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    Parents as Advocates: Supporting K-12 Students and their Families Across Identities
    Parents as Advocates: Supporting K-12 Students and their Families Across Identities
    Parents as Advocates: Supporting K-12 Students and their Families Across Identities
    Ebook197 pages1 hour

    Parents as Advocates: Supporting K-12 Students and their Families Across Identities

    By Dr Liz Dempsey Lee PhD

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    About this ebook

    How can students, their families, and their teachers all work together towards common educational goals?

    Teachers want the best for their students, and a student’s family wants the best for them too. But what “best” looks like can be different for everyone. A student’s social identity and family context will have a significant impact on how they and their family define success at school. It is crucial for teachers to be aware of their own social identities, those of their students, and how these various identities might intersect, in order to understand what success might look like for each child in their classroom.

    Exploring various aspects of social identity – including gender identity, race, ability and disability, and socioeconomic status– this book tackles the question of how teachers can work together with their students, as well as how social identity will inform various kinds of advocacy from parents, carers, and family. Vital reading for teachers and educators in practice and in training, this book features suggested discussion questions, practical extension activities, and real-life case studies from the context of K-12 schools in the US.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLived Places Publishing
    Release dateMay 22, 2023
    ISBN9781915271624
    Parents as Advocates: Supporting K-12 Students and their Families Across Identities

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      Book preview

      Parents as Advocates - Dr Liz Dempsey Lee PhD

      Learning objectives

      1. Family (or child) social identities are critical aspects which inform how and why parents advocate.

      2. Developing understanding of family (or child) social identities results in more compassionate and informed responses to parent concerns.

      3. Developing understanding of family (or child) social identities results in deeper and stronger family-school relationships.

      4. Compassion, informed responses, and better family-school relationships lead to better outcomes for children.

      Introduction

      Now you try.

      Chapter learning objectives

      To gain a deeper understanding of how context influences the family-school relationship and parent advocacy.

      Genesis of book

      As an early career teacher, I taught in a small northeastern city—a former mill town that had never quite recovered from the economic blow of the mill closing. The poverty rate was high, as was unemployment. I oversaw a Title 1 funded kindergarten classroom focused on boosting student literacy. Each day, selected students would attend their regular half-day class and come to me for the other half of the day. In the beginning-of-year literacy assessments, my students fared poorly. None knew all their letters. Some had never held a pencil, and others could not orient a book to an upright, left to right position. And so, we worked intensely to address these early literacy concepts. I worked with students’ families as well, teaching them about the value of reading to children and providing activities and books to use at home.

      Ideally, my classroom would increase student skills in a short amount of time and transition them out of my classroom. However, this assumed that the primary obstacle my students faced was a lack of experience and exposure. Of course, this was not always the case. Many students had complicated situations. Dylan¹ qualified for free and reduced meals and would eat daily as much food as the food service workers gave him—up to three meals at breakfast and also at lunch. Victoria didn’t speak—at all. Donny arrived in the classroom each morning and promptly fell asleep in the book corner. And Kelli played out the same scenario in the play kitchen day after day. Hide the babies in the closet! The police are coming!

      But of all these children, Dallas stood out. A quiet redhead with a smattering of freckles across his pale face, he worked hard in class. He entered kindergarten recognizing only one letter, the first letter of his name. He and I worked and worked, but any gains made during the week were erased over the weekend and on Monday we were back at the beginning. No matter which approaches I used, letters simply didn’t stick in Dallas’s mind. Something else was going on.

      His parents, Joe and Gail, whom I had never met, were due for their first parent literacy engagement meeting. When they arrived, I shared my concerns and explained that they could support Dallas at home, and I was happy to teach them how. Thanks to a generous grant, I had books and activities for Dallas to keep. I modeled reading a picture book to an early reader and carefully explained how to engage Dallas, where to pause, and how often they should read together.

      I turned to Joe and handed him the book saying, Here, now you try! He looked at the book as if it were a rattlesnake and reluctantly opened it. Oblivious, I nattered on about the joy of books and invited him to start reading—an impossible request, as it turned out, because Joe was unable to read. At this moment, the weight of my faulty assumptions fell squarely onto us all—and that weight broke our relationship. Joe and Gail were deeply embarrassed. Without a word, they got up and left as quickly as they could. I never saw them again. They didn’t come to conferences, parties, or school events. By the end of the year, I suspected that Dallas had a serious learning disability and that perhaps his father did as well. My one-size-fits-all approach to working with parents had cut Dallas’s greatest advocates, those who knew him best, from participating in his education. This was, of course, not deliberate, but the consequences were severe and lasting, nonetheless.

      Fast forward to summer 2019, when I began my dissertation research on perceptions of education among parents with different socioeconomic backgrounds. As I worked, I had Dallas, Joe, and Gail in my mind. That summer, I spoke with many parents both for my research and in the course of my daily life as a parent to three young children. I sat across from Ada, a mother of two, and listened as she described a systematic bullying campaign lasting two school years (Lee, 2020, p. 124). Although the reasons for this bullying were not entirely obvious, her classmates did reference her Middle Eastern heritage, asking do you belong to ISIS? (Lee, 2020, p. 120). Ada advocated tirelessly for her daughter with little effect. The bullying did not end until her daughter transitioned to high school.

      Just a day before I met Ada, I’d had a long conversation with another parent, Mandy (not part of my research). Mandy was a typical parent in her community—she was white, had an MBA, and worked at a financial services firm in the nearby city. Together, she and her husband made a comfortable living in a town where the median price for a house was $900,000. Mandy was deep in anxiety over math instruction at her daughter’s school. In this mother’s view, her third grader was quite advanced in math and, in her view, the conceptual mathematics program in her public elementary school was not challenging enough. She had spoken with the teacher, who disagreed. I did not know enough about either her daughter or the school to be able to evaluate Mandy’s statement; however, I was struck by the meaning she pulled from this situation. Mandy believed that without a more rigorous—and by this she meant traditional—teaching style, her daughter’s future would be ruined. She would never be accepted to a decent college, and that would have lifelong negative consequences. So, Mandy outlined a three-point plan to remediate this perceived weakness of the school:

      1. Lobby the school to adopt a more rigorous curriculum, as defined by her.

      2. Lobby the school to provide more advanced and traditional teaching to her child in addition to the regular class work.

      3. Pay thousands of dollars for a traditionally structured, extra after-school math class twice a week for her daughter.

      Mandy posted her concerns on social media and, within a week, had garnered more than 100 signatures on a petition. By the next week she had organized 25 parents to speak at the school board meeting and secured a meeting with the district superintendent.

      Ada’s and Mandy’s children attended schools in the same community but had very different experiences. Ada’s child was bullied every day. So, Ada had immediate and pressing concerns. The other child appeared to be thriving, but her mother, Mandy, had deep-seated concerns—not about her daughter’s present circumstances, but about a hypothetical problem located more than ten years in the future. Likewise, both parents received different responses to their advocacy. Ada was ultimately unsuccessful in addressing her concern, while Mandy was rapidly heard by the broader community of parents, the school board, and the superintendent. I wanted to understand how a family’s social identity might influence different views of education, the ways parents advocate for their students, and different outcomes (Lee, 2020).

      Parent advocacy

      This book is an in-depth exploration of a critical facet of teachers’ work with students’ families—parent advocacy. Each chapter explores a distinct characteristic that influences parent advocacy: race and ethnicity, ability, gender identity, and high socioeconomic status. Parent advocacy is defined as actions taken by a parent in support of their student, with the goal of influencing the educational setting to best meet the perceived educational, social, and/or emotional needs of the child. Like the desire to engage with schools, parent advocacy emerges from a place of concern and love for children. Moreover, parents advocate for many different reasons and in different ways, depending on their and their student’s needs as defined by that family’s context.

      As we see in the examples of Joe, Ada, and Mandy, not all parent advocacy involves problems of equal weight. All parents’ concerns should be evaluated by educators with attention to the family’s social identity and how that interconnects with the larger settings of school and community. Of these three parents, Joe was completely excluded from his child’s learning and was rendered voiceless. Mandy was worried about her child’s distant future, while Ada struggled with a substantial and immediate problem faced by her child. These parents had remarkably different experiences advocating.

      This book is based on my mixed methods dissertation research, titled Win the Game or Build Decent Humans? Parental Perceptions of the Family School-Relationship Across Socioeconomic Backgrounds (Lee, 2020). I also draw extensively on my own experiences and observations as an early childhood educator and parent to three. My research centered on two primary questions. Does socioeconomic status influence perceptions of engagement among parents in high-income public schools? focused the quantitative section (Lee, 2020, p. 78). The qualitative section asked, How do parents of children in a high-income public-school system describe their relationship with the school? The related sub-questions asked To what do they attribute their experiences (positive, negative, neutral)?, and Do their perceptions vary by socioeconomic status? (Lee, 2020, p. 79).

      This book extends that work by focusing on the intersection of

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