School–Community Partnerships, Friend or Foe? The Doublespeak of Community With Educational Partnerships

Abstract

In recent reform efforts, school–community partnerships have been touted as a means for promoting student success (Decker, Decker, & Brown 2007; Epstein 2010) and meeting student needs (Hands 2010). Yet, despite any accolades, the motives and results of school–community partnerships are contested. Gary Anderson (1998) points out that partnerships tend to be designed to graft members into prior objectives and goals instead of being designed to facilitate staff members in working together to redefine goals. Auerbach (2010) echoes this concern, suggesting that the literature regarding school partnerships focuses primarily on academic achievement while operating under “limited school agendas or mandates for collaboration” which do little to promote “socially just” schools (p. 729). And, schools are egregiously unjust. Thus, in this article, I first evaluate the school–community partnership in a new light by broadly conceptualizing how community exists as a term within the public education system and considering the impact of the historical situatedness of communities and political lines on renderings of community. Second, I offer an understanding of how school–community partnerships are discussed in terms of doublespeak, illustrating how the very word community can be employed across a spectrum of different meanings, interpretations, and implications. Last, I argue that community partnerships have been promoted as educational reform with little prospect of challenging meta-narratives that tell a story of who has something to offer to our schools and who does not.

Notes

¹Schools that do not meet annual yearly progress (AYP) are considered failing. According to the US Department of Education, in 2003–2004, 25% of schools did not meet the requirements to earn AYP. The percentages of failing schools remained static between 2004 and 2007, although approximately 10% of schools met AYP one year and not the next, or vice versa, rendering a less favorable percentage of schools consistently passing. Also, the percentage of schools meeting AYP dropped noticeably in 2008–2009, when only approximately 66% of schools met AYP standards. Percentages among states vary, such as in 2003–2004 when 95% of schools in Wisconsin made AYP compared to only 23% of schools in Alabama.

³Being colorblind is critiqued on multiple levels. First, a colorblind policy disregards the culture and identity associated with race. Second, without paying respect to how race affects educational opportunities, continued discrimination is allowed without scrutiny or questioning. We might instead liken colorblindness to whitewashing, a form of covering over diversity, history, and color with blanket assumptions from a dominant cultural perspective. See Schofield (2006) for a lengthier discussion of the complications of being colorblind.