June Newsflash
Parent activists see continued need for increased parent power in schools
For the Notebook’s Summer 2004 edition, “Focus on the Notebook’s first decade,” we brought together a group of parents, community activists, and researchers with a history of involvement in Philadelphia schools to reflect upon developments in parent activism and organizing over the last decade. An edited version of the conversation appears here. The interview was conducted by Paul Socolar and Beandrea Davis. Participants in the discussion:
Patricia Raymond is a public school parent at Central High School and has been active in Northeast region schools for several years. She currently serves as president of the Philadelphia Home and School Council, the citywide umbrella group of public school parent organizations.
Steve Honeyman is a public school parent and executive director of the Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project (EPOP), which began organizing parents at Sheppard Elementary School in 1993.
Eva Gold is a senior researcher with Research for Action and has studied the intersection of families, communities, and schools in Philadelphia and nationally.
Ros Purnell, formerly a public school parent, is a senior facilitator for Talent Development High Schools at the Philadelphia Education Fund.
Wendell A. Harris is a public school parent and grandparent and has been president of the Birney Elementary, Cooke Middle, and Olney High School Home and School Associations. He currently serves as vice president of the Philadelphia Home and School Council.
Cecelia James, formerly a parent organizer with the Alliance Organizing Project, is a public school grandparent at Welsh Elementary.
Lucy Ruiz, formerly a parent organizer with the Alliance Organizing Project, is currently a public school parent at Edison High School and a community organizer with EPOP.
Carol Hemingway is a public school grandparent and president of the community organizing group Pennsylvania ACORN, which organizes parents at several neighborhood schools.
Notebook: When the Notebook was
founded in 1994, we saw it as a time when a new wave of parent organizing
and activism was emerging. Do you agree?
Patricia Raymond: A lot of it had to do with the public hearings that Judge Doris Smith held in the communities [to solicit input on school reform plans]. I know parents, myself included, who traveled to far ends of the city to make it to one of those meetings so that they could be heard. The issues were fantastic that this independent committee was hearing: high-tech computer labs with no qualified teachers to run them; parents being brushed aside. All of a sudden, information was really getting out to people. And it was like, “Hello, wake up, and smell the coffee here. We do have rights. We do have responsibilities.
Steve Honeyman: There have been several waves of parental involvement and parent organizing going back to the ’60s and ’50s. With Judge Smith’s decision, statistics and data started to be released. And then for the first time, the Inquirer is publishing a list of how the schools do on tests. That wasn’t happening in the ’80s or the ’70s for that matter. During the ‘90s people began to say, “Wait a second. If we’re going to have a good quality of life in our city, we need good public education.”
Eva Gold: We had our particular situation around Judge Smith and the town meetings, but nationally a number of community organizations that had been working hard to improve community conditions were starting to hear from their members, “We need to pay attention to education, we want more involvement with our educational institutions.” So what was happening here was also happening across the country.
Notebook: What were some of the opportunities and obstacles to parent organizing in the schools during the Superintendent Hornbeck era (1994-2000)?
Ros Purnell: I think it was significant that Hornbeck came in with a ten-point plan, and one of the ten points was parents would be involved. Effecting that may have had some serious weaknesses. But that raised the level of consciousness in the community.
Wendell A. Harris: Around the Hornbeck era, parents began to play a greater role in education with issues that impacted our children, because the administrators were telling people that they had to listen to us. They finally came to a realization that they could not succeed without parental and community involvement.
Honeyman: You’re right that Hornbeck came in with a plan. But the disappointing part of the Hornbeck era was his inability to build a team to support his plan. That was the problem with the most important part of the team besides parents – teachers.
Cecilia James: I found that Hornbeck wasn’t actually being upfront and truthful like he said he was. At a town meeting, I spoke about our need for a crossing guard. And he said when the meeting was over to talk to his chief of staff and get back to him in a week if I don’t hear from him. But it took two years. We had to rally and march down to City Hall and talk to councilmen. He said what he felt the people wanted to hear. He did not follow through. It was politics.
Lucy Ruiz: When I found AOP [the Alliance Organizing Project, started in 1995], I gathered more voices and realized “Wow, I have power.” Parent organizing really helped some of the schools in our area. We helped parents have a bigger voice than we ever did before in our lives. So the AOPs of the world, the EPOPs, the ACORNs, we need more of those. We need more community organizations to help us, as parents, to be a part of our community.
Raymond: [When the District switched from six regions to 22 clusters], I sat on the planning team for one of those clusters. We had a dynamic team, some of the best principals, some of the best teachers. And we worked together for months to develop this whole cluster thing. Ultimately, it didn’t matter what happened in that room. The cluster leader mattered. And that’s what we learned.
Gold: There was a lack of realization that teachers and principals were not prepared for the significantly different roles that parents would play under Children Achieving [Hornbeck’s reform plan]. There were a few cluster leaders who were able to take advantage of the work happening at the grassroots level on the ground with parents. But there just wasn’t the kind of professional development necessary to move these new roles for parents forward in a dramatic way.
Notebook: What about parent organizing in the schools during the period leading up to the state takeover?
Carol Hemingway: Parents who hadn’t traditionally been involved in schools really started questioning and stepping up to the plate. For too long parents in the public school system accepted that because it was a school, the educators knew what was best for their children because they were the educators. That’s the kind of awakening I’ve seen, where parents started questioning things because they started feeling power.
Harris: It was a milestone to get with groups during the time when they tried to polarize all of us with the EMOs [education management organizations] during the takeover. We formed coalitions with other groups – people I didn’t really know a lot about before. I’d heard of them and done peripheral work with them, but I never went to Harrisburg with some of them until all that happened. I knew that the EMOs were going to traumatize our children by coming in, trying something, and then when finding out it didn’t work, moving out. We had to get involved and fight this. We showed them that we weren’t going to just lay down and say “Do whatever you want with our school district.”
James: The bottom line is, had we not been organizing, we would not have accomplished anything. The fact that we stepped up to the plate, we came out as winners. And that goes to everyone around this table and all the organizations of parents that were involved in it.
Ruiz: At least Edison didn’t get the 70 schools they wanted. That’s how I see it as a parent. They only got 20.
Notebook: What has been your experience with parent organizing during the Vallas years?
Ruiz: It feels like we, as organizers and community leaders, know what we need to do for the schools, but yet the District doesn’t come to us and ask us. We’re a threat to them. They have a resource around the whole city, but they don’t want to use it.
Purnell: I don’t feel that parents are at the table. I don’t feel that there is an invitation to parents to be there to make those decisions on our children’s behalf. Decisions are being made without our voice – our presence – even being requested. It doesn’t have the validity I feel that it had 10 years ago when there was at least the aura. The parents have to be at the table.
Harris: Paul Vallas sees that he needs us. We’re talking about real issues like curriculum, safety issues, zero tolerance. All these things are things that impact out children. And we’re talking about that now in realistic ways. I tell the parents if ever there was a time where you could make a change in your children’s lives, this is the time. But we have to come together to do it.
Notebook: How would you like to see parent involvement develop in the future?
Raymond: I would just like to see parents being given credit for having half a brain and embraced as partners in education.
James: I would like to see that when the District says parent involvement, two parents cannot sit on any one committee representing the whole District. You need different organizations within the School District that work with parents and understand parents to be able to have them at the table, so that they can voice their opinions.
Ruiz: I think parents are tired of not being heard. And they are also tired of being treated like trash inside schools. I built relationships with teachers inside my children’s school. I knew what I was supposed to do and how to get it. Most of the parents don’t. That’s why we need parent organizers that have been through this stuff so that they can go inside the schools and say, “Look, I’ve been through this; I’ve done it, and you could do it, too.” I’m still involved in McKinley [Elementary School]. If you go there now, it’s a different McKinley from before. It’s beautiful inside. But we don’t want to just make things beautiful. We want the education piece to be right for our children.
Hemingway: If you are going to talk about parent involvement, you’re going to have to talk about it at all levels. From the time you’re sitting around that table talking about developing that budget for that local school, have real parent involvement. Have parent involvement with the day-to-day activity. And also include parents in the running of that school. Those are the kinds of things that would truly be parent involvement.
Gold: Looking at the legacy of the work, there are a number of critical issues that parents in communities helped to raise up, like this issue of the high turnover of teachers in the lowest-income schools. And they’re coming to fruition now – such as with the Teacher Equity Campaign around addressing the inequitable distribution of qualified teachers across the city. Parent organizing work has helped to lay the groundwork for the activity around those issues.
Purnell: At the top of my list would be sustained, consistent, organized parent involvement, not just responding to the flavor of the day or whoever the new CEO is, but parents with their own agenda, who have training and professional development and can make their demands and their voices heard in ways that command respect.
More on this subject in the Notebook’s Summer 2004 edition.
Contact Notebook staff writer Beandrea Davis at 215-951-0330 x156 or beandrea@thenotebook.org.