An equity framework for family, community, and school partnerships

ABSTRACT

Equity has often been identified as a foundational concept for truly inclusive and reciprocal partnerships among schools, families, and communities. Equity can be difficult for schools to achieve without cultivating new paradigms for interacting with historically marginalized students, families, and communities. In order to bridge the ideal of equity with radical, scalable, and sustainable institutional change, we developed an equity framework for cultivating mutual interdependence among families, communities, and schools in partnership. Rooted in sociocultural and critical theories, this framework builds upon the values of mutual respect, democratic participation, critical consciousness, and sustainability. These values then support cycles of collaborative action amongst stakeholders leveraging problem posing and community organizing to address inequities. In our article, we discuss the underlying theory supporting the framework and elaborate upon its implications for practice.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the United States Department of Education under the Office of English Language Acquisition’s National Professional Development Grant (T365Z170226). The U.S. Department of Education had no role in the design, execution, analysis, or preparation of this manuscript for publication. The contents, findings, and opinions presented are solely those of the authors.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no financial or business conflicts of interest associated with this work.

Additional resources

(1) The Great Lakes Equity Center website: https://greatlakesequity.org/

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, this regional center, located at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, serves a 13-state region free of charge in addressing equity-driven system change, professional learning, and collaborative inquiry. The website offers learning experiences and a plethora of resources for addressing equity, such as newsletters, briefs, podcasts, vodcasts, presentations, equity tools, digests, and webinars.

(2) Moule, J. (2012). Cultural competence: A primer for educators. Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of how to become culturally competent, with applications to classroom teaching and in teaching marginalized student groups. It is especially helpful for White and/or middle-class educators learning about racism, prejudice, microaggressions, privilege, and racial consciousness among Whites.

(3) Larson, J. (2014). Radical equality in education: Starting over in US Schooling. Routledge.

This 92-page book outlines what educators need to do now to reimagine schooling. Using a humanist and democratic view of learning and equality, Larson presents bold ideas that require collective political action to improve schooling for all students.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Education Office of English Language Acquisition, NPD Grant [T365Z170226].