Professionalism and Parents: A New Frame for Color-Blind Racism in Schooling

Abstract

This study deconstructs the racial dimension of teacher resistance to parent authority within the shared social institution of education. More specifically, we examine how teachers responded to a teacher evaluation policy that included a parent-based component to assess teacher quality. Using framing theory, this study illustrates the use of professionalism as one mechanism connecting teachers’ individual actions to broader sociocultural experiences of privilege and oppression. To illustrate the anatomy of color-blind framing, we deconstruct three tactics teachers used when framing their resistance to parents: minimizing professional responsibility for engaging parents, masking racist perspectives through geographic and social distance, and misdirecting attention away from parents’ rights to judge education as a public good.

Keywords

Educational policy studies teacher evaluation color-blind framing parent authority

Introduction

Several mechanisms, including teacher evaluation, currently serve to reconfigure parent authority in schooling. As states across the United States have revised their teacher evaluation systems to rely on more diversified sources of information (Conley and Glasman, 2008; Donaldson and Steinberg, 2016), some states have added a new role for parents: assessing teacher quality in evaluation systems (Donaldson and Steinberg, 2016; Ruffini et al., 2014). Teachers have been increasingly confronted with the possibility that parents might be given the power to influence their employment, with growing evidence that they are resistant to such changes (Fernández et al., 2018).

Shifts in parent roles in teacher evaluation fit within broader trends that complicate the relationships between the bureaucracies of schooling and the private sphere of the family (Marsh and Wohlstetter, 2013). In the past 35 years, federal and state policies in the United States have opened a number of mechanisms, such as parent trigger laws (Smith and Rowland, 2014; Stitzlein, 2015) and interdistrict school choice (Beal and Hendry, 2012; Cobb and Glass, 2009), to allow parents to assert increased power over how their children are schooled.

Such shifts have occurred within contexts shaped by the asymmetries of teacher identities and those of the families they serve. Teachers in the United States are largely White, middle-class women, even in communities in which many families live in poverty and do not have the privileges associated with being White (Taie and Goldring, 2017). There is little known about how teachers react to the repositioning of parents to have direct, if limited, authority over defining quality in teaching. However, there is a great deal of research demonstrating that teachers struggle to resist the dominant deficit narratives related to race when working with Students and Families of Color (Castro, 2010; deCarvalho, 2001; Hollins and Guzman, 2005; Hong, 2011; López, 2001; Olivos, 2006; Sleeter, 2008; Terrill and Mark, 2000). For instance, Pollack (2012) examined teachers’ informal teacher talk—those informal conversations that occur in various school spaces such as lunchrooms, workrooms, or other communal areas between and among teachers—of deficit-based narratives that surround Black and Latinx students and families. Such dynamics have been found not only in the United States but in postcolonial education systems across the world (Barr and Saltmarsh, 2014; Birenbaum-Carmeli, 1999; Goldring, 1993; Olivos, 2006).

We build upon this body of research by examining how teachers, engaging in teacher talk during focus groups, framed their resistance to a new teacher evaluation policy as it extended parent authority. We examine the ways in which teachers evoked their sense of professionalism while obliquely pointing to racist perspectives to justify their resistance. Using framing theory to analyze teacher talk, this study illustrates the use of professionalism as one mechanism connecting teachers’ individual actions to broader sociocultural experiences of privilege and oppression.

Literature Review

This study deconstructs the racial dimension of teacher resistance to parent authority within the shared social institution of education. As parents are increasingly given formal authority to contribute to defining teacher quality (Fernández et al., 2018), they are further legitimized in defining expectations of the profession. We build on existing scholarship demonstrating tensions in teacher professionalism, particularly as they relate to teacher evaluation. We draw connections to research on the effects of racial asymmetry between teachers and the students they serve, as well as teachers’ racial identities as they are socialized into the profession.

Tensions in the Professionalism of Teaching

Conceptualizations of what it means to be a teacher change over time, as do the reasons for debating teacher professionalism (Mockler, 2011). In education policy, teachers are often positioned as both the key to saving public education and the reason it is failing (Buchanan, 2015). With the current continued focus on accountability, teachers are frequently framed as a critical point of intervention for improving schooling (Datnow et al., 2002; Mehta, 2013). At the same time, teachers face increased monitoring and public pressure to justify their performance (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2016).

There are two dimensions involved in organizing conceptualizations of teacher professionalism. The first is the extent to which teaching is considered a profession, which is to say that teaching requires advanced education, shared cultural norms, and constructive environmental conditions to ensure success (Ingersoll and Merrill, 2011; Milner, 2013). With the rise of certification policies requiring specialized graduate degrees, professional associations, unionization, and other means of normalizing expectations for teachers, the general consensus in the United States is that teaching constitutes a profession (Ingersoll and Perda, 2008).

A second, more highly contested dimension for conceptualizing the professionalism of teachers involves defining the constitutive elements of professional practice. What is it that teachers must do in order to be considered professional? What constitutes standard professional practice and, therefore, which practices define exceptionally good (or bad) teaching?

In this study, we focus on the aspects of these boundaries defined by the cross-cultural demand placed on teachers. In the United States, the vast majority of teachers emerge from preparation programs ill-equipped to respond in culturally responsive ways to Students of Color (Civitillo et al., 2018; Sleeter, 2001). Culturally responsive teaching has also gained momentum internationally as nations struggle to address the cultural divide between teaching workforces and the families they serve (Gay, 2015). Insufficient multicultural competence in the teaching workforce has been examined in Russia (Logvinova and Ivanova, 2016), China (Qian, 2007; Wang, 2015), Australia (Burgess, 2017), and several European nations (Acquah and Commins, 2013; Santoro and Forghani-Arani, 2015; Santoro and Kennedy, 2016).

Teachers, who predominantly hold identities privileged within their cultural contexts (White and middle class; Coopersmith, 2009), often rely on “color-blind” understandings of their students (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Milner IV, 2008). Research has documented the futility of teachers’ attempts to remain racially neutral in their practice (Allen, 2015; Furman, 2008; Hayland, 2005; Massey et al., 1975). Instead, the largely White teaching force draws heavily on White ideologies’ normative assumptions of deficits regarding Students of Color (Delpit, 1995; Solórzano, 1997). Teacher education programs—which have an opportunity to disrupt deficit and racist ideologies—have been found to further reify White ideologies. Programs often superficially engage in multicultural curriculum (Irvine, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1999), evading critical conversations about race and racism with preservice teachers (Galman et al., 2010; Marx, 2004). Such programs fail to provide preservice teachers with practical tools for implementing anti-racist practices once in schools (Assaf et al., 2010). Teacher educators in the United States are also predominantly White (Fuller, 1992; Galman et al., 2010 ) and rely on their own color-blind beliefs (Frankenberg, 1993; Furman, 2008; Galman et al., 2010) to engage with preservice teachers—further perpetuating a dominant color-blind understanding of teaching and learning (Furman, 2008; Leonardo, 2008).

Defining Teacher Quality Through Evaluation

There have been several recent changes to teacher evaluation policy in the United States, some of which arguably threaten to de-professionalize teachers (Anderson and Cohen, 2015; Andrews et al., 2016). Ratings of teacher quality have become increasingly defined through value-added measures of teachers’ contributions to student achievement test scores (Koedel et al., 2015; McCaffrey et al., 2004). Scholars have critiqued these changes on several fronts as the components of teacher evaluation define how “good teaching” is understood, measured, and rewarded (Grossman et al., 2013; Hill et al., 2011).

Several states have recently designed new evaluation systems in response to these tensions to redistribute the authority to determine teacher quality across several stakeholders and balance the technical emphasis on students’ academic performance against other factors. Six states currently include a parent-based measure of teacher quality in their evaluation policies (Steinberg and Donaldson, 2016). Yet the research on how parents are (or are not) included in evaluation practices is scant. Mead (2012) focused on the extent to which parents are provided information about teacher evaluation systems, positioning parents as disenfranchised stakeholders of public education.

Despite the dearth of research, there is growing evidence that teachers, on the whole, are resistant to the idea of extending the authority to define good teaching to the communities they serve. Teachers remain more supportive of traditional assessments of teacher quality, which rely on experiential expertise (e.g. observations by principals) than they are of widening the set of stakeholders allowed to participate in formal evaluation activities (Donaldson et al., 2016; Lavigne and Chamberlain, 2017; Ruffini et al., 2014). For instance, in Connecticut’s first year of a new parent-based component, no schools measured parents’ assessment of the quality of teaching. Rather, local districts used teachers’ communication providing information to their students’ families in place of parent evaluation of teaching quality—a move sanctioned by the state (Fernández et al., 2018).

Conceptual Framework

This study examines teacher responses to parent roles in defining quality for the profession using framing theory to analyze teacher talk. Drawing on multiple disciplines (Hertog and McLeod, 2001; Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007), framing theory provides a means of understanding how language draws attention to particular ways of viewing the world (Chong and Druckman, 2007). Bonilla-Silva (2006) uses framing theory to present a framework for identifying and understanding color-blind racism, which serves to uphold White privilege without breaking current cultural norms that chastise explicit racism.

Race Talk

At the foundation of Bonilla-Silva’s understanding of racism is the influence of post-Jim Crow social and political contexts on what is considered acceptable race talk. As Bonilla-Silva (2002) states, “the language of color blindness is slippery, apparently contradictory, and often subtle” (42). Building on scholarship that demonstrates the pervasive existence of covert forms of racism, Bonilla-Silva presents four frames widely used by people in the United States to justify racially unjust positions, beliefs, experiences, and values. The first, abstract liberalism, is an extension of the political and economic liberalism foundational to American culture used to subvert the importance of racial equity as less important than other individual rights. Naturalization frames racialized phenomena as naturally occurring, rather than socially constructed, removing the blame from people who uphold structures of oppression. Cultural racism explains institutional racism as a result of cultural behaviors, relying on cultural relativism rather than racist actions. The final frame is minimization of racism, in which the existence and extent of racism is questioned to suggest other, non-racialized factors as better explanations for race-based phenomena.

Teacher Talk

Teacher talk is the informal practice of teachers engaging in casual conversation around the shared experiences of teaching (Pollack, 2012). Pollack (2012) highlighted that these conversations are often seamless narratives wherein teachers share stories regarding their students and families as a way to share information, construct a narrative, frame a student’s behavior, or justify their own interaction with students. In their study of informal teacher talk, Pollack (2012) found teachers often crafted deficit narratives when discussing students and their families. As such, we analyze teacher talk utilizing a race talk lens. Doing so provides the opportunity to explore how teachers utilize racially coded language to make sense of specific experiences and/or understandings, express their beliefs, and/or strive to find shared commonalities with one another, in this case regarding teacher evaluations and professionalism.

In this study, we analyze the frames teachers use as they respond to new evaluation policy that extends authority to parents as evaluators. Through the use of focus groups, which helped foster casual conversational spaces, teachers engaged in teacher talk as they discussed a newly implemented teacher evaluation policy. What emerged in these conversations were the ways in which teachers used the professionalism of their role to explain their resistance to parent authority—particularly in demographically diverse communities. Norms in American political and economic spheres infuse our broader cultural system, including how we value professionalism and the common acceptance of the power professionals wield. We ask whether and how these values, in turn, are invoked by teachers to either hide racist elements of the education system or justify racism as being necessary to avoid impinging on their rights as professionals.

Methods

This study reanalyzes data from a larger study of an educator evaluation policy. During the 2013–14 school year, 12 districts in one state piloted a new state policy for teacher evaluation. Districts agreed to include evaluation by either parents or peers as 10% of teachers’ annual summative rating. All 12 districts elected to use parent evaluators; none of the districts had previously included parents as sources of data for teacher evaluations. Districts were allowed to choose how they would assess parent accounts of teacher quality from a range of techniques, such as parent surveys and focus groups. Additional details about the methods used to conduct the broader study have been published (Donaldson et al., 2016; Fernández et al., 2018).

Sample

Districts applied for participation in the policy pilot and were selected by members of the state department of education. Within the 12 participating districts, we used stratified sampling to select 37 schools. In four small districts, all schools were invited to participate; in the seven districts large enough to have multiple elementary schools, a random subset were invited to participate to ensure that a minimum of 20% of the teachers within the elementary schools were enrolled in the study, along with the middle and high school. One large urban district participated; six (21%) of the district’s K-8 schools and one (17%) of the high schools participated. This array of districts is fairly representative of the state, in which there are many small districts and few large urban districts. While this allows us to argue that our findings are broadly applicable across district contexts within the state, other regions of the United States (and, indeed, other countries) may serve different types of communities in their school systems. All of the schools in the 12 districts were considered for participation and all schools that agreed to participate remained in the study through data collection and analysis.

Within participating schools, we randomly selected teachers to represent the ratio of teachers of tested subjects, non-tested subjects, and student support (e.g. special education); teachers were randomly selected within grade level and subject area with a goal of enrolling approximately 20% of teachers within the school in the study. A total of 363 teachers participated.

Due to the sensitive nature of interview questions, we did not collect teacher demographics beyond school, district, grade, and subject area. This limits our ability to analyze the influence of teacher race on an individual level. The representative nature of participating teachers combined with public data about the demographics of participating schools does allow us to make some assessments. All participating districts have primarily White teaching faculty (see Table 1). Approximately half of the districts serve racial/ethnic demographically diverse student bodies with disproportionately higher African American, Latinx, Asian, and/or Native American student populations compared to the state. This allows us to compare teacher talk across two sets of diverging education contexts.

Table 1.

Racial/Ethnic Demographics of Participating Districts.

District		Student demographics			Teacher demographics
	# of schools	# of students^a	% English language learners	% White	# full-time equivalent teachers	% White
Primarily White districts
District B	1	500	0	91	34	100
District C	1	500	0	90	13	100
District D	1	500	0	88	12	100
District E	1	500	0	89	30	100
District G	3	1000	0	91	84	97
District H	4	1000	1	92	73	99
District J	5	2500	2	79	177	96
Racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts
District A	40	20,500	14	12	1175	75
District F	12	8500	5	29	595	87
District I	19	11,500	14	32	703	84
District K	6	3000	24	25	246	85
District L	7	3000	4	28	264	86
State	1000+	575,000	6	56	30,000+	92

Source: 2015–16 data from the State Department of Education.

Rounded to the nearest 500 students to mask districts.

Data Collection

We collected data through focus groups at the beginning, middle, and end of the 2013–14 school year. Each focus group included six to eight teachers grouped by school and was conducted in private spaces (e.g. conference rooms) in schools. Each focus group was one hour and covered a range of topics about the shift in teacher evaluation. Teacher talk about parents was prompted by a question soliciting participants’ understanding of the components of the new evaluation system, including the parent component.

Data Analysis

Analysis proceeded in cycles of coding and interpretation. In the first phase, we read all transcripts to annotate teacher talk about parents to reduce the dataset. We then coded the data referencing parents using the constant comparative method (Glaser, 2009; Strauss and Corbin, 1990) to identify frames related to how teachers describe the profession of teaching. All instances that referenced parents, families, and communities were coded with a broad “parent talk” code. We then reread these instances of teacher talk to assess which patterns emerged relevant to the study, such as teacher emotions (e.g. “It bothers me that. . .”), positioning of parents (e.g. “Parents don’t know. . .”), and teacher professionalism (e.g. “That’s my job as an educator. . .”). As codes emerged, the researchers met to attenuate shared understanding and orient inductive coding around core themes. We then began from the beginning to apply the new code to all instances of teacher talk to ensure full coverage across the data.

Frame analysis lends itself to consideration of framing, the rhetorical act of generating frames, as well as the resulting frames (Johnston, 1995). In the final phase of analysis, we focused on the rhetorical moves made by teachers as they talked about the parent component of the evaluation policy. Teachers positioned their perspectives on the parent component using specific tactics, whether consciously or subconsciously, and we used inductive coding techniques to emerge patterns in those tactics. To do so, we returned to the dataset with gerund codes—those depicting “ing” verbs—and coded the rhetorical function of each instance. This type of coding focuses on the utility of speech acts, rather than their content, allowing for the analysis to bring to light implied meaning. Gerund coding is therefore an appropriate tool for theory construction (Saldaña, 2016). Three codes emerged: minimizing the influence of teachers on parent engagement, masking race-based causes of teacher resistance, and misdirecting attention away from parental rights to judge education as a public good. These tactics constitute the means through which teachers justified racist assumptions related to parent authority by drawing on frames of what constitutes professional educator roles.

Findings

Teachers mentioned parents in 181 instances of talk about the new evaluation policy during focus groups. The vast majority of that talk (75% of instances; n = 136) involved negative views of parents. As teachers critiqued the parent component of the new evaluation policy, certain themes emerged across teachers, including the use of professionalism as a frame for justifying resistance to parents. By positioning their negative views of parents as being in defense of their profession, these teachers normalized the idea that teachers are at odds with parents, rather than accepting parent relationship building as part of their professional responsibility.

Teachers occasionally referenced race obliquely with terms like “diverse” or “urban.” However, in no instances of teacher talk about the parent component did teachers directly reference race. Although race was almost entirely absent from teacher talk about parents, the significant differences in how teachers talked about parents in racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts and how teachers talked about parents in primarily White districts suggest that race matters. Signaling parents without reference to race, while establishing patterns of perspectives along racial demographics of the district’s families, points to a racial dimension to teachers’ color-blind perspectives.

To illustrate the anatomy of color-blind framing in this study, we deconstruct three tactics teachers used when framing their resistance to parents: minimizing professional responsibility for engaging parents, masking racist perspectives through geographic and social distance, and misdirecting attention away from parents’ rights to judge education as a public good. Each of these rhetorical tactics was invoked by teachers in this study to define the professional role of educators. As teachers discussed the new authority extended to parents through the parent-based evaluation component, the language they used often minimized, masked, and misdirected attention away from the racial dimensions of their resistance. Of the 136 negative comments on parents or the parent component, 80% (n = 109) involved one of these three framing tactics.

Minimizing: Lowering Expectations That Teachers Engage Parents

Minimizing the role of teachers in engaging parents draws boundaries around the profession, describing what is and is not reasonable to expect of professional educators. When teachers minimize the role of teachers in engaging parents, they claim it is not something that teachers must do to be professional. This is different from claiming that engaging parents is necessary though difficult to achieve.

Teachers in both racial/ethnic demographically diverse and primarily White districts minimized their role in positively engaging parents. However, 76% (n = 22) of instances in which teachers minimized their role in engaging parents occurred in racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts. Teachers in these districts often described their students and families as needing more from them to meet educational benchmarks to emphasize the uneven expectations facing teachers under the same statewide policy. However, many also used this fact to draw attention to what they believed should be understood as a reasonable boundary around the profession.

Minimizing teachers’ roles in engaging parents relies on the logics of control. As one teacher shared,

I think there are too many X factors - the things that you just can’t predict, like kids doing their work at home, homework and parent involvement, and who we’re given as students. There are just some things you can’t [do]. . .And also there’s no differentiation between a diversified city school, like [here], and a small, rural [district]. We’re all being held on the same thing. We’re being held on, you know, ten percent parent feedback. Well our parent feedback, our parents are so much more removed than, like let’s say a [White, affluent district] parent might be. So again, it’s just like the state is making it one big umbrella when we’re not all the same.

This teacher, like many others, justified her resistance to allowing parents to evaluate teacher quality with her belief that teachers did not have sufficient control over how parents choose to engage in their children’s school. She implies that she should only be evaluated on elements of educating students that she can “predict” and assert some influence over the outcome.

She further implies that teachers should not be expected to attempt to influence what happens outside the classroom because “there are just some things you can’t [do].” In other words, the profession should only be judged on what members of the profession are able to produce and it is unreasonable to expect professional educators to influence parent engagement. Minimizing the role of teachers in parent engagement thus allows teachers to remain on the politically correct side of racial issues: even the most inclusive, equity-minded teacher could not make a difference.

While minimizing the role of teachers in engaging parents, several teachers invoked issues related to individualism. In one representative example, a teacher at a racial/ethnic demographically diverse district minimized her ability to influence parent engagement while sharing her concerns.

I’m concerned about the parent survey component and the aspects that relate to school climate and the things that are holistic that impact our evaluations. Because while I understand that our personal actions definitely impact the school and perceptions in the community - and I think that’s important - I don’t know, just in terms of fairness or equity, how fair that is for any individual to be held responsible for the public’s perception or the lack of participation perhaps.

This teacher states that measurement is only appropriate when it connects individual efforts (the teacher’s own practices) to individual outcomes (teacher quality rating). The concern regarding individual evaluation being subsumed by perceptions of school climate at large suggests the speaker, as an individual, does not want to be held responsible for the school climate. Rather, this teacher is seeking an evaluation on teachers’ individual efforts (i.e. the work they have completed). In other words, conflating individual teacher efforts into a larger conversation around school climate might (to this teacher) be perceived as an inequitable practice.

Bonilla-Silva (2002) describes individualism as a foundational value in the abstract liberalism of the United States. One of the ideologies that allows White people to act in ways that reify racial privilege without referencing race is to trace individual successes to individual behaviors, rather than attributing positive experiences to systems that favor White people in various ways. This teacher’s concern is a reflection of her presence in systems operating to favor individuals who are White and disadvantage individuals who are from historically marginalized communities. The speaker wants a fair and equitable evaluation of their individual efforts. This language of fair and equitable demonstrates how White teachers employ ideals of abstract liberalism within narratives of their experience without acknowledging the lack of “fairness and equity” for historically marginalized communities operating within educational systems.

Masking: Distancing From Racist Perspectives

Masking describes a situation where the presence of one relationship obscures the presence of another. In this study, some teachers suggested that they generally favored extending authority to parents—but only under the right set of circumstances in which that authority would not be abused. Others suggested that they themselves did not hold negative perceptions of parents—but their colleagues did. Masking therefore creates a false sense of distance between teachers and resistance to a set of racially diverse parents evaluating them.

In one set of teacher talk using masking, teachers described the parent component as being problematic but attributed that belief to others. The following is a typical comment from this set:

You’re still doing the same thing you’ve always been doing, which is tracking data - tracking student performance, you know, increasing parent feedback. So for me, I’m not traumatized by it. But a lot of my colleagues are, I will be honest with you.

At first glance, it might appear that this teacher is comfortable with the implementation of the parent component of the teacher evaluation. However, by suggesting that there are other teachers (i.e. “colleagues”) who are “traumatized” by the policy not only points to a critique of the policy but also allows the teacher to air these concerns without necessarily taking ownership of them. Moreover, the use of a generalizing “you” to refer to teachers in general demonstrates an unwillingness to claim ownership of an evaluative experience pushing the concern into the realm of a professional and shared experience. Casting it into a professional experience through the use of a generalizing “you” distances this teacher from the experience, which allows the teacher to then express the masked emotion of being “traumatized” by the evaluation process. In other words, when speakers introduce the idea that “increasing parent feedback” is actually too difficult for teachers, they do so by distancing themselves from the idea, claiming that they are “not traumatized by it.” By attributing that experience to colleagues, the teacher removes himself or herself from any ownership over what is a politically incorrect confession. Responding to the parent component through this type of social distancing from negative perspectives occurred only in demographically diverse districts.

In a second set of instances in which teachers invoked masking, they relied on comparisons with districts serving more privileged communities and families in their rationales for resisting the parent component. Several teachers in demographically diverse districts aligned themselves with positive views of the value that parent perspectives might bring to schools even while discrediting the possibility of that value in their own schools or districts. This allows teachers to distance themselves from deficit perspectives of parents, rather than owning these perspectives in their own sensemaking of the new policy. For example, one teacher shared,

Both parent and student surveys - you’re going to get considerable, probably useful data from those in some districts. And in other districts your return of the sample is going to be miniscule and the data you get is going to be useless. I think [this district] is part of those districts, no offense [emphasis added].

This teacher suggests that there is, in fact, an opportunity for professional learning to be gained from including parents in the evaluation process (in this case, via district-authored surveys). However, according to this teacher, there was something about parents in this particular district that decreased the chances of them participating in the survey.

By distancing herself from perspectives about parents’ inability or unwillingness to authentically engage in evaluation activities, this teacher relied on the psychometrics of good measurement to mask racial implications of her responses to policy. Her reasoning was that it is not that parents in racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts should not be allowed to evaluate teachers, it is that doing so will not lead to sufficient data to draw sound conclusions. Rather than focusing on how teachers in her district might boost parent participation, she implies that it is not worth the effort to engage in the component in certain districts. Furthermore, by adding “no offense,” she acknowledges that the perspective she has shared may be viewed as being offensive and in this process unmasks her color-blind tactic to reveal deficit and racialized perspectives of her demographically diverse district and parents.

A few teachers in primarily White districts masked their negative responses to the parent component behind social distance. There were 12 instances of teacher talk that masked teachers’ resistance to the parent component; however, in these instances, the distance was not used to compare the school’s district to more privileged communities and families. For example, one teacher masked his resistance to the parent evaluations of quality behind parents’ outdated expectations of what happens in schools.

It’s hard enough on the students, but the parents have certain expectations about high school education, I think. I’m sure they remember their own, what I’d call, fun elective classes and thinking their children are going to have that same high school experience.

In this and a few similar instances, teacher talk framed parents’ unreasonable expectations in terms of changes to the institution of schooling over time rather than parents’ general ability to assess professional educators adequately. By this logics, if parents adjusted their understanding of what schooling entails, they would be able to accurately assess high-quality teaching.

Misdirecting: Focusing Attention Away From Parents’ Rights

The only rhetorical tactic that occurred more frequently in primarily White districts than in racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts was misdirecting attention away from parents’ rights to assess the value of education as a public good. This was the most frequently deployed tactic with 45 instances of teachers justifying resistance to parents to protect the profession across participants, representing one-third of teachers’ negative talk about parents. Of these instances, 62% occurred in primarily White districts, with only 38% occurring in racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts. Although misdirecting more often shaped teachers’ resistance to parents in primarily White districts, the tactic was still deployed in color-blind frames in racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts. When used by teachers in primarily White districts, resistance was almost always based on what might otherwise be considered to be parent assets, such as being highly involved in their children’s education. In racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts, teachers used misdirection to point out deficits in parents that made them unfit to judge public education.

As teachers in primarily White districts talked about their resistance to the parent component, they often described parents as already being overly directive concerning their children’s experience in the school. One teacher shared that “In [this district], a lot of parents, they get their own say of what team [of teachers] their kids are on. They’d like to say that they don’t, but they do.” A teacher in another school referenced “helicopter parents” as prevalent in her experience. Although these teachers talked about this parent involvement as being problematic, having parents engaged in their children’s education is, broadly speaking, an asset for children.

On the whole, teachers in primarily White districts then connected this ability of parents to exert power over what happens in schools and classrooms to parents’ willingness to use the authority of evaluating teachers as further leverage. As one teacher shared her justification for the parent component not being weighted any more than 10%, she explained,

you have the parents that love you or the parents that hate you. And the parents that hate you is because you’re doing what their child needs, but they just might not agree with you. So to make that a larger percentage, I feel, wouldn’t be fair.

This teacher contends that parents who “hate” the teacher are not justified in their evaluation and that it is the teacher who truly knows what the child needs. She situates knowledge of what to do in teachers’ professional expertise and, by doing so, questions the right of parents to determine the value of particular educator practices. Yet the disagreement stems from parents’ engagement in the decisions being made about what their child should or should not receive in school.

Another teacher shared similar logics:

We did hear a lot of complaints because you do have some parents that may be upset with administration. And then, now they’re gonna take that survey and they’re gonna slam you and then that’s gonna affect our score.

Although this teacher attributes the root cause for parents’ negative response to administrators, rather than individual teachers, the justification for resisting the policy extending evaluation authority to parents is the same: parents who are upset will use that authority to “slam” teachers. Furthermore, that power of engaged parents is characterized by this teacher as inappropriately affecting teacher scores.

In racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts, teachers referenced a variety of ways in which parents should not be given the right to assess the value of education due to their deficits. For example, several teachers referenced parents’ lack of knowledge about what teaching, as a profession, entails. One teacher explained his opinion that the parent component should be discontinued, “You’re asking parents who have no degree in education to come in and evaluate us. That’s like me going and evaluating the doctor I saw yesterday. That’s unfair to us.” Referencing medicine is a clear indication that the teacher is framing teaching as a profession with specialized knowledge and practice that is inaccessible to people not in the profession. Yet adults have the ability to discontinue seeing a doctor who they believe is not caring for them the way they would like; this teacher does not extend the same consumer logics to parents being served by public educators.

Another assumed deficit in misdirection from resistant teachers in racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts involved justifying the profession’s ability to take parents’ right to determine the value of public education if parents do not engage in ways legitimized by teachers. Several teachers connected the fact that parents do not participate in school-based activities as signs that the parents are not engaged in their child’s education and, therefore, have given up their right to determine whether the school is providing a valuable experience for their child. In an exchange between teachers during a focus group, two teachers connect their resistance to the parent component to views about the community and, by extension, parents.

Teacher 1:

We have a [Student Learning Objective] for parent communication. I know we are supposed to be building bridges between the community, but if the community is not building the bridge with us then it just seems like teachers are being blind evaluated. ‘Teachers need to do this.’ And we are relying on a community to step up, which is [not happening].

Teacher 2:

We had an assembly here for the community and parents on Tuesday and I came and it was half full. And - that should not be for something that was this important. And the kids - a lot of the kids have taken it to heart. So like I said, that concerns me.

The first teacher acknowledges that the rationale for including parents as evaluators is to shift teachers toward increasing engagement with the community they serve. She then qualifies that position with an expectation that the community work with teachers to strengthen relationships. If they do not, she contends that it is inappropriate for community members to evaluate teachers without the context of a relationship or, as she says, “blind.”

However, the example given by the second teacher to demonstrate what co-constructing positive relationships between teachers and the community should entail is school centered. The example given is a school assembly that required parents to go to the school building to be viewed as “engaged” in their children’s education. Such strategies have been demonstrated by scholars to be problematic in reifying educators’ positions of power (deCarvalho, 2001; Fernández and López, 2017; López, 2001; Olivos, 2006; Young, 1999) and failing to authentically engage parents across cultural divides (Author, 2016; Hong, 2011; Olivos, 2009; Rodela, 2016; Scribner and Fernández, 2017). The teacher typifies parents’ lack of attendance as a failure to “step up” rather than interpreting the “half full” assembly as a symptom of deeper issues. Grounding their “concern” and resistance to “being blind evaluated” by parents in this lack of parent attendance misdirects attention away from an interpretation of these parents as being engaged in their children’s education in other ways and, therefore, still entitled to evaluate teachers, according to these teachers’ logics.

Taken together, the assets-based perspectives of parents who abuse those assets in primarily White districts and the deficits-based perspectives of parents who fail to do their part to appropriately engage schools suggest a racial dimension to teachers’ use of misdirection in this study. As teachers framed their resistance to the parent component in terms of parents’ rights to assess the quality of education, they did so in different ways across district contexts.

Discussion

There has been a recent push to include parents within educational spaces (Donaldson and Steinberg, 2016; Ruffini et al., 2014). One strategy has been to invite parents to conduct teacher evaluations. Given the significant body of research examining teachers’ use of racialized narratives of Students and Parents of Color (Hilliard III, 2002; Pollack, 2012; Valencia, 1997; Valencia and Black, 2002), we sought to understand whether and how teachers employed racialized logics in response to newly implemented parent evaluations of teachers. Teachers largely spoke negatively about the parent component of the new evaluation system. However, there were differences in the explanations utilized to express disapproval between teachers in primarily White districts and those in racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts. Although the teachers did not use overtly racialized language, teachers employed a number of color-blind racial tactics to discuss the assumed deficits of Students and Parents of Color and to express fear of the political power held by White students and parents.

These findings have a number of implications for practice as well as future research. The district context of teachers in this study operated to inform the racial logics employed for denouncing the parent evaluation system. Within racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts, teachers referred to parents as being incapable and unreliable, while teachers situated within primarily White districts feared parents exercising their power over teachers. These findings extend Cobb’s (2017) examination of color-blind frames used by teachers across three schools. Cobb found the local meaning systems interacted with color-blind racial logics, creating different frames for understanding race/class within their schools and communities. Taking it one step further, our findings suggest that the racial makeup of such meaning systems influences the type of color-blind logics employed by teachers, even when the goal for employing such logics (i.e. resisting new power extended to parents) is the same.

As such, future research might consider how color-blind logics “shows up” in teacher preparation programs. Research that explores how teacher preparation programs address, reify, or socialize preservice teachers’ internalization of color-blind ideologies and logics could provide insight into which aspects of teacher preparation programs (e.g. educators, curriculum) might therefore serve as critical points of disruption. Recognizing these empirically demonstrated points of disruption might provide teacher education programs an opportunity to begin activating and nurturing the critical consciousness of preservice teachers—potentially shifting internalized color-blind logics into anti-racist, humanizing, and liberatory beliefs. There may also be a parallel research agenda focused on the effects of these efforts on teacher educators themselves.

Similarly, highlighting current practices within districts and schools that center anti-racist and humanizing pedagogies might yield a broader understanding of how to continuously engage in school-wide or district-wide initiatives that resist color-blind logics. By documenting and sharing these liberatory practices within schools, we can begin to (re)conceptualize how to cultivate a school culture that views Parents and Students of Color through assets-based frameworks. However, in order to do this, school leaders, teachers, teacher educators, and preservice teachers have to not only reconcile their own internalized color-blind logics but also grapple with the threatening discourses that seek to de-professionalize the teaching profession. As our findings indicate, these two personal sets of beliefs color our language in related ways. Ignoring the connection contributes to the reification of logics that perpetually positions Parents and Students of Color as barriers and obstacles (Fernández and López, 2017; Hong, 2011; Olivos, 2009; Rodela, 2016; Scribner and Fernández, 2017).

The fear of delegitimizing teaching as a profession has a long history (Burbules and Densmore, 1991; Gardner, 2007; Ingersoll and Merrill, 2018; Inlow, 1956; Wise, 2005). Allegratto and Mishel (2018) argue that delegitimizing teaching as a profession allows the profession of teaching to be attacked, underfunded, and neglected. The response invoked by teachers in this study suggests that the parent component of teacher evaluations blurs the line between teachers as credentialed experts and the “non-credentialed” public, particularly as parents assume a legitimized position of authority over them.

However, the goal of the policy that extended such authority to parents in this study is to shift the balance of power to include parents to a relatively small degree. The parent component comprised such a small percentage of teacher ratings that an otherwise excelling teacher could not be marked down a rating due to negative ratings from parents. Yet teachers located across racially/ethnically diverse and predominantly White districts have positioned parent authority as a threat. Rather than viewing the evaluation system as an opportunity to amplify parent voices, they view the parent evaluation system as delegitimizing the profession (see Fernández, LeChasseur and Donaldson [2018] for a more nuanced analysis of the teacher evaluation policy). Such responses foreground the entrenched resistance of education systems to include parents in ways that decenter teachers and schools (López, 2001, 2010; Olivos, 2006, 2009; Pérez-Carreón et al., 2005; Scribner and Fernández, 2017).

Finally, observing contextually specific color-blind tactics to denounce the parent evaluation system highlights the power of the American racial order. DuBois (2017) details the power of the American racial order among American laborers during and after the American Civil War. While many White working-class laborers and Black slaves occupied “like situations” in terms of working conditions and political power, White working- class laborers chose allegiance to their racial group over their allegiance to fellow laborers (especially Black laborers). Burawoy (1972) documented a similar trend in Zambian mines after decolonization and again in an American Midwest factory (Burawoy, 1982). Like the laborers described above, we noticed that the “laborers” in our study (i.e. teachers) did not default their political allegiance to economic class; rather allegiance defaulted along race.

Increasingly, teachers across the United States face poor economic positions as public education is defunded and devalued (Levin, 2018). Despite finding it more difficult to be successful and their social status decreasing, the teachers interviewed in this study continued to distance themselves from parents, who might otherwise be viewed as strong political allies (Fennimore, 2017). This distancing was pronounced along racial allegiance. Teachers within racial/ethnic demographically diverse districts employed color-blind tactics to mask racialized logics to diminish the capabilities of Parents and Students of Color, while teachers within White districts expressed fear of the political power parents possess.

Distancing themselves from one group due to perceived racial differences while fearing White parents works to reinforce the racial and social status order prevalent in American society. Teachers discredit and assume Parents and Students of Color are incapable, while fearing that affluent White families maintain power. As with any racialized logic, whether overt or color-blind, the hypocrisies exist in tandem, simultaneously contradicting and informing each other. Teachers are not exempt from falling prey to fallacious racial logics even if they try to mask, minimize, or distance themselves from it.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Érica Fernández

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