A governing assumption of our community-based research partnership in Philadelphia is expressed cogently by Ann Ishimaru: “The people with the deepest understandings” of the impact of educational policies “are the youth and the families themselves.” For over a decade, our research team has been working alongside youth, parents, and other local leaders as they conduct original research on issues of educational access and justice that affect their communities (Campano, Ghiso, & Welch, 2016). They have made presentations to a wide range of audiences, including school leaders, on issues related to tracking, the material conditions of schooling, anti-racist pedagogy, language access, policing, and the necessity for sanctuary schools, to name a few — topics that resonate with many of the examples of community-based leadership described in Ishimaru’s essay.
The partnership is just one small node in a whole constellation of grassroots organizing efforts in our city, where families draw on local intellectual and activist legacies to transform education. And given their deep roots, these struggles for educational justice will continue over the long term, regardless of the short-term priorities of school district leaders or educational researchers.
Like Pedro Noguera, we know many school and district administrators who work effectively with parents to improve schooling. But we believe the best way to uproot deeply entrenched inequities is not to rely on individual champions within the school system but to involve multiple stakeholders working in solidarity with families and following their intellectual and political leads.
As Ishimaru rightly argues, “individualistic” and “race and power-neutral” approaches to school leadership tend to stymie such collaboration. But even when school and community-based leaders challenge these “outmoded” leadership styles, they still face significant challenges. Dominant ideologies that dehumanize working class families of color are not merely oppressive ideas held by individuals, but they are also baked into the very infrastructure of schooling. As one activist Latinx parent in our group stated: “We need to know more about the constraints teachers and schools face so we can advocate for them politically.”
In the context of Philadelphia, the poorest large city in the country, this oppression manifests itself in toxic school buildings imbued with asbestos and lead, unconscionably high student-to-counselor ratios, insufficient numbers of nurses and librarians, and a lack of enriching electives to nurture students’ creativity. Under such conditions, there is a high turnover of faculty, making it difficult for schools to forge the trust with families that Noguera describes as essential. Further, given the economic strains it faces, the district has come under intense pressure to shutter existing schools and increase the number of new charter schools — this has been the case especially since the adoption of a draconian “doomsday budget” in 2013, though many local students have joined their teachers in protesting these changes.
As children and youth have become increasingly dispersed among schools spread throughout the city, the neighborhood public school has lost much as its power to serve as a locus of community leadership and organizing. Meanwhile, the high school admissions process has become more complicated and stressful, forcing students to compete for access to a handful of high-status schools. Increasingly, families have been pitted against each other as they try to secure scarce resources (such as access to advanced placement classes), undermining their collective efforts to forge a universalistic vision of a high-quality education.
It is important to note that institutions of higher education have not been neutral observers of these trends. For better or worse, as Davarian Baldwin (2021) has argued, universities are central to the sociopolitical ecology of cities, and they often wield a disproportionate amount of power over the communities that have enabled them to thrive. For instance, in Philadelphia, where there is already an affordable housing crisis, higher education institutions have contributed to the dispossession and dislocation of Black, Brown, and immigrant residents through gentrification. And because of their tax-exempt status, universities do not pay property taxes that would otherwise help fund the school system. They have also shunned community-driven campaigns to have them make Payments in Lieu of Taxes (or PILOTs), despite being the city’s largest landowners, with massive endowments. In short, even while they train and certify local school leaders, universities often undermine efforts by local community members to exert strong leadership of their own.
University-based education researchers can certainly push their own institutions to take more responsibility for their civic behavior. But they can also do more, as researchers, to support the communities they often rely on. For example, they can provide resources and even paid compensation for those local leaders who generously share their knowledge and time with them. And they can be careful to respect the rights of local community members to be fully involved, as partners, in research, programs, and projects that affect them and their schools (Campano, Ghiso, & Thakurta, 2022). For that matter, many members of the university research team, including graduate students, may themselves belong to the local community and have important knowledge to share about demystifying educational access and navigating academia.
Coming together in a spirit of inquiry and dialogue is a crucial component of efforts to forge genuine solidarity (Bang et al., 2016). In our own partnerships, we’ve seen many families learn about one another’s respective histories and experiences as they define a unified vision of educational justice. Many Latinx and Asian families have gained a deeper understanding of anti-Black racism in schools, and families with citizenship status have garnered insights into the challenges of being undocumented. (For example, some parent leaders have been denied access to their children’s schools because of social security number requirements and the presence of ICE.)
Indeed, some immigrant parents were initially reluctant to be take political stances and question the authority of school administrators, in part because they experienced authoritarian rule and genocide in their home countries. But over time, through relationships cultivated in the partnership, they have taken inspiration from Black struggles for liberation and claimed their own roles as community leaders. One of our Indonesian parents, for example, began asking district administrators incisive questions about how schools will protect their students in the face of resurgent anti-Asian violence.
The long-term nature of the community-based research group has helped to foster ever-expanding networks of care and belonging. Everyone who has become involved in the partnership has done so organically through already established relationships, and many individuals have forged new bonds of friendship, often across social boundaries. A local intellectual legacy has also developed over time, with former youth participants becoming research fellows who mentor younger generations about research and leadership. The mentees, in turn, conduct new action research that builds off the work of previous generations, carrying the torch forward. These coalitions extend to bringing family and school leaders together with university-based researchers to engage in more systematic dialogue. Several of our school leaders are also community leaders and organizers, and several of our former Philadelphia youth researchers are now undergraduate university scholars. Their lives and commitments traverse the boundaries between school and community. No one in the initiative is naïve about the magnitude of the challenges facing the educational system, but everyone takes heart in sustaining an alternative leadership collective where we come together in common cause of a more just educational future for all youth, in Philadelphia and beyond.
References
Baldwin, D.L. (2021). In the shadow of the ivory tower: How universities are plundering our cities. Bold Type Books.
Bang, M., Farber, L., Gurneau, J., Marin, A, & Soto, C. (2016). Community-based design research: Learning across generations and strategic transformations of institutional relations toward axiological innovations. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 23 (1), 28-41.
Campano, G., Ghiso, M.P., & Welch, B. (2016). Partnering with immigrant communities: Action through literacy. Teachers College Press.
Campano, G., Ghiso, M.P., & Thakurta, A. (2022). Community-based partnerships: Advancing epistemic rights through improvement research. In D.J. Peurach, J.L. Russell, L. Cohen-Vogel, & W.R. Penuel (Eds.), The foundational handbook on improvement research in education (pp. 189-210).
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Gerald Campano
Gerald Campano is a professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Maria Paula Ghiso
Maria Paula Ghiso is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City.
