Abstract
For the past several decades, the construct of parent involvement (PI) has framed much of the literature on school–family–community partnerships. In this study, the authors used a qualitative form of meta-analysis called thematic synthesis to explore a programmatic alternative to conventional PI known as collective parent engagement (CPE). The CPE approach examined in this study was implemented in three low-income, urban school communities. The primary goal was to help low-income parents develop programs and services that could support the strengths, needs, and challenges of children and families at school and in the community. The findings indicated that, when implemented as an isolated or “stand-alone” service strategy, CPE generally does not influence school outcomes. But when tied to a broader system of reform efforts, CPE can help transform the social-institutional landscape of low-income, urban school communities.
Keywords
How should schools serving large numbers of low-income children go about engaging their parents? How can schools work with parents and communities to address poverty-related barriers to children’s healthy learning and development? What are the theoretical and empirical warrants for school–family–community partnerships that include parents in their design and implementation?
For the past two decades, we have explored these questions by designing, implementing, and then researching programmatic efforts to address poverty-related barriers to children’s school learning. The goal of our work has been to develop new models of formal and informal social organization in urban places where poverty and segregation are concentrated and where schools enroll a high percentage of students who receive free or reduced lunch (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2014; Milner & Lomotey, 2014). Our working assumption has been that all such urban communities have the innate capacity to support children’s educational and developmental needs. What is often “missing” from these communities are programmatic efforts that can help schools and neighborhood service agencies better utilize existing community resources. To assist with this effort, we have developed a relational approach to parent engagement and support that we call collective parent engagement (CPE; after Shirley, 1997; Warren, Hong, Rubin, & Uy, 2009).
Our particular conception of CPE begins by engaging low-income parents in the design and delivery of services and supports for other low-income parents and families at the school and in the community. Once these programs are developed, efforts are made by professional service providers to integrate parents’ collective work into a broader systems improvement strategy. This improvement strategy aims to engage multiple school–community stakeholders in activities that are designed to (a) broker needed school–family–community resources at the school site, (b) develop in-school referral mechanisms for children and families needing assistance, and (c) improve the capacity of schools and neighborhood service agencies to respond to parent-identified needs and concerns (e.g., Alameda-Lawson, Lawson, & Lawson, 2013; Lawson & Alameda-Lawson, 2012).).
In previous studies (e.g., Alameda-Lawson, Lawson, & Lawson, 2010; Lawson & Alameda-Lawson, 2012)), we highlighted the key design features that emerged from analyses of CPE in single program settings. In this article, we extend this setting-specific research by analyzing how CPE “works” across the three project sites where the model was implemented. This expanded view of CPE responds to research needs to better understand how urban schools can build on and from the strengths and assets of their constituent families and communities (Milner & Lomotey, 2014). It also highlights needs for school improvement models that provide a more expansive, engagement-focused reach into children’s family, neighborhood, and community ecologies (e.g., Hopson, 2014).
Literature Review and Conceptual Framework
To date, much of the study of parent involvement (PI) has focused on what parents do relative to the goals and priorities of schools (Olivos, 2012). In this school-centric framework, parents who are “involved” represent individuals who volunteer at the school when asked, attend parent–teacher conferences regularly, and consistently monitor their children’s homework and academic performance (Epstein, 2011). Parents who are “uninvolved” do not participate in the same range of school-centric activities (Gutman & McLoyd, 2000; Lawson, 2003).
Because research has identified parents’ school involvement as an important correlate for children’s academic achievement (Epstein, 2011; Jeynes, 2014), it is often positioned as a centerpiece of urban school reform (Warren et al., 2009). But this consistent emphasis has not changed the fact that PI remains weak in many low-income, urban school communities (Horvat, Weininger, & Lareau, 2003; Warren, Mapp, & The Community Organizing and School Reform Project, 2011). This ongoing PI difficulty has led some scholars to seek alternative ways to understand how low-income parents might engage with their schools and communities (e.g., Lawson, 2003; Olivos, 2012; Valdes, 1996).
The “Ecologies of Parent Engagement (EPE)” model developed by Barton, Drake, Perez, St. Louis, and George (2004) represents one such conceptual framework. In contrast to models that depict PI as a set of school-centric activities and goals (e.g., Epstein, 2011), EPE frames parent engagement as the intersection between parents’ strengths, assets, and worldviews, and the characteristics of their surrounding social and institutional environments. This social-ecological view extends the study of parent engagement beyond the actions and reactions of individual parents to include analyses of the social networks and interactions that exist between and among parents, teachers, and other school–community agents (see also O’Conner, Mueller, & Neal, 2014).
Two overarching EPE concepts help characterize the quality and nature of these dynamics. The first concept involves the notion of a “social setting” (i.e., Sarason, 1972). In EPE, social settings are developed in particular activities, locations, or physical structures (e.g., the home, school, or playground). They consist of a set of “social regularities” (i.e., norms, rules, and expectations) that help two or more individuals achieve certain goals (Christens, 2012; Sarason, 1972; Seidman, 2012).
Since social settings are created by people and not places (Case & Hunter, 2012), it is possible for schools to host multiple social settings—even within a single classroom. But it is also possible for social settings to transcend the physical boundaries of place—such as when role relationships between students maintain their character across school, home, and community environments (e.g., Ream & Rumberger, 2008). In EPE, the key is identifying the social practices, values, and boundaries that comprise each setting where parent engagement occurs (Seidman, 2012).
The second EPE concept is “parental capital.” In EPE, “parent capital” is operationalized as the human, social, and material resources parents use to pursue their own desired purposes or goals (e.g., Barton et al., 2004). In more affluent school communities, parents leverage these capital resources (i.e., their educational background, their social status, their time, and their money) to engage proactively in their children’s school (e.g., Evans, 2014). In contrast, low-income parents, by virtue of being poor, often do not have access to the same range of social, educational, and financial resources (Horvat et al., 2003). As a consequence, their school engagement may depend on their capacity to leverage an alternative set of social-cultural resources (e.g., Iddings, Combs, & Moll, 2014).
Here, Yosso’s (2005) work on cultural wealth is especially salient. Her work identifies several forms of family “resource capital” that schools can leverage to support parents’ school engagement. These alternative forms of capital include (a) parents’ aspirational capital, that is, the capacity of low-income parents to maintain hopes and dreams for the future in spite of adverse circumstances; (b) parents’ familial capital, that is, their capacity to forge “extended family” and kinship bonds; and (c) parents’ navigational capital, that is, their ability to negotiate and gain resources from complex social-institutional systems.
Toward an Ecology of CPE
The preceding section highlights opportunities for urban schools to create engagement practices and settings that build on and from parents’ indigenous strengths, assets, and capital resources (Milner & Lomotey, 2014). In recent years, CPE has emerged as a practice model that can help low-income schools realize this important opportunity (e.g., Bess & Doykos, 2014; Ishimaru, 2014a; Warren et al., 2009). In contrast to PI efforts that aim to involve individual parents in service of the school, CPE models are designed to engage parent groups (or collectives) in service of the neighborhood community as well as the school (Schutz, 2006; Shirley, 1997). The theory is that once parents are engaged with others of like circumstance, they may be more likely to view themselves as powerful change agents in the school and the community (Warren et al., 2009). Enhanced child, family, and social-institutional outcomes are considered more likely when parents are provided opportunities to collectively address school–community problems and concerns (Boutte & Johnson, 2014; Schutz, 2006).
However, in order for parents to be successfully engaged and mobilized, new social and organizational resources may need to be developed. For some low-income school communities, this may require changing multiple aspects (or levels) of parents’ surrounding social environment (e.g., Blanchet-Cohen & Bruson, 2014). For instance, at the individual level, CPE may require parent-focused interventions that help socially isolated parents forge needed social ties with other families in the community (Ishimaru, 2014a; Warren et al., 2009). On the mezzo or collective level, CPE may require collaborations that help low-income parents gain consistent access to needed academic, housing, health, financial, and mental health resources (Bess & Doykos, 2014). Finally, at the social-institutional level of analysis, CPE may require new institutional practices and policies that help low-income parents use their existing strengths and know-how to support their schools, families, and constituent neighborhood communities (Alameda-Lawson & Lawson, 2002; Ishimaru, 2014a; Lawson & Alameda-Lawson, 2012).
The CPE model investigated in this study was designed to attend to these multilevel needs and priorities. Guided by an empowerment-based helping philosophy, the model was developed to include three primary design phases. As each phase is described in detail later in the article, a brief summary of the effort is provided here.
The first design phase of CPE focused on engaging low-income parents who were not involved at the school. Three primary service activities comprised this “individual engagement” phase of CPE: (a) door-to-door outreach to the homes of parents with school-aged children; (b) a collaborative decision-making/needs assessment process, called the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), that allowed parents to collectively identify and prioritize barriers and constraints to the education, health, and overall social welfare of their children (Delbecq & Van de Ven, 1971); and (c) a 40-hr outreach training course that helped parents develop skills in community outreach and referral. Each activity was led by a professional project facilitator (PF), who typically possessed a Master of Social Work degree.
The second design phase of CPE included project activities that targeted the development of the parent collectives. Throughout this “collective development” phase, the PF provided parents with the additional training and resources they needed to design and implement programs that could meet the needs of other parents and families in the community. For all such work, parents were paid a US$40 weekly stipend.
The third and final phase of CPE—referred to here as the “systems development” phase—included activities that were designed to help the school and neighborhood service providers better respond to the strengths, needs, and challenges of low-income families. Significantly, most of these “systems development” activities were launched by a school–community collaborative (SCC) of educators, professional service providers, and parents. This community collaborative was developed to broker needed school–family–community resources at the school site and to improve the capacity of schools and neighborhood service agencies to respond to parent-identified needs and concerns (e.g., Alameda-Lawson, 2002; Lawson & Alameda-Lawson, 2001).
Charting the Development of the CPE Model
The CPE model investigated in this study was implemented in three low-income, urban school communities between the years 1991 and 2009. The original pilot site was developed in a large city in South Florida (FL) with a local university serving as fiscal agent for all project operations. The two replication projects were implemented in a midsized city in Northern California. Each replication effort was administered by a local nonprofit working in collaboration with a local university. Details of the contextual features of each site are provided in Table 1. All three CPE projects served Title One elementary schools.
Key Design Features of Each CPE Program Site.
Note. CPE = collective parent engagement; MSW = Master of Social Work; API = academic performance index.
The FL pilot site was implemented in a low-income community that was primarily comprised of newly arrived Latino immigrants. The FL site was targeted for CPE because the school district identified the school as the most in need of support and assistance. This designation was given because the school had the lowest attendance in its feeder pattern and had standardized test scores that ranked in the bottom 5% in the State of Florida (Alameda, 1996).
Within 3 years of CPE program implementation, the FL pilot had served as a catalyst for several important organizational and educational outcomes. For example, during the first program year, the school witnessed dramatic decreases in the rate of school-wide absenteeism. School-wide test scores also improved significantly during the first 3 years of program implementation (U.S. Department of Education, 1996). Moreover, 4 years after the onset of the project, a cadre of CPE parents had developed their own nonprofit child care and family service agency which remains operational at the school today. And, as a result of these accomplishments, the school was named the top Title One School in Florida for 2 consecutive years (Alameda, 1996).
Replication efforts in Northern California
Following the success of the FL pilot, the authors replicated the project in two school communities in Northern California’s Central Valley (CA). The first CA site was implemented in a Title One elementary school that served a “walled-in” residential community that was comprised mostly of low-income, African American families. This site was selected for replication because it had the lowest test scores and the highest incidents of suspensions in the district. All activities for this project were housed in a double-wide portable that was located in the back of the school.
The second CA replication site was developed as a school-linked project. This CPE effort was school linked because there was no usable space for program operations at the targeted elementary school. As a consequence, all program activities were conducted out of three activity rooms that the host nonprofit agency leased from a church located across the street from the school. Similar to the original FL site, this school served an urban neighborhood that was primarily populated by newly arrived Latino immigrants.
The Present Study
The purpose of the present study was to explore and theorize how this particular CPE model “works” across different school, family, and community contexts. We began this research with two operating assumptions. The first assumption was that needs remain for parent engagement models that help urban schools better build on and from the strengths of their constituent families and communities (Milner & Lomotey, 2014). The second assumption was that differences in local school–community contexts require interventions that can be “placed,” meaning that they can be adapted to fit the particularities of local contexts and cultures (e.g., Gutierrez & Penuel, 2014). Thus, the research objective for the present study was to explore the extent to which CPE worked similarly across program sites, while also paying attention to those social-institutional conditions that might explain context-specific variations in CPE practices and outcomes (e.g., Becker, 1998).
Method
This study analyzed data that were collected from three prior studies of the CPE effort. Because these research efforts examined different CPE sites at different times, the “master data set” used for this study represents a secondary data source (Long-Sutehall, Sque, & Addington-Hall, 2010). To analyze these secondary data, we used a systematic approach to qualitative meta-analysis called thematic synthesis (TS).
TS is a qualitative research method that is closely related to Noblit and Hare’s (1988) pioneering work on meta-ethnography. The primary difference between meta-ethnography and TS can be traced to their overall purposes. Meta-ethnography, much like the case study method (e.g., Yin, 2009), is designed to advance a basic theoretical understanding of social and cultural phenomena (Noblit & Hare, 1998). In contrast, TS is designed to help researchers develop applied theories of intervention need, appropriateness, acceptability, and effectiveness (Thomas & Harden, 2008).
As a general rule, researchers who use TS analyze their secondary data using three primary analytic strategies (after Barnett-Page & Thomas, 2009). The first such strategy is reciprocal translation analysis (RTA). This method is used to identify concepts that translate from single studies to others. In this study, we used RTA to identify and classify those theoretical concepts and intervention mechanisms that consistently emerged across the different CPE program sites.
The second analytic method used in TS is called refutational synthesis (RS). It involves describing and explaining the contradictory themes and findings that exist between individual studies. For this article, we used RS to identify those social-institutional factors that explained important cross-site variations in CPE practices and outcomes.
The final analytic strategy used in TS is the Lines of Argument (LOA) synthesis. This method involves using the general themes obtained from RTA to develop a more comprehensive picture of the intervention or program of interest (Barnett-Page & Thomas, 2009). Mirroring the constant comparative method (i.e., Glaser & Strauss, 1967), we used this LOA approach to generate “grounded” program theories/propositions that were empirically faithful to our individual studies and also were broad enough to capture how CPE works across different low-income, urban school communities (Long-Sutehall et al., 2010; Thomas & Harden, 2008).
Primary Data Sources
Each prior CPE study was facilitated by a rich variety of data sources. These data included interviews with project and nonproject parents, observational data, school/program records and case files, as well as other program artifacts, such as videos and photographs (e.g., Yin, 2009). A complete account of the data sources used for our prior CPE research is provided in Table 2. An abbreviated summary of each study follows.
Study Sample Characteristics and Data Sources.
Note. CPE = collective parent engagement.
The study of the original FL site focused on the program experiences of 10 parents who, after 4 years of CPE, developed their own nonprofit child care center at the school site. All research activities for this project site were conducted by the first author 5 years after the CPE project was initially implemented.
The second study examined the first CA replication site. The goal of this mixed methods study was to examine the social competencies and educational benefits that accompanied the development of CPE (Alameda-Lawson et al., 2010). For this study, the authors collected interview, survey, and academic achievement data from 16 CPE parents as well as a comparison group of 17 parents who were not involved in the school. Data for this study were collected at the end of the project’s grant funding—3 years after the program was implemented.
The third study utilized an ethnographic, case study design (Lawson & Alameda-Lawson, 2012). For this study, the authors drew a random sample of 32 low-income, Latino parents who were engaged in the second CA project. Twelve of these parents had completed the project’s outreach training course. The other 20 parents were community residents and service recipients of CPE parents’ programs and services. This study was conducted during Year 4 of the program’s 7 years of grant funding.
Secondary Data Analysis
Consistent with the three forms of TS described previously, our analysis began with line-by-line coding of the parent interview data collected from the FL site. Similar to the methods employed elsewhere (Lawson & Alameda-Lawson, 2012), the first author analyzed these data in Spanish, whereas the second author analyzed transcripts that were translated into English. Next, both authors analyzed the original data and codes from the second and third prior research studies to chart their relationship to the codes generated from the FL study. Ultimately, this RTA process contributed to a preliminary matrix of “emic” codes that were supported by parents’ “member-checked” views of the themes and categories that best described their CPE experiences (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Once our descriptive codes had been identified and charted, we then focused on generating a broader set of “analytic” or “etic” codes that could be used to characterize how the program worked across settings (Merriam, 2003). Here, we organized our codes according to both theme (e.g., social setting, engagement, or capital) and level (individual, mezzo-collective, and social-institutional) of analysis. For example, one theme that emerged from our “descriptive”/emic coding centered on parents’ perceptions of social capital. In our etic coding, this “social capital” theme was further categorized according to the level of analysis from which parents appeared to derive their social capital resources. So, for instance, the social benefits parents collectively obtained from others in the CPE parent group were charted on the mezzo or “collective” level of analysis. Meanwhile, the social capital that the school generated from the SCC was mapped onto the social-institutional level of analysis. These coding and categorization processes continued until we had achieved mutual agreement on the multilevel, ecologies of CPE framework that is presented in the following section.
Addressing Researcher Positionality
Both authors served as co-architects of the CPE model. Each was responsible for developing its training protocols and overall theories of action. We initiated each CPE effort because we believed that parent- and community-driven mutual support and assistance networks carried strong potential for improving outcomes along several different levels of analysis, including schools (see also Ishimaru, 2014b; Warren et al., 2011). As a consequence, rather than wait for such practice innovations to present themselves for research, we endeavored to develop and then research CPE pilot innovations from the ground up.
As part of our work as co-designers of CPE, each author was heavily involved in the day-to-day operations of the program. For instance, the first author served as the “professional facilitator” for all program activities at the FL site and continued many of the same roles in the CA sites (i.e., facilitating the outreach training course and parent-led program development phase). The second author, who did not participate in the FL project, acted as a lead professional PF for both CA projects. His working responsibilities included facilitating the outreach training course, the development of parent-led programs, as well as the SCC.
Together, these professional roles provided an ease of access to the program participants as we made the important, but difficult, transition to researching it. The fact that we were known to the participants was important because it facilitated dialogues that were quite conversational and appeared to involve high levels of trust or confianza (e.g., Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). However, our prior roles and status relative to the program’s participants also introduced several threats to the credibility and trustworthiness of our findings (e.g., social desirability bias, researcher bias, recall bias). These threats were especially pronounced in the present research; since this study required us to analyze data that we collected from different CPE sites, at different times, and in the case of the FL site, with only one of the two authors.
Several research strategies were adopted to address these important threats to the study’s overall credibility and trustworthiness (e.g., Guba & Lincoln, 1989). First, to limit the potential for recall bias, we cross-checked all of our analytic/etic themes to make sure that they were supported by the member-checked parent data, and then we used our program data to triangulate each of the themes and categories obtained from our RTA and RS analyses (e.g., Miles & Huberman, 1994). Finally, to provide safeguards against additional forms of researcher and recall bias, we presented an audit trail of our primary research findings to university colleagues at each stage of coding and analysis, and we revised our analytic strategies, theories, and propositions according to their feedback.
Ultimately, we believe that these measures represent the most rigorous means of addressing our positionality relative to the research participants. While we recognize that conventional standards of researcher objectivity are sacrificed by this researcher–practitioner duality, our predicament remains typical of action-oriented innovations involving new designs for both practice and research (Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011).
Findings and Discussion
Our analysis of the program data revealed a complex, social-ecological portrait of how CPE works across school–community settings. While the details of this portrait are provided in the following pages, two broad findings merit attention here. The first broad finding was that parents generally had similar experiences between and within each CPE program site. These shared experiences were especially pronounced when parents reflected on their engagement in the first two design phases of CPE (i.e., the individual engagement and collective parent development phases). Thus, while the following narrative highlights the stories and experiences of individual parents, readers should be mindful that these stories and quotes were highlighted in the text because they reflected the prevailing experiences of all of the parents in our data set.
The second general finding obtained from this study relates to the developmental progression of CPE and its activities. Specifically, whereas the CPE model began with activities that targeted the engagement of individual parents in their homes, the model’s activities soon expanded to include multiple social actors (e.g., parents and educators) and settings (e.g., schools, homes, and neighborhoods). Thus, while most extant models of parent engagement and support can be characterized as discrete, individual-level interventions (e.g., Webster-Stratton, Reed, & Stoolmiller, 2008), the CPE model examined in this study might be best understood as a complex, relational, and multilevel system of interventions and supports (see also Prilleltensky, 2008).
Attending to CPE’s Theoretical Complexity
To help readers attend to the theoretical complexity of CPE activities and interventions, we developed several figure diagrams. The first diagram, Figure 1, provides a wide-angle, “bird’s eye view” of CPE and its primary social-ecological features. Then, in subsequent diagrams, we depict the model’s key theoretical and empirical warrants as they appear along particular levels of social analysis (i.e., the individual, collective, and social-institutional).
Ecologies of collective parent engagement.
There are two ways in which readers can evaluate Figure 1. The first is to examine how CPE is depicted horizontally at particular levels of analysis (i.e., the individual, collective, and social-institutional). Here, consistent with the EPE model (i.e., Barton et al., 2004), parent engagement is depicted as the result of complex interactions between parents’ resource capital and the quality and characteristics of their surrounding social environment. Thus, the arrows which connect the concepts of “social setting” and “capital” in Figure 1 illustrate that, when parents experienced the program’s social setting as engaging, they were more able and willing to use their capital resources to participate in that setting. Similarly, the arrows which connect the concepts of “engagement” and “social setting” in the figure indicate that, when parents activated their resource capital for engagement, the setting changed to accommodate parents’ engagement and participation.
A second way to examine Figure 1 is to examine those “vertical” arrows that cross-cut different levels of social analysis. Here, as illustrated in the mezzo/collective level of the figure, the data indicated that parents’ collective resource capital was an important social-organizational feature of CPE. At the same time, the vertical arrows which connect parents’ “collective resource capital” (i.e., the mezzo level of analysis) to “organizational capital” (i.e., the social-institutional level of analysis) in the figure indicate that the quality of parents’ social capital resources was often influenced by the organizational social capital of the school and other human service organizations in the community (see also Holme & Rangel, 2012).
Importantly, these same types of horizontal and vertical “feed-back/feed-forward” loops were present throughout our data (e.g., Seidman, 2012). In fact, because the relations between individual, collective, and social-institutional processes were often so blurred in the data, it was possible for us to draw connections between virtually any of the primary codes gleaned from our analysis and all of the others. For this reason, we delimited our discussion to emphasize the overarching theoretical workings of CPE; we did not attend to all of the unique features of any particular case (Hearn, 1975).
Following the conceptual organization provided in Barton et al.’s (2004) study on the ecology of parent engagement in urban education, our results were organized to highlight the three primary theoretical propositions that emerged from our analyses. These propositions were as follows:
Details of each proposition follow, starting with a brief description of parents’ school–community experiences prior to CPE.
Isolating Settings and Silenced Resources
Across each project site, parents described their lives prior to CPE as a mixture of stress, anxiety, and fear. For the African American parents in the first CA site, their fears were attributed to the effects of living in a “walled-in” housing project that was socially and structurally isolated from the resources they needed for daily living. For example, at the time the CPE project was implemented, residents did not have access to working laundry machines. Many apartments were without heat, electricity, and clean water. Community professionals would not venture into the community due to safety concerns. Resources such as newspapers and food delivery services (e.g., pizza) were not available to the community’s families.
The social isolation and exclusion that accompanied these conditions structured a life of hardship for the community’s residents. These hardships were especially detrimental to the well-being of the African American parents engaged in CPE at the first CA site. In the following quote, Tunisha describes how this social isolation contributed to ongoing struggles with depression and social-psychological withdrawal. She said,
When I’d come home, I’d just go inside my house and not care about nobody else. Never go to any meetings, never talk to my neighbors, don’t go to the neighbor’s house when I need something. It’s like you just feeling little and you can’t get nothin’ done. And that’s why we all stayed in our shells for so long.
Although the Latina parents in the FL and second CA site did not live in a walled-in housing project, their descriptions of community life also revealed deep feelings of social isolation and exclusion. Some of these parents attributed these emotions to their status as undocumented immigrants. Other parents felt isolated because they did not initially trust families who came to the United States from other countries in Central and South America. As one CPE parent, Belen, from the second CA site explained,
I know families who told me they had no friends, they did not know anyone, or simply it was difficult for them getting beyond the barriers that I mentioned at the beginning when I got here. This fear, because it feels different . . . I mean, there are people who speak the same language, but how do I know I can trust that person or not? It’s a great fear when you don’t know or can’t trust other’s intentions.
Across our study samples, the Latina parents differed in how they coped with these social-cultural barriers and constraints. Some parents responded to their (undocumented) immigrant status by isolating themselves and their children inside their particular apartments or dwellings. In contrast, others, such as Veronica (a parent at the FL site), went to the school every day hoping that someone would invite them to become involved in the life of the school. She said,
Before the (CPE) program . . . I would let the teacher know in the mornings that I could help if she needed me . . . Each day, I would sit outside on a bench waiting to see if I was needed and that’s what I did before starting in the program.
The result of the social isolation and exclusion experienced by CPE parents was a cumulative loss of self-efficacy and self-worth. All but two of the 32 CPE parents interviewed described themselves as depressed, desperate, and lacking the overall “agency” they needed to improve the lives of their children, themselves, and their surrounding neighborhood community. They were not, however, at a loss for ideas. As Regina, an African American parent in the first CA site, noted during interviews, “You know, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about how things could be different for me and my kids.” What appeared missing were substantive opportunities for these parents to put their ideas into action.
The CPE program began with professionals conducting door-to-door outreach in the urban neighborhoods that surrounded the elementary school. These initial engagement activities were conducted for two reasons. The first was to provide preliminary information about the program and its bottom-up, “parents helping parents,” philosophy. The second reason was to invite parents to attend meetings at the project site where they participated in a collaborative needs assessment called the Nominal Group Technique.
At the start of each NGT meeting, the PF informed parents of the CPE project’s primary purposes and goals, emphasizing that it would be difficult to improve the school and community without parents’ collective engagement and expertise. Following a brief round of introductions, each parent was asked to identify and discuss five barriers to family, school, and community well-being. This process was repeated until every parent had discussed five barriers.
At the conclusion of the meeting, parents who were interested in addressing these barriers were invited to participate in a 40-hr outreach training course. This course was designed to teach parents how to conduct outreach in the community, how to formally assess the strengths, needs, and challenges of school families and community residents, and how to make a referral to community health and social service agencies. To successfully complete the outreach training course, each trainee was required to make 25 contacts at the homes of other parents or residents in the community. Each trainee who completed her or his 40 hr including the required contacts received an outreach training certificate and a US$40.00 stipend.
As indicated in Figures 1 and 2, these initial assessment and training activities appeared to create a social setting for CPE that we are calling an activating setting (e.g., Barton et al., 2004). This “activating setting” concept was created when the program utilized parents’ indigenous capital resources for school, family, and community improvement.
Ecology of CPE activating setting.
Significantly, a formative kind of parent engagement, referred to here as social-cultural engagement, appeared to accompany the activation of parents’ indigenous capital resources. We refer to this kind of parent engagement as “social” because parents’ narratives indicated that their engagement was tied to their social interactions with others. We also describe it as “cultural” because parents’ initial engagement in CPE appeared rooted in their existing cultural strengths, interests, values, and mores (Iddings et al., 2014). In the following quote, Porsche—an African American mother from the first CA site—describes some of the key features of parents’ social-cultural engagement. She said,
I like the way the program is structured that we do what we feel is needed type of thing. That’s why I stick with it. That’s why I tell people I have hope that there is going to be something bigger for me and I’m a part of it.
In this quote, Porsche highlights the importance parents attached to engaging in social activities that were culturally relevant (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1995)—meaning that they accommodated parents’ immediate interests, priorities, and concerns (i.e., “We do what we feel is needed type of thing”). Porsche’s quote also reveals how parents’ engagement was often facilitated by the activation of other indigenous capital resources such as parents’ aspirational capital (i.e., “There’s going to be something bigger for me and I’m a part of it”).
In addition, Porsche’s use of the word “we” highlights the collectivist orientation that often accompanied CPE parents’ descriptions of their experiences with the program. Consistent with other studies, these community-centric worldviews (e.g., Lawson, 2003; Van Velsor & Orozco, 2007) appeared grounded in parents’ beliefs that the health and well-being of their own families were often tied to the welfare of others in the community. Perhaps for this reason, parents’ descriptions of their aspirational capital were often embedded within the context of their family capital—that is, their interests, capacity, and know-how to forge “extended family” and kinship bonds (e.g., Yosso, 2005). In the following quote, Gloria, a FL parent, describes how the CPE program created the conditions for parents to activate both kinds of parental capital resources. She said,
I saw many positive things . . . that I knew would help the community, because this community is a community that is very poor and no one had ever done anything to help the community. Through the program, we saw that we could help the school . . . but we needed first to help the community . . . and its families . . . to help ourselves because we are part of the community.
A final form of capital that appeared activated by the CPE program setting was parents’ navigational capital—that is, parents’ abilities to negotiate, and to gain resources from, complex social-institutional systems (Yosso, 2005). In our data, parents reported that participation in the outreach training course helped them maximize their own navigational skills and competencies (e.g., human capital), at the same time they learned how to support others facing similar familial challenges and constraints. As one African American parent, Daphne, noted during an interview, “Before we were just trying to work the system, but through the training course we learned how to make it work better for us, for other families, and for the kids.”
Finally, CPE parents suggested that their initial engagement depended on two additional program resources: space and stipends. Across all three sites, parents suggested that the dedication of a “parents only” room created the social conditions they needed to overcome their initial fears of engaging in formal, social programs. Moreover, while all of the CPE parents were quick to caution that the stipend did not remove the hardships associated with poverty, all but one parent suggested that their initial engagement depended on it. As Katie, an African American parent at the first CA site, remarked during an interview, “You tell all the people out there that . . . the little change helps. It helps. That ‘little chump change’ is just enough to keep you from going under!”
In summary, the initial outreach, assessment, and training activities included in the CPE model appeared to create a special type of social setting for parental engagement called an “activating setting.” Depicted in Figure 2, this activating setting concept refers to those program activities and social regularities that elicited and then helped to activate parents’ existing strengths and resource capital for school–community improvement. Significantly, a particular formative kind of parent engagement—referred to here as social-cultural engagement—appears to have mediated these complex person–environment interactions. Parents reported heightened senses of individual and collective agency as a result of these early program experiences.
Once parents’ indigenous capital resources were activated through the NGT and outreach training course, the next two phases of the CPE program centered on developing new forms of social organization in the school community. Here, the guiding idea was to help children, parents, families, and professionals gain access to the resources they needed to realize their individual, collective, and/or organizational goals. Two key program activities were developed to address these primary service objectives. The first centered on helping parents develop programs and services that addressed the barriers they identified in the NGT. The second involved the development of a SCC of parents, educators, and service professionals in the school community.
For parents, the process of developing and implementing services for others provided them with needed social, human, and financial capital resources. In turn, the development of these parental capital resources appeared to fortify and sustain parents’ CPE. In the following quote, Consuelo (a parent at the second CA site) illustrates this symbiotic relationship as it relates to the development of parents’ bonding social capital resources (e.g., Putnam, 2000). She said,
I can come here (to the program) and we can talk about, about things that interest us as well as me. And I feel comfortable being with them, and I feel, like, maybe, if I have a problem and we talk about it . . . maybe one of them already passed through the same problem . . . And I say, “Oh, well it also happened to her.” And I feel like a little more tranquil . . . And then how we go to the meetings for outreach on Mondays, and we talk about what we’re going to do, and sometimes we talk about other things . . . And one feels like you’re relieved from the stress you have.
Although the CPE model was structured to allow parents to design and implement their own programs, parents were not expected to organize these efforts by themselves. Instead, the PF worked with parents on a day-to-day basis to provide two important kinds of support. The first kind of support centered on the provision of technical help to CPE parents. Here, the PF provided informal trainings that helped parents learn how to staff their own programs, how to develop group norms for problem solving, and how to develop record-keeping strategies that fit project reporting/grant requirements.
A second kind of assistance provided by the PF was resource brokering support. This kind of assistance was provided when the focus or scope of parents’ programs exceeded the project’s available funding or staff resources. So, for example, when parents at the second CA site wanted to start a crossing guard program at the school, the PF worked with the school and its community partners to secure the equipment and training required for that particular activity. Similarly, when CPE parents (at all three sites) identified child care as a needed service, the PF brokered training resources that enabled parents to become certified child care providers. Significantly, many of these resource brokering activities were enabled by each site’s SCC.
Enhancing settings for engagement through family–school–community collaboration
As described in the article’s introduction, one of the primary service goals of the CPE model was to develop a SCC of community parents, school leadership, as well as social service, health, and human service professionals in the community. Each SCC effort was organized to provide the school with an efficient and systematic way to enhance family and child access to needed community services (i.e., social services, health services, financial assistance, etc.). The theory was that if parents and professionals could work together to enhance family access to needed services and supports, barriers to school learning would be reduced. Enhanced academic achievement was the expected consequence of reduced child, family, and community barriers.
Although an SCC was developed at each CPE site, the composition of members varied considerably across project locations. For instance, the collaborative at the FL site was staffed by school leaders, heads of city/county service agencies, and parents. In contrast, the SCCs at the two CA replication sites were staffed mostly by parents, school leaders, and middle managers who worked at various city/county departments (e.g., Housing and Redevelopment, Parks and Recreation, and Health and Human Services).
Despite these important differences in membership and leadership, each SCC was implemented using the same operational protocols. For instance, each SCC meeting began with a discussion of “old business” where members provided status updates on the action items that were identified during previous meetings. Following a discussion of these items, CPE parents would then present items of “new business” that emerged from their day-to-day workings with children and families in the community.
Typically, the presentation of these “new business” items contributed to two kinds of professionally led action strategies. The first kind of strategy focused on resource brokering activities that could support the programmatic efforts of CPE parents. The second kind of action strategy focused on how professionals might modify the services of their own agencies to better accommodate the strengths and needs of parents and families in the community.
In our data, the resources generated from both kinds of collaborative activities contributed to a second, social-organizational feature of CPE that we are calling a navigating setting (see Figure 3). This navigating setting concept emerged from the collaborative norms, practices, and routines that accompanied the collective engagement of parents, educators, and social service providers at school and in the community.
Ecology of CPE navigating setting.
Significantly, our data indicated that three different kinds of navigating settings were fostered by CPE and its attendant collaborations. The first such setting accompanied the development of each CPE site’s Referral and Information program. This parent program was developed at each site because, across program locations, parents reported that they lacked information about the institutional resources that were available to families in the community. In light of this barrier, CPE parents designed each Referral and Information program to (a) refer families to community service agencies, (b) provide translation and/or transportation assistance to families in need of formal support, and (c) help parents complete agency forms and applications.
After 1 year of implementation at each project site, each Referral and Information program successfully linked 1,000 community families to needed services each year. Presumably, these service outcomes were achieved because the program helped community parents learn how to better navigate formal institutional supports and resources.
The second navigating setting of CPE was developed when school leadership asked parents to help them solve (i.e., navigate) problems that the school was unable to address by itself. Here, across all three project sites, the school principal asked CPE parents for help in addressing attendance problems at the school. Following these requests, CPE parents designed and implemented programmatic efforts to support the needs of families with truant children.
For example, at the FL site, CPE parents visited the homes of children who had missed 3 or more days of school. During these visits, CPE parents delivered homework packets to children and their parents, offered transportation assistance to the school, and referred parents to institutional resources that could help them address family barriers. Similarly, at the first CA site, parents visited the homes of families of truant children, and then arranged to walk those kids to school each day. In each case, these parent-run attendance programs helped each school move from worst to first in attendance in their feeder patterns. To reiterate, these developments occurred when school leaders asked parents to help them navigate family and community barriers that they could not address by themselves.
The third navigating setting of CPE developed as professional members of the SCC helped CPE parents secure the social, informational, and navigational resources they needed to serve other families in the community. In the following quote, Veronica (an African American parent at the first CA site) described how the development of the SCC’s navigating setting allowed her and other parents to increase the social capital of other parents in the community. She said,
A lot of us represent the community by going to community (collaborative) meetings so that we know what’s going on in the community . . . And then we convene within the school to let the other parents know what’s going on and they can tell their community. And now I see many community residents doing things differently as far as knowing more about what to do, like when the landlord doesn’t come to fix the heater . . . or when a problem comes up at the school. You know, when a community resident sees a trained parent out there in the community they know they can ask for help.
This particular quote by Veronica reflects an important theoretical progression in our data. Namely, as parents’ gained access to professionals and their social capital resources, their collective engagement appeared to absorb increasing amounts of social space (see also Bess & Doykos, 2014). Thus, while parents’ initial CPE was limited to particular activities or locations, over the long term, CPE appeared to include social norms, interactions, and regularities that included multiple social settings and multiple social actors. In our data, the creation of these expanded navigational settings represented an important, preliminary benchmark for school–community change.
One of the key questions facing any social intervention or reform strategy involves its overarching purposes or goals. Strategies that aim to improve existing social-institutional systems and practices target what is typically known as first-order change. Reforms which seek to transform those same policies, practices, and systems are characterized as second-order change efforts (e.g., Mehta, Schwartz, & Hess, 2012).
In our data, the school–community engagement fostered by CPE program parents, school–community leaders, and other community agents appeared to create the potential for school–community change and transformation, that is, second-order change. This potential was reflected in two primary codes gleaned from the social-institutional level of analysis. The first code, which was primarily evident in data from the FL and second CA site, included indicators of change in school–community cultures and attitudes. In the FL site, this code included changes in the social regularities of school—that is, the patterns of social interaction between parents and key school agents (Seidman, 2012). Here, Marcela, a FL parent, describes how parents’ interactions with the school changed along with the development of CPE. She said,
Since the program came here, it brought programs, more services. That’s what most parents needed. And of course everyone was interested, not only because the school has opened up much because, let me tell you, that in the beginning, when I came here, the classroom teacher was very cute and open, but that was it. She was the only one. Because everyone else, in the office . . . I never got to see the principal. I never saw anyone, anyone with any authority. It didn’t happen. You could not see them. But the program helped tremendously. You can see the difference in the school. Anyone can go to the office and ask to speak with the people, with the principal, with whomever.
The second code for social-institutional transformation included evidence of structural change in the school community, that is, the development of new professional roles, institutional policies, and organizational structures. For instance, at the FL site, CPE parents developed their own nonprofit agency that served low-income families in need of child care and early educational programming. Once incorporated, this parent-run nonprofit agency received funding for portables that housed multiple service providers at the school site. In turn, the development of the “multiservice” center at the school allowed participating service providers to serve more community families, while also increasing state and federal reimbursements for their services.
Significantly, our data indicated that these structural changes helped to enhance the “organizational social capital” of the school community’s helping institutions (e.g., Holme & Rangle, 2012). For example, once the parent-run, nonprofit agency was incorporated at the FL site, the CPE effort received site visitations from several national funders and policy makers, including the then Vice President of the United States. In turn, these visitations resulted in additional grant funding which bolstered the social and human capital of participating organizations.
In summary, this complex interplay between school–community engagement and organizational social capital development appeared to create a final organizational feature of CPE that we are calling a transformative setting. Depicted in Figures 1 and 4, this transformative setting concept consisted of institutional practices, policies, and cultures that enhanced the resource capital of each participating organization. In turn, the resource capital secured by these organizations contributed to the construction of new buildings at the school (which housed the day care center and family service center) as well as new policies (i.e., changes to the city’s eviction process for low-income apartments, a client Bill of Rights) that supported the residential stability and social-institutional engagement of the community’s families. These organizational developments resulted in school–community attitudes, relationships, and policies that were fundamentally different than they were before. In fact, they appeared transformed.
Ecology of CPE transformative setting.
Barriers to School–Community Transformation in Northern California
While the successes of the FL site were noteworthy, the results from the two CA sites were considerably more modest. Specifically, whereas the FL site was successful in changing multiple policies and practices at school and in the community, much of the social-institutional landscape at the two CA sites remained unaltered by the effort.
For instance, at the first CA site, the principal asked CPE parents to help him address a suspension problem which was the worst in the district. Following this request, CPE parents developed a classroom intervention team that they called the “Temper Tamers.” In this approach, classroom teachers called the CPE parent room to let parents know when a child was having a behavioral outburst in the classroom. From there, CPE parents took the child out of the classroom, walked him or her around the school yard for 5 to 10 min, and then returned the student to class when he or she had calmed down.
Following the implementation of this program, the school reduced the number of students suspended from 431 in the project’s baseline year to 38 at the end of the second year. However, in contrast to the FL site—which experienced significant school-wide increases in achievement when behavior improved—test scores remained flat throughout the duration of the first CA project. In fact, throughout the project’s three grant periods, nearly 80% of the school’s children remained “below basic” or “far below basic” on standardized tests.
Our analysis of program data provided two potential explanations for these static and undesirable outcomes. The first explanation was that, in spite of weekly meetings between the principal, CPE staff, and teachers, the project did not appear to impact the school’s instructional philosophy, especially its “fix then teach” instructional practices. A second and related explanation for these static outcomes is tied to the deficit-oriented views that many of the community’s social service providers held toward community parents. As one community service provider noted at an SCC meeting during the project’s third and final year, “If we want to improve academic achievement in this school, then we need to find a way to get these parents out of the community.”
Unfortunately, these types of deficit-oriented views toward children and their parents were present throughout the program data (i.e., meeting minutes) collected from the first CA site. Thus, while this site was successful in generating some important setting-level enhancements at the individual and mezzo/collective levels of analysis, it was ultimately unable to affect some of the primary institutional practices (i.e., school instructional practices, social service practices) that may have been the most important for improving school outcomes. Second-order change did not occur.
Like its predecessor, the second CA site did not appear to alter many of the internal practices of the school and its surrounding social service agencies (e.g., school instructional and/or child welfare practices). However, this site did appear to foster important partnerships and collaborations that benefited school families. For instance, at the behest of CPE parents, professional members of the SCC (i.e., the school principal and the head of the county’s neighborhood service agency) helped to reroute one of the city’s bus lines closer to the school. This subtle structural change to the community’s transportation system provided residents with better access to the grocery store, dollar store, and other important basic amenities. In addition, this same SCC brokered additional social services such as legal services for undocumented immigrants, English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, child care certification training, and district-led early childhood programming.
Ultimately, the resources generated from the SCC appeared to contribute to some important second-order changes in the school community. In our data, these second-order changes were the most pronounced when parents described the collective efficacy that was emerging in their neighborhoods. As one Latina parent, Gloria, explained,
But here in this area I remember that they said it was a really bad area before, and I feel like it’s getting better because everyone already knows everyone . . . For example, I live in this corner and someone that I know lives over there, so if I see that something is happening over there and one helps each other out, or you call the police. I don’t know, you look out for their interest in some way and the same person knows your house . . . And maybe that’s why I like it here, because I already know people.
During the time that these social resources were developed, the school met its academic improvement targets (annual performance index) twice over a 3-year period. What’s more, these outcomes were witnessed in spite of significant turnover in school leadership and staff during the same time frame (Lawson & Alameda-Lawson, 2012).
However, despite making some important inroads in school–community practices and outcomes, the second CA replication effort was positioned structurally as an “add-on” to existing institutional practices, policies, and routines. Consequently, although the development of this site included important indicators of school–community transformation (i.e., enhanced organizational cultures and some neighborhood level change), these outcomes were not sustained by formal structural changes or agreements (i.e., matching funds, physical capital improvements, etc.). Thus, once funding waned and project leadership changed, there was little formal institutional support for CPE parents to draw from. Two years after grant funding had ceased, few CPE parents remained engaged in the life of the school.
Theoretical Contributions
The CPE model researched in this study offers an important theoretical and practical point of departure from conventional PI models described in much educational research. As noted elsewhere (e.g., Barton et al., 2004; Olivos, 2012), conventional PI activities and related partnership models are typically conceived as school-centric, school-directed, and individualistic efforts. They are school-centric because the nature of PI activity is usually centered on the needs that teachers have for support at school (Lawson, 2003; Warren et al., 2009). They are school-directed because PI efforts are typically designed by educators and school leaders for parents (Boutte & Johnson, 2014). And, they are individualistic because PI is typically marketed by the school as something individual parents should do to better support the educational welfare of their own children (Schutz, 2006; Warren et al., 2009).
In contrast to the conventional PI approach, the CPE model described here included activities that were (a) parent-guided, parent-run, and parent-directed; (b) school-focused and community-centric; and (c) collectively designed and employed. Importantly, this CPE model appeared to contribute to a formative kind of parent engagement that we called social-cultural engagement (after Lawson & Lawson, 2013). This social-cultural form of CPE began when the program elicited parents’ prior interest, knowledge, and experience to inform program planning and development (e.g., Gonzalez et al., 2005). It became fully manifest when parents activated their existing capital resources for the purposes of collective action.
This social-cultural, collectivist view of “parent engagement” diverges from extant conceptualizations in important ways. For instance, whereas much extant educational research has defined parent engagement relative to parents’ thoughts, feelings, and worldviews (e.g., Olivos, 2012), our findings indicate that a social-behavioral and action-oriented component is needed to capture the full range of parents’ individual and collective experiences. Thus, future research might benefit by operationalizing parent engagement as a tripartite construct consisting of emotional, cognitive, and social-behavioral dimensions (e.g., Fredericks, Blumenfield, & Paris, 2004), with the caution that each of these elements should be understood as dynamic, social-ecological, and relational phenomena (e.g., Lawson & Lawson, 2013).
In addition to these operational considerations, findings from this study helped advance an understanding of the social-ecological conditions which might accompany CPE. Specifically, our findings indicated that CPE appears to follow the development of three related kinds of social settings: (a) an activating setting which fosters the development of parents’ existing strengths, know-how, and social-cultural resources; (b) a navigating setting that fosters the development of parental social capital networks, especially parents’ bridging social capital with schools and social service providers in the community; and (c) a transformative setting that fosters the organizational social capital of the school and its partners for the purposes of second-order, school–community change.
While the development of each kind of social setting was important for the short- and long-term engagement of CPE parents, our findings indicated that the development of transformative settings (i.e., the development of new organizational relationships and designs) was the most consequential for improving family, school, and community outcomes. Consequently, whereas much educational research has evaluated PI and engagement practices as individual-level phenomena, our data paint a contrasting picture. Specifically, our findings indicate that the most influential “determinants” of parent engagement and academic achievement in low-income communities may reside on the social-institutional level of analysis. This is one reason why social-ecological models of parent engagement should remain central to the current research conversation on how to improve social and educational outcomes in low-income, urban centers (Schutz, 2006; Warren et al., 2011).
Summary and Conclusion
This study described a particular model of CPE for low-income, urban, and ethnically concentrated school communities. In this model, social workers engaged low-income parents to design and run school-based and/or school-linked programs to serve other children and parents in the school and neighborhood community. The empirical and theoretical warrants of this model were documented, analyzed, and described across three pilot sites that served three unique urban centers: one in South Florida (FL) and two in Northern California’s Central Valley (CA).
Our findings indicated that the CPE effort provided transformative experiences for parents across project sites (e.g., Carreon, Drake, & Barton, 2005). However, in spite of changes in parents’ feelings about themselves and their own agency, only the FL site appeared to facilitate significant and enduring changes in school–community practices and outcomes. This finding serves as an important reminder of the limitations of any single intervention to affect change, especially interventions that are not well integrated with the work of school leaders, teachers, social and neighborhood service providers, funders, and policy makers (Gutierrez & Penuel, 2014).
Three primary conclusions can be derived from this research. The first conclusion is that the model’s initial outreach, assessment, training, and development activities appear to “work” for parents in similar ways across settings. For this reason, it appears that the individual engagement and collective development phases of the CPE model can be readily adapted to fit the needs of low-income parents and families, especially those living in communities challenged by social isolation and exclusion (e.g., Tate, 2012).
The second conclusion is that children’s school learning may be enhanced when the focus of school reform extends beyond the school to also include children’s surrounding family and community environments (e.g., Hopson, 2014). Here, our findings indicated that when school–community programs engage low-income parents as communities of practice, gain their commitments, capitalize on their expertise, and build on their strengths and aspirations, several new social settings for learning and development may be created. In fact, our data indicated that improvements in children’s attendance, conduct, and even test scores may accompany the development of these new social settings and institutional environments (Alameda-Lawson, 2014; Lawson & Alameda-Lawson, 2012; Seidman, 2012).
The third and final conclusion of this study is that improving urban education may require more than just PI; it may depend on the collective engagement of all relevant stakeholders in the school community (e.g., Ishimaru, 2014a). Here, our data clearly indicated that when school–community collaboration was powerful enough—as it was in the FL site—school-wide academic outcomes improved. In contrast, when CPE was implemented as an add-on to existing institutional practices, policies, and routines—as it was at both CA replication sites—school outcomes were significantly more limited and/or short lived.
What remains unclear from our data (and our work) is how to best marry the place-based and bottom-up components of CPE with some of the more centralized, categorical, and top-down reform efforts that are germane to today’s educational policy environment. One potential solution to this challenge is to engage high-ranking “decision makers” in the development of CPE and its related collaborations. As noted earlier in the article, the SCC at the FL site was staffed almost exclusively by leaders of city/county service agencies. In contrast, the SCCs at the two CA sites were staffed mostly by middle managers and frontline service professionals. Presumably, the engagement of agency leaders at the FL site represented a key determinant in helping that school community develop the kinds of new social practices, resources, and organizational structures (i.e., new buildings, organizations, and policies) that were needed to transform outcomes. For this reason, future research would benefit by better attending to the role of school–community leadership in facilitating similar bottom-up approaches to school–community change and improvement (e.g., Auerbach, 2010).
In closing, the CPE model explored in this study represents one example of an emergent movement to improve urban schools and communities by way of ecologically oriented, multicomponent interventions (e.g., http://promiseneighborhoods.org; http://urbanresearchnetwork.org). This movement follows growing recognition that the challenges associated with concentrated poverty may be too powerful for singular interventions (such as schools) to address by themselves (e.g., Berliner, 2009; Jeynes, 2014). Framed in this way, the CPE model examined in this study appears to represent a first-generation example of how these social-ecological, multicomponent interventions may look and function. To the extent that this study contributes to the development of the next generation of social interventions and urban helping systems, it will have served its primary purpose.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.