the classroom:

Once I got to know the students better, I started telling Mrs. N_______ about some of the conflicts that the students were having at home, sometimes when students would act up I was able to talk to them and calm them down. There was this one student B_____who was always getting picked on and he just had enough and push a student that was messing with him in class. I got and told him let’s go for a walk, we walked down the hallway and we had a short discussion but when we got back he was ready. I saved this student from being kicked out . . . fighting in class is an automatic suspension but Mrs. N______let me try a different way. We need push these kids into class not push them out, they can’t learn nothing out of class.

Another parent who has worked in the Parent Mentor Program commented:

At first when I was in Mrs. A____’s class I wasn’t sure what to expect I think it took a minute but a couple of weeks into the class she came and told me that she liked how I was interacting with the students, that same day a student came to class and I know he was having a bad day he wouldn’t settle down. Mrs. A___ asked be to talk to him and I took him out in the hall and found out that his mother was [having problems]. We talked for about 10 minutes and then he went back to class. Mrs. A__ told me if I hadn’t been there she would have just sent him out to ISC or something.

A mother with a son attending the local high school worked as a parent mentor in the high school. She had struggled unsuccessfully to keep her son in high school. However, she worked to keep other Black students in class and on task. She shared,

I walk around and when I see a student on their phone or not paying attention I just go up to them and say how you doing today, tell me about the assignment . . . I just try to keep them on task. I want them to stay in school.

One mother with three children in the local middle school worked as a parent mentor in a high school science class and commented,

B___: I could see that something was about to jump off, because you could hear students starting to get loud, I went over and talked to them. I told them just get through this period, don’t mess up and get kicked out over some stupid stuff. Do you think you could just get through this period? I am just trying make sure students stay in class.”

Teachers have also acknowledged the parents’ successful efforts with keeping students in class and focused on their work; they applauded the parent’s efforts to help students work through incident behavior potentially disruptive to the classroom. They acknowledged the parents’ outreach to other parents of students in the class and the impact that their positive telephone calls home have on the students:

9th-grade social studies teacher: Certain students gravitated toward the parents, N____was able to give guidance some students and encourage them to work toward being a better student and wanting more for themselves, I saw her impact in the attendance improvement of some of the students.

9th-grade English teacher #2: As a teacher, having B____ pull a student out of the class for a mini-conference in the hallway helped to avoid a potential disciplinary issue and allowed me to continue the lesson without disruption or distractions for the students who were on task and working. This practice helped to quietly de-escalate an issue and to provide students with a space to be heard, briefly counseled and then to re-enter the work environment to get back to learning. This, by far, was the greatest success of the year with those students who crave individualized attention and/or with those who needed to “take a break” to prevent them from acting inappropriately.

9th-grade English teacher #2: Students who received positive calls home mentioned improved communications with their parents/guardians, and I certainly saw the benefits of this type of positive intervention through their motivation, work ethic and interactions with their peers in our classroom.

In conclusion, we posit that bringing Black parents into school settings can work toward shifting and closing the cultural disconnects between Black families and predominantly White school personnel. Analysis of the focus groups, interviews, and field notes taken by parents indicates that parents have contributed to the teachers’ changing perspectives on race. Parent mentors’ use of race-conscious and culturally relevant practices have kept some Black children “pushed in” instead of “pushed out” of classrooms, which have often resulted in disciplinary proceedings and suspension. At the same time, while the parents reported feeling more respected in the school setting in their official capacity as parent mentors, their acceptance in the predominantly White school remains tenuous, particularly, when they enter the school in their “unofficial” capacity as parents advocating on behalf of their own children.

Discussion

The findings in this research provide support for this innovative parent engagement program with Black parents. This work is unique in that the project proposes a parent engagement model that does not subscribe to the traditional ethos of race neutrality and colorblindness ubiquitous in most school systems (Castagno, 2008, 2014; Crozier, 2001). This parent engagement program instead proposes a race-conscious parent engagement model informed by a CRT lens. The Parent Mentor Program has the potential to build upon nontraditional paths to school engagement for Black parents which position them as being in control of the means and methods of school engagement (Beckett et al., 2012; Delgado-Gaitan, 1991, 1993; Dyrness, 2008; Pérez Carreón et al., 2005) This program is different from traditional forms of parent involvement which places schools in charge of determining how parents will be involved and reproduces relations of power that often marginalize Black parents (Baquedano-López et al., 2013). The Black parents in this project do more than share stories, as their narratives work to challenge the system that produces structural disenfranchisement in schools. The experiences of the Black parents challenge the public discourse that seeks to engage “parents as partners” (Christenson, Rounds, & Gorney, 1992). The discourse of “parents as partners,” according to Cooper (2009), is problematic because the power relations in school settings are not equal. Black parents get invited into the schools on the school’s terms and are expected to enact Whiteness as they interact in ways which privilege school personnel as experts rather than as truly equal partners. As evidenced by the findings of this study, Black parents in the Rivertown school district were continually marginalized and dismissed as they attempted to engage the school personnel in conversations around the discipline of their children. The experiences of these parents became the catalyst by which the parents became involved in the Parent Mentor project (Yull, Wilson, Murray & Parham, in press). Parents shared that, prior to the program, they were not welcomed into school; on the contrary, they were treated as problems when they entered the school.

The marginalization of Black bodies in educational institutions is not a new phenomenon. Many scholars have documented the struggle that Black families have engaging the school system in the United States (Boyd-Franklin, 2006; Cokley, 2014; Cooper, 2009; Delpit, 1995, 2012; Kozol, 2005; Noguera, 2001; McAdoo, 2001, 2006; Shujaa, 1994). Although scholars have contended that parent involvement provides a basis to improve the academic outcomes of Black children (Auerbach, 2009; Noguera, 2001), studies have shown that Black parents are no different than other parents regarding the support they provide for their children in schools (Cooper, 2009; Delpit, 2012; Noguera, 2001).

The parents in this study described often feeling marginalized as they walked into the White spaces of schools. Their humanity was questioned in that they were constructed as a racialized “other” not belonging in a school building (Crozier, 2001). W. E. B. Du Bois posed the question “How does it feel to be a problem?” regarding the racialized status of Black people more than 100 years ago (Du Bois, 2003, pp. 3-4). Yet the narratives shared by parents showed that this question persists in the experiences of Black parents in the school system. In their role as parents—and in the initial months as parent mentors—parents shared the feeling that, “They don’t want us here.” Parents also shared that they felt, “Some people would be looking at me like, what are you doing here?” However, over time as they worked in the Parent Mentor Program, they could see a shift how they were being treated by school personnel. At first, they saw small gestures of acceptance. For example, a security guard who said “Good morning” as opposed to, “What are you doing here?” and a front desk attendant who recognized them and did not question why they were there or ask them to sign in. The parents’ sense of belonging to the school community increased as they made suggestions that directly related to a change in the way students were being dealt with in the classroom. While the parents began to feel better about engaging schools they were still reminded periodically of their place of marginalization within the school. This generally occurred when the parents were not in their role as parent mentors, but as parents of children being disciplined by the school district.

The parents’ experiences as parent mentors have changed their relationship with the school, as they have gained the cultural and social capital needed for them to see that they have a right to be in school (Noguera, 2001). They see the work they are doing as important and making a difference for the children at the school. Sharing about bonds they have made with students over the years, one father shared, “I saw one of my students at the store the other day and they ran over and gave me hug and the took me over to meet their parent.” A mother who has been a parent mentor for three shared,

Last year when school ended a few kids wanted to know if I could come to their next grade . . . I’ll be going into 8th grade Ms. K_____ will you come to the 8th grade next year . . . it felt good, like I was making a difference.

A father who spent 1 year as parent mentor shared,

It’s about keeping the kids pushed in to classrooms, they are good kid, they just need people to listen to them . . . listen with your ears and your eyes, you know what I mean . . . sometimes you just need to give them a chance find out what is going on . . . we can help with that . . . keep them in class, keep them learning.

Teachers in this study were positively impacted by their interactions with the parents. They experienced the parents as providing core leadership in building community in the classroom by assisting teachers in promoting a positive milieu for the students. Teachers and parents developed authentic relationships where they functioned as allies in their efforts to help students have success in the classroom. Our findings suggest that teachers can learn from the parents. They see the parents’ cultural connections to Black communities as a mechanism to better understand and gain insight into the lived experiences of Black students in their classrooms. For instance, as previously discussed, when a fight broke out in a seventh-grade class between two female students, the teacher was dismayed that the argument was about hair. The parent mentor took the opportunity to explain to the teacher the cultural nuances of African American hairstyles. The teacher found the parents’ understanding of the cultural relevance of African American hair invaluable to understanding the salience of classroom dynamics. Delpit (2006) contends that it is important for teachers to learn the culture of the students in their classroom. She argues that the academic outcomes of Black students in the classroom are directly connected to the teachers’ commitment to understanding the lived experiences of their students.

Our findings also demonstrate that parents understand the challenges that Black students face in schools and have used their life experiences to connect with students in the classrooms they serve, but they connect with Black students employing culturally relevant, race-conscious parenting practices to keep them from being suspended. They position themselves as caring adults who wholeheartedly believe in the student’s potential for academic success, and they interact with students in a firm yet understanding manner; they demand and expect the students to respect themselves, their peers, and the adults in the lives. This finding is commensurate with the work of Ladson-Billings (1994) related to the concept of culturally responsive pedagogical practices. According to Ladson-Billings (1994) this term refers to “a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially and politically by using cultural references to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (p. 17). Ladson-Billings (1994) articulated the salience of culturally responsive pedagogical frameworks in fostering connections between home and school contexts for students; these contexts can be used by educators as a basis for educational instruction. Building on this idea, Ware (2006) suggests that the incongruence between the culture of the school and the culture of Black students creates the potential for students who lack the cultural capital (Delpit, 1995) to navigate the schools in a way that symbolizes their inability to model the unstated White middle class normative behaviors (Cokley, 2014; Grills et al., 2016; Hale-Benson & Hilliard, 1986; McAdoo, 2001; Morris, 2016). The parents in the Parent Mentor Program not only engaged in culturally responsive approaches but also were dedicated to the academic success of the Black students, often taking on the role as “other parent” (Delpit, 2006). They have high expectations for the students and work hard to keep them in class because they assume the students they encounter can succeed.

The parents engage students in understanding the racial injustices that they experience in school settings and prepare to help them overcome adverse reactions to their behaviors. Researchers have suggested that the behavior modeled by the parents needs to be institutionalized by the teachers and other school personnel, which has been referred to as “warm demander” (Kleinfeld, 1975; Ross, Bondy, Gallingane, & Hambacher, 2008; Ware, 2006). The parents in the Parent Mentor Program have been successful as “warm demanders” using the framework of CRT (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) that challenges the deficit-based construction of Black children and disrupts the perceptions of Black parents as not caring and not capable of advocating for their children. These parents provide an example that challenges the perception that many in the school hold which suggests that when Black bodies walk in the school one can only expect problems (Cooper, 2009; Reynolds, 2010). These parents have experienced this conceptualization personally and shared a number stories of the racism they experienced in schools as they tried to advocate on behalf of their children (Jones & Neblett, 2016). As parent mentors in the school, they were living counternarratives to the deficit and problematic construction of Black parents in Rivertown.

Limitations

There are a number of limitations for the study. First, there was a relatively small number of participants for both parents and teachers. However, our findings are consistent with the national pattern of a deficit-based construction of Black parents and the treatment they receive because of this marginalization (Cooper, 2009; Crozier, 2001; Noguera, 2001). Furthermore, this research reflects an ongoing qualitative research investigation conducted over a period of 4 years, which provided the researchers with an in-depth understanding of the constructs studied.

Second, we were limited in scope based on the geographical location of where the study was conducted. Future research needs to explore the development and implementation of this race-conscious parent engagement model in other regions in the United States. Third, this study relies on convenience sampling with respect to the schools where the parent engagement program was conducted, which poses the possibility of selection bias. This issue may pose limitations in understanding the development and implementation of race-conscious parent engagement programs within other urban and rural school contexts.

Implications

Black parents in this family engagement project represent the community of parents that are often dismissed as uninterested in their children’s educational experiences. This project presents a family-school-community-university collaboration, which provides a successful model for engaging Black parents. It adds to the literature on parent engagement by focusing not on “fixing the parents” so that they fit in the school paradigm of family involvement; instead, this project assumes that the parents will bring into the school culturally relevant skills and experiences that will help change the way teachers engage in the disciplinary practices of Black children (Wilson & Yull, 2016). The framework of CRT (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) and the lens of race consciousness (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008) require that stakeholder’s privilege and respect the knowledge and experience that Black parents bring into school. This work provides a practical example showing the power of bringing Black parents into classrooms not only as mentors for the students but also to provide a cultural bridge helping teachers to challenge the myth that “[B]lack children are innately less capable—that they are somehow inferior” (Delpit, 2012, p. 30). In a school district where the school personnel do not mirror the racial makeup of the children in the schools, the parents provide an avenue to prepare school personnel not only to engage Black families and their children but also to provide some hope in reversing the trends of disproportionate disciplinary practices by placing Black adults in the schools who—just by their mere presence and small actions—can help to dispel the myth that the children walking in Black bodies are inherently “problems.”

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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