Re-imagining turnaround: families and communities leading educational justice

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-01-2018-0013
Published date06 August 2018
Pages546-561
Date06 August 2018
AuthorAnn M. Ishimaru
Subject MatterEducation,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy,Educational administration,Leadership in education
Re-imagining turnaround:
families and communities leading
educational justice
Ann M. Ishimaru
College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deepen the understanding of how minoritized families and
communities contribute to equity-focused school change, not as individual consumers or beneficiaries, but as
educational and community leaders working collectively to transform their schools.
Design/methodology/approach This qualitative case study examines one poverty-impacted racially
diverse high school in the US West and the changes that occurred over a seven-year period.
Findings Minoritized families, community leaders and formal leaders leveraged conventional schooling
structures such as turnaround reforms, the International Baccalaureate program and the PTA to disrupt
the default institutional scripts of schools and drive equity-focused change for all students, particularly
African-Americans from the neighborhood.
Research limitations/implications Though one school, this case contributes insights about how families
and communities can collaborate withsystems actors to catalyzeeducational justice in gentrifying communities.
Practical implications This study suggests strategies that families and communities used to reclaim
school narratives, infiltrateconventional structures and reorient them toward equitable collaboration and
educational justice.
Social implications This study contributes to a body of critical scholarship on turnaroundreform
efforts in urban secondary schools and suggests ways to reshape decision making, leadership, parent
engagement and student intervention to build collective agency.
Originality/value This research raises provocative questions about the extent to which families and
communities can use conventional structures and policies to pursue educational justice in the US public
education. Learning from such efforts highlights strategies and practices that might begin to help us
construct more decolonizing theories of change.
Keywords Parents, Educational administration, Educational institutions, Decision making,
Community relations, Equity theory
Paper type Research paper
Amid uncertainties in the current educational policy environment and a polarized national
sociopolitical context, long-standing racial and other inequities in education have increasingly
come to the fore in educational improvement and reform policy and research (Darling-Hammond,
2015; Ladson-Billings, 2006). So-called turnaroundreforms, catalyzed by federal education
policy during the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era, incentivize rapid organizational change
instigated by major turnover in leadership as well as teaching staff and assessed solely by
achievement test score outcomes (Sun et al., 2017). Such reforms continue to hold sway as an
enticing theory of change, though the enthusiasm for such reforms belies a decidedly thin
empirical basis (Herman et al., 2008; Mathis, 2009; Trujillo and Renée, 2015).
An emerging body of critical scholarship on whole-school reform has begun to highlight
how topdown decision-making processes by policymakers and systems leaders largely
result in disproportionate impacts on low-income minoritized communities, especially school
closures (Briscoe and Khalifa, 2015; Khalifa et al., 2014). Moreover, in the policy context of
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 56 No. 5, 2018
pp. 546-561
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-01-2018-0013
Received 5 February 2018
Revised 24 May 2018
14 June 2018
Accepted 14 June 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
The author would like to thank the parent, community and educational leaders of Rainier Beach High
School who so generously shared their stories; graduate students Rebeca Muñiz and Ishmael Miller
for their help in the study; and Dr Seashore, Dr Khalifa and anonymous reviewers for their
invaluable feedback.
546
JEA
56,5
neoliberal educational reforms, turnaroundsand the school improvement efforts spurred
by them often relegate young people, their families and their communities of color to the
margins of decision making, which can exacerbate rather than ameliorate racial inequities in
education (Trujillo and Renée, 2015). Yet organized youth, parent and community leadership
have mobilized powerful resistance in response to school closures triggered by turnaround
reforms (Kirshner and Jefferson, 2015). Despite the disproportionate closures of schools
serving black and Latino students, efforts such as the well-publicized hunger strike in
Chicago and grassroots organizing efforts in Detroit have successfully prevented the closure
of some schools (Welton and Freelon, 2018). Such efforts have joined an emergent national
movement that unites efforts to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline with advocacy for
public schools that truly serve all students (Warren, 2014).
A growing body of work illuminates minoritized family and community leaders as
drivers of sustained, equitable school change (Bertrand and Rhodela, 2018; Ishimaru, 2014).
Rather than passive supporters of educator-driven agendas or individual consumers who
choosebetween constrained options, collective parent and community agency and
leadership hold potential for re-imagining the urban secondary school turnaroundtoward
collective action in improving schools (Shirley, 2009). Drawing on an equitable collaboration
framework with racialized institutional scripts, this case study of one poverty-impacted
racially diverse high school addresses the research question:
RQ1. How did minoritized family and community leaders leverage institutionalized
schooling structures toward community-driven educational justice?
Faced with the threat of closure due to low enrollment and graduation rates, Rainier Beach High
School[1] parents and alumni mobilized to save the only predominantly African-American school
in the Seattle Public School district. The story echoes a familiar cascade of long-standing
resource inequities, neighborhood disinvestment, white flight and decision-making resulting in
the disenfranchisement of low-income African-American and other students of color in an urban
secondary school. And yet, ten years later, the schools student enrollment of 800 is on an
upward trajectory, graduation rates have surpassed the district average and the school has
stepped onto the national stage for its academic programs and their role in opening opportunities
to African-American and other historically minoritized students from the neighborhood.
Although the daily reality of the school still entails complexity and struggle, a nuanced
understanding of this turnaroundoffers insights into how minoritized families and
communities can shape the political and normative dimensions of equity-focused change.
This case study highlights how families and communities infiltrated the systemto
reimagine traditional structures like turnaround reforms, advanced learning
opportunities, PTAs, and student interventions in ways that disrupted the typical
narratives and expectations for interactions that accompany these structures. I conclude
with implications for building decolonizing theories of change for community-determined
educational justice in a shifting sociopolitical landscape.
Informing literature
Education reform and racial injustice
Turnaround strategies represent the latest iteration of decades of federal policy aimed at
reforming the lowest achievingschools and the lagging test-based performance of a
growing proportion of the US public school student population (Trujillo and Renée, 2015).
Turnarounds are defined as the quick dramatic improvementof student achievement in
chronically low-performing schools (Herman et al., 2008). Although there are four specific
intervention models delineated by federal policy (transformation, turnaround, restart and
closure),the broad class of reforms catalyzedby School Improvement Grants(SIG), Race to the
Top, and other NCLBwhole-school reform policiesshared similar assumptions and strategies.
547
Re-imagining
turnaround

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT