Honoring African
American parents as
partners in education
Educators must
explicitly grant
families of color
authentic access to
share their voices.
That means allowing
ourselves to be
more uncomfortable
than they are and
not pulling rank by
posture, tone or title.
16
Leadership
When I set out to pen this article, I
had no idea that what you are about to read
is what it would become. I had grandiose
ideas of talking strategy, discussing my
book on equitable family engagement and
parent empowerment strategies, and pro-
viding a few quotes from African Ameri-
can parents and official parent liaisons to
support my key points.
Instead, after ref lecting on what was
shared with me, I was moved to play a lesser
role, and walk-my-talk by creating access
to the voice of a key stakeholder group in
our schools throughout the nation: African
American families. Being an equity leader
and a woman of color, I am careful not to
support the stereotype that “one person of
color speaks for the whole.” Yet, what this
mother and father share with us all too often
in my work is the sentiment of “the group.”
While the bulk of this article focuses
on parent voices, I will lightly offer both
some start-now solutions as well as some
concluding thoughts for us as educators in
this difficult work of engagement regard-
ing families of color, particularly African
American families.
Listening to parent voices
Let’s hear from Collette (not her real
name), a middle-class African American
mother of three students, ranging from col-
lege to elementary school, in a progressive
urban school district in a progressive urban
city. Collette has been involved in parent
leadership work in the district since 2010.
Q: What motivated you to get involved as
a parent leader? Was there one specific in-
stance?
A: My daughter was in the 10th grade.
She asked me to come to her school because
things just “weren’t right.” She couldn’t de-
fine it any better than that, even though she
was normally very articulate. Because “Pro-
gressive High” was popular, and I had read
all the catalog information, I didn’t under-
stand what could be wrong. So I went to the
school, and that’s when I was able to see that
some kids were expected to succeed, and
others were expected to fail and treated as
throw-aways – the latter were all Black.
Around the same time, I went to a PTA
meeting at my other daughter’s elementary
By Tovi C. Scruggs-Hussein