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Community Involvement in Education

Vicki O'Day
CPSR/Palo Alto

CPSR News Volume 12, Number 3: Summer 1994

The school system in the United States is currently the focus of extensive reform efforts covering all aspects of the system, such as teaching methods, curriculum, assessment of student work, teacher development, and school governance. (See [1, 2] for overviews of the reform movement.) One of the many elements undergoing change is parent involvement in schools. As a computer scientist who has for the past six months worked with education researchers, I have begun to notice parallels between the role of parents and other community members in schools and the role of end users in participatory design efforts.

In this article, I'll summarize two different paths to community involvement in schools and comment on the lessons from schools' experiences that we might take and adapt to the design process. One path to community involvement is the substitution of school-based decision-making for centralized, top-down authority. The other path is the establishment of integrated community services attached to schools.

SCHOOL-BASED DECISION-MAKING

School reform, including decentralization, has been going on for over twenty years in the U.S. and has gained momentum during the past five to ten years. In 1991, nine states had some form of mandatory shared decision-making program and others encouraged it. The central idea of school-based decision- making is that those closest to the action should have both the authority to make decisions and responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions.

The state of Kentucky, for example, had to redesign its entire school system from scratch after its Supreme Court declared the system unconstitutional since it did not give all students access to a decent education. Kentucky's program is "high-stakes": if a school doesn't meet reform targets, it will be declared a "school in crisis" and its staff will be replaced. Parent involvement is part of the mandate for change: research has shown that the active participation of parents in school has a positive impact on student learning. (See 13 for an example of this research.) By 1996, each school must be run by a council composed of three elected teachers, two elected parents, and the principal. By 1992, about 40% of the schools had set up councils [4].

As in some participatory design teams, the degree to which the outsiders (parents in this case, sometimes teachers as well) are real partners has been found in Kentucky to depend on the group leader's (principal's) style. In some cases, the principal creates side committees that make decisions outside the council structure. In other cases, the council isn't permitted to make decisions about certain critical issues, such as hiring. When teams in Kentucky and other states do share full decision-making authority, parents and teachers both feel that better decisions are made than if the traditional bureaucracy were in place. Innovative and sometimes surprising changes happen, such as hiring ten aides instead of an assistant principal, or setting up Saturday tutoring sessions including high school equivalency tutoring for parents, or choosing to have the kids wear uniforms to cut down on designer clothing costs.

The evaluator of Kentucky's school-based management program outlines four challenges for school- based decision-making [4]:

1. Turning parents, teachers, and administrators into partners instead of adversaries; changing power relationships and sharing goals.
2. Finding a focus for decision-making; establishing priorities.
3. Arranging opportunities for learning teamwork skills. decision-making, conflict resolution, etc.
4. Balancing the tension between specifications and flexibility, top-down vs. bottom-up pressures.

These challenges could be transferred almost intact to the domain of computer system design. Members of participatory design teams also need to become partners with common goals. They have to learn new ways of working together, bringing in people's different perspectives yet still keeping a common focus in design discussions.

Some of the approaches taken in schools to deal with these issues are:

• The council is held accountable for actual student learning outcomes. not just for a reasonable decision-making process.
• The integrity of the system is maintained even if that means transferring principals who can't handle shared decision-making.
• Workshops are given to teachers. administrators, and parents to explain their responsibilities and teach practical operating skills. (However, a weakness has been that workshops don't take into account the different perspectives of the participants, and they tend to be concentrated at the beginning rather than an ongoing process.)
• Regular public meetings are held and given wide news coverage, to bring the larger community into the picture.

Some lessons here for participatory design teams are to include the larger user community rather than relying only on "user representatives," to explicitly teach group work skills tailored to groups with mixed backgrounds and expertise, and to commit to carrying through a participatory design process even when the path is rocky and resistance is high.

One of Kentucky's evaluators points out that it is hard for teachers who are themselves not sure how to handle new practices to welcome parent involvement and input; some tolerance is needed for a gradual pace of' charge. Even with state-mandated parent involvement in school decision-making, it is more common to find parents as volunteers (still in a client or support role) than as partners in the educational process.

One strong rationale for local control is increased professionalism for teachers, treating teachers as skilled, knowledgeable people rather than cogs in a school-factory model [1]. Kenneth Strike points out an interesting tension between teacher professionalism and democratic control as the basic rationale for shared decision-making [5]. Professionalism can carry the connotation of teachers as members of a guild who control all the standards and activities of their profession. (This has its parallels in the elite cadre of software developers.) If increased professionalism were the only motivating factor for sharing of decisions, parents and children would still be clients of the system instead of team members. Democratic control, which Strike advocates, implies a model of equal authority (respect, reciprocity) for all participants. To accomplish this, he suggests these guidelines, which I have annotated with parallels in the system design domain:

1. Work in teams whose size permits face-to-face decision-making.
2. Legitimize and provide parent [user] participation in decision-making.
3. Diversify teams to the extent necessary to create communities with shared values.
4. Set up school boards to be the "voice of the public," rather than policy-setters. (In system design. there isn't a group of people exactly parallel to school boards. The closest may be high-level managers.)
5. Teachers and administrators (professional system designers) should be "first among equals." They have experience and expertise. but they still have the obligation to persuade others rather than assert authority.

   INTEGRATED SCHOOL-BASED COMMUNITY SERVICES

   Next I'll briefly summarize a second path to community involvement in education: integrated school- based services. When families have problems which lead them to use social services, they often have to deal with several different agencies in an uncoordinated fashion. The idea behind integrated services is to establish collaborations among different social service organizations and community members and to make services available under an umbrella program at or near a school. Schools are a natural focal point, since they are convenient and accessible. An important goal of these programs is to ensure that children are mentally and physically able to take part in learning activities: problems children have at school are often related to family issues and are better dealt with at that level.

   One pilot program currently in progress is Healthy Start in California, which has funded sixty-five different integrated services projects, each of which has a different operating model and set of local service providers. All offer some form of "one-stop shopping," and all rely on community involvement and guidance. As is the case inside schools, parents are sometimes adjunct to these efforts, not part of the decision-making process, in spite of the fact that collaboration with parents is a stated goal of the program [6]. However, some centers have found a way of bringing parents and children fully into the process. One example is the Vaughan Family Center in Los Angeles, which is attached to the Vaughan Street School. Since the start of the center, the school itself has withdrawn from district control to become a "charter school," allowing it to function independently yet remain a public school. The Vaughan Family Center and the school are anchored in the community, with goals for children, families, and neighborhood. The center identified local needs that included health care, youth programs, childcare, parent training, job placement, housing, legal counseling, drug counseling, and other social services. Its calendar is full, with services and events ranging from family counseling and consumer rights advocacy to arts and crafts classes and parents' singing practice; it runs a food and clothes closet and hires parents as advocates on the staff. The center is located on the school site and is closely identified with the school community. After the recent earthquake in the Los Angeles area, families camped on the school grounds rather than use Red Cross or FEMA shelters.

   To promote parent involvement, the principal initially identified a few parents to organize and bring in others. During the needs assessment phase of the project, organizers literally went door to door and asked people what they wanted. A program commission composed half of parents and half of service providers meets regularly to make decisions. A Service Exchange Bank tracks services (such as childcare, translation, tutoring, and maintenance) donated by parents in exchange for services obtained. For all of this to work, the external service providers in the coalition had to be discouraged from treating parents without strong educational backgrounds as lower-status participants.

   There are again lessons for participatory design teams. Here, parents have a sense of project ownership and a stake in decision-making, giving the project high energy and high impact. An honest needs assessment was done, drawing on constituents beyond those parents who were most directly involved in the project. The partners in the collaboration are treated with equal respect, though this took some coaching.

   CONCLUSION

   I'll end with a suggestion: this is a very interesting time to be involved in the education community. We may be able to learn something about participatory design from the hard work that parents, children, teachers, administrators, policy-makers, and researchers are doing to change the way schools are run. In return, schools can certainly use any resources the technical community has to offer, from mentoring of students to computer hand-me-downs. As schools respond to local community needs, they depend on local community support.

   NOTES

   [1] Edward B. Fiske, Smart Schools, Smart Kids: Why Do Some Schools Work? Simon & Schuster, 1991.

   [2] Theodore R. Sizer, Horace's School. Redesigning the American High School. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992.

   [3] Concha Delgado-Gaitan, Literacy for Empowerment. The Role of Parents in Children's Education. The Falmer Press, 1990.

   [4] Primary School; School-Based Decision-Making; Family Resource/Youth Services Centers: First Year Reports to the Prichard Committee. The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, Lexington, Kentucky, July 1992.

   [5] Kenneth A. Strike. Professionalism, Democracy, and Discursive Communities. Normative Reflections on Restructuring. American Educational Research Journal 30(2), Summer 1993.

   [6] Debra M. Shaver and Lynn Newman, The Role of Parents in School-Linked Services Programs. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 1994, New Orleans.

   

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