Organize This!

January 14, 2009 by alicemercer

This is where I conclude my series on poverty and education. In the first installment, I discussed overall theory about poverty, and how education fits in to these (not well as a cure). I then discussed the particular actions that a school could take to improve relations with parents that have issues with schools that reach beyond just treating them as an obstacle. Next, I wrote about how not all poor families are the same or behave the same, and how this affects issues like school choice. I then finished up with suggestions about how to incorporate choice for your students in the classroom.

One of the things that I like about my site is that we are building relations with our parents. I’d say were in the early stages of this, and not all is smooth sailing, but there are some basics we have in place that are worth noting. First, we have community information posted in English and other languages around the lobby and other public areas. We have daytime ESL classes with daycare. We encourage parents to be on campus. This requires conscious thought and action.

From Eduwonkette, a study on class differences in how parents interact with schools and the assumptions that educators make about this. Here is an excerpt:

Poor parents saw teachers as professionals, deferred to their judgment, and believed it was the role of the school to educate their children. But teachers’ definitions of what parents’ role should be differed, and many interpreted their failure to fill this role as an issue of values.

I like the study because rather than saying poor parents aren’t doing the right thing (being super involved in their kids education), it talks about the expectations that both parties bring to the “relationship”. Not ALL poor parents are “hands-off” in their approach to schools, but if you find yourself complaining about how little parent participation there is in your school, there is reason this is occurring and will require you work with these parents to make them feel welcome, and let them know they can participate and some ways they can do it.

My school site is starting to move up to the next level of parent involvement, by forming and nurturing parent groups. The groups are concerned with supporting their children’s learning, but they are also hearing from local community organizations, and taking up larger community concerns. For example, the Hmong parent group helped out in starting a tutoring group started by local college and high school students. The African American parent group is doing tutoring with students, and is also looking into the problems caused by abandoned and unmaintained properties in the neighborhood.

We try to bring in allies. We have local community non-profits like Hmong Women, and Oak Park Weed and Seed talk to parents. We have a local non-profit that does fund-raising for our school, but there is more than that. They are assisting families who are in dire straits. They sponsor efforts to reach out to parents with our weekly coffee on us (which makes our campus more welcoming). But their work on health care is the most interesting to me. They did fundraising to sponsor an effort to sign-up families for MediCal (a substantial percentage of eligible families are not signed up), and for families that can’t qualify (immigration status, income too high for MediCal but too low to get insurance), getting them medical care.

Now I’m going to talk about organizing students. I hinted about some work I did with students to develop a sense of their own rights and worth. I’m in the middle of a lesson that can show some of the promise, and pitfalls when doing these projects. Sixth Graders are doing a unit on “Taking a Stand” where they read selections on Gandhi, the U.S. civil rights movement, etc. I started by going back to a lesson I had done with the upper-grade students (including these students when they were fifth graders) on the rights of the child. I asked them to reflect on rights they were supposed to have, and rights they thought they should have, and how conditions in their neighborhood, one of the most violent parts of the metro area, violates their rights. This sounded good when I was planning it, but when I reviewed the student responses with my husband it just seemed too negative. I had made a mistake in focusing only on the negative. Still, since this was one part of an ongoing project, it was easily fixed. This week I’ll be asking students to share what works in their neighborhood.

This will eventually will culminate in a presentation that is a “letter” to the new president and our new mayor, about what Oak Park needs that the students will put together. Why is just focusing on problems a problem? First, it gets you in a negative frame of mind, second, you ignore what is working and needs strengthening, and third it will make for better propaganda in the final product to have the good with the bad. This will help teach students how to advocate for themselves.

Will it close the achievement gap? No. Will this fix all the problems of poor students and their families? Heck no! But here are some reasons why you might want to try these steps.

It will get you into a more pleasant and less confrontational relationship with your parents and students.
It will teach students how to think critically.
It will give students topics to work on that they know and understand. Really, is there any sense in having them collecting pennies for kids with cancer when many of them may not have health insurance, and you just ignore that because it’s too problematic or political?
It may make some small measure of improvement in their lives.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged parents, Policy, poverty | 4 Comments

Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)

4 Responses to “Organize This!”

on 14 Jan 2009 at 10:12 pm1 Jane

This is great, Alice. I just shared it via Google Reader with my teacher ed students. It’s such a strong example of working with low-income kids and families without first plowing through long lists of cultural deficits that presumably hold back poor families…in the name of “understanding” them.

I’m curious. This series of posts was spurred in part by the discussion over at Dangerously Irrelevant about theory/practice/Ruby Payne/ alternatives, and any number of people have suggested (there and elsewhere) that teachers gravitate toward Payne because there are so few other people talking about working with poor families or teaching poor kids.

It seems that in your school, there had to be some core ideas about what would happen if you worked pro-actively with parents and began with respect. Was there some broader conversation about this? I think that I’m asking if some of this work began with some bigger picture thinking about the nature of the problem (dare I say it: theory about poverty?) that did not begin with assumptions of deep cultural deficits. I am really interested in how some schools get to the work that you describe here and others instead spend thousands of dollars to talk about how all poor people do x and y and we have to understand how different they are from us to begin working effectively with them.

Thanks for this series. I’ve been following with great interest even though I’ve been too slammed to comment.

[Reply]
alicemercer Reply:
January 15th, 2009 at 12:09 am
First, the principal at my site has really pushed this. In my wrap up, I’ll share the some of the occasional “splinters” that come up from time to time with staff. Nothing is ever perfect in the real world, is it? Many of our teachers are from the same immigrant/refugee community that our students come from, so they get many things about this. I recently had a discussion with a coworker about her experience with MediCal dentistry as a child. That helps a lot.

This blog was started to have discussions about what it is really like teaching in these communities, so to the degree it helps forward that, hoorah!

Please feel free to add to the discussion, and have your teacher ed students post either their experience or questions. I want to share ideas in a week or so.

[Reply]
on 11 Feb 2009 at 10:45 am2 Jane2

I’m interested in getting back to your 1st installments, and am also thinking about how to get parents in to start these more positive discussions. Am currently an ELL tchr., but started as a music tchr. As a strong advocate for the arts in ed., I have a grant that allows my students & a parent to attend community concerts, regular visits to the art center, plays, etc. I’m about to wrap it up in March w/a presentation to the board of ed. Any advice on how to get the board informed of needs of our students–bldg. is at or above 75% poverty? How to take what I’ve started and move it into drawing the parents into their child’s education and our bldg. activities? Any thoughts or ideas of other grants to apply for so that I can offer my students instrumental lessons & the instruments, group art classes at the Art Center, chances to be involved in plays?? Thanks for any help.

[Reply]
on 11 Feb 2009 at 12:25 pm3 alicemercer

For the board preso, my first suggestion is to tell a story. Make a composite student, and describe their challenges and needs, and how this grant will help with that. Include some really cute photos, and you’re on your way.

To get parents involved, are there processes that exclude parents? Some, you probably have to have, like making them sign-in, but make it was friendly and non-confrontational as possible. Second, have food at an event. We do coffee on Mondays as parents drop off kids. Try to find out what time(s) work best for parents. When parents do show up on campus, make them feel welcome, and thank them. This will help ease them in and let them know this is a space where they are welcome. If boundaries (like closed campus, sign-in) have to be enforced, don’t accuse the parents, make it clear it is not about them, but their child’s safety.

[Reply]