Reframing community (dis)engagement: the discursive connection between undemocratic policy enactment, minoritized communities and resistance

ABSTRACT

While studies have examined leadership efforts to improve community engagement, less is known about how deeply rooted structured discourses, systems, and practices influence leadership actions and responses from communities. Deficit approaches to educational policy reform are pervasive in the most historically marginalized communities and school districts in the United States (US). Drawing on critical policy analysis, this study examines a disengaged school district’s leadership of a Federal School Turnaround Policy from the perspectives of minoritized communities in an urban US school district. We analyzed deficit policy discourses, its enactment, and leadership practices using interview data and archived documents. This study found pathological discourses and deficit frames of minoritized communities, embedded in policy enactment, which directly led to leadership practices resulting in community resistance. In this way, we (re)frame disengaged school leadership; the resistance and the tension in response to pathological and deficit structures and ideologies as, at minimum, healthy attempts of redistributing justice and democracy. In addition, our findings highlight that discourses and enactment of turnaround school reforms were intertwined with undemocratic and racialized practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical policy analysis
• community engagement
• community disengagement
• epistemology
• urban education
• turnaround reform

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We used a pseudonym for the district in references to protect the district.

2. The first author is a graduate of Garvey High School.

3. Education advocate and community organizer; was the school governance council president in Urbanville Elementary School and charged with being a liaison for Urbanville parents. As a school governance council president, she worked closely with Mr. King.

4. Major Sr. is a retired State Legislator of over 20 years, a community organizer, a local college professor and a highly respected member of the Blackamerican community in Urbanville. As a lifelong government official and city and state politician; his perspective on local school policy was significant.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James S. Wright

James S. Wright (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University. His research agenda is highlighted by the ways in which culture affects educational policy and leadership. Specifically, he looks at how culture and discourses of culture shape educational policy and their implications for culturally responsive leadership practices in education.

Taeyeon Kim

Taeyeon Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln