Disrupting the Racialized Power Imbalance Between Home and School: Working Toward a New Mental Model for Family Engagement

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally rearranged the boundaries between home and school. Chelsea Public Schools (CPS), which was fully remote for most of the 20-21 school year, sought to make use of this historic opening to improve partnerships between families and educators. The challenge, as research tells us, is that educators across America have not typically been trained or exposed to examples of successful family engagement, and many hold deficit-based views of families that are often rooted in racial bias. This is particularly relevant in Chelsea, where 90% of teachers are white and 94% of students are children of color (87% Latinx), and where the renewed national reckoning on racial injustice has coincided with a new equity agenda being led by the district’s first Latina Superintendent. My residency, housed in the Superintendent’s office, was designed to support teachers and administrators in building a new mental model for a solidarity-driven and equity-focused family engagement practice, with the goal of setting a foundation for sustained improvements over time. There were three phases to this work. First, a broad districtwide effort introduced trust as the indispensable component of strong partnerships with families. This included professional development and 1-on-1 family-teacher “trust visits” with each family in the district. Second was a series of focused co-design teams that involved families, teachers and administrators, which deliberately interjected upon racialized power imbalances by centering family voices in addressing remote learning challenges. Third, co-design teams went through an organizational learning process that made use of their shared experience to reflect publicly on their past and future family engagement practice.

This capstone offers a critical analysis of these efforts, as well as implications for CPS and school districts across the country. It suggests that the key to improving home- school partnerships is for districts to invest in building the infrastructure that provides educators the time and professional learning experiences they need to strengthen their family engagement practice.