3. Contested Community
NEGOTIATING ADMISSIONS IN THE NEW SMALL SCHOOL

Two years after OCCA held its first action for new small schools in Oakland, United Community School opened its doors in temporary facilities in the heart of the Fruitvale district. It was the first new school to open in the Fruitvale-San Antonio neighborhood in more than forty years. The brightly painted portables and newly laid lawn, still fenced in by bright orange netting to protect the fragile grass, stood out in colorful contrast to the surrounding urban environs: the looming concrete of the elevated Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) tracks, a busy freeway, and still more train tracks, crisscrossing the avenues leading to the school. No one could have called this plot of land desirable property for a school. It stood at the border of a bustling commercial strip where an informal economy struggled to make up for decades of corporate and government neglect, and an industrial wasteland stretching to the Bay, traversed by commuters whizzing by on the freeway or on BART trains, on their way from jobs in the city to homes in the suburbs. And yet, community leaders with OCCA had fought for eight years to acquire this land from the city for new small schools. And on this day in late September, they were here to celebrate their victory.

Representatives from the school district, the school board, BACEE, and OCCA joined parents, teachers, and families to commemorate the unprecedented partnership that had brought them to this day. It was an overcast Sunday afternoon, with the sun trying hard to break through the clouds, and a steady wind blowing the decorative banners, balloons, and streamers that had been hung for the occasion. Colorful murals and welcome signs in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese were displayed on the wire link fences enclosing the school. Neighborhood Mexican restaurants and markets, along with several families, had donated food and drinks for the celebration, and a row of long tables was laden with platters of beans and rice, chicken, carnitas, lasagna, and potato and macaroni salads. Children’s craft stations were set up around the courtyard, and in an adjoining playground a crowd of gleefully screaming youngsters attacked a succession of piñatas.

From the podium, a series of speakers addressed the crowd, sharing their pride in the new small school and thanking everyone who had helped to make it possible. “I’m very emotional, because our dream, our vision of a new school in our community, is a reality,” said Lupe, a mother who had been on the design team. A second mother, Norma, told the crowd:

I want to take this opportunity to say that I am very happy that my son is going to go to this new school where they have grass to run on, where they have nice new buildings, new classrooms, desks, and chairs. I’ve lived in Oakland my whole life. I was born here, I grew up here. I went to Oakland schools. And I know that Oakland schools need a lot of fixing. The schools I went to had only torn textbooks, broken lockers, and no security, and here, finally, we have the security that our children are going to go to a school that is nice, new, and safe.

After parents and teachers had spoken, an OCCA elder named Barbara spoke of the eight-year struggle to bring the school to this site—a history of, in her words, “an entire community coming together and working together towards a common goal.”

The opening celebration of UCS was in many ways a celebration against all odds. In the face of urban neglect and decay, the community had chosen to open a new school, and had succeeded in overcoming innumerable bureaucratic and political obstacles to locate it there. The lot on which UCS was located, designated to house two new small schools in permanent facilities by 2004, had been the site of an abandoned department store building since the mid-1980s. In 1993, community members through the Local Organizing Committee at St. Isabel’s Church mobilized to pressure the city to tear the building down and construct new schools in its place. New schools and recreational fields for children had been identified as top priorities for the community. The history of the community’s struggle to obtain control of the property is in itself a remarkable story, beyond the scope of this chapter.¹ But, important for our purposes, the opening of UCS on the site represented the community’s struggle to “transform the building from a symbol of despair to one of hope.”² Many people present at the opening celebration that Sunday, including OCCA leaders, parents, and some teachers, bore the memory of the long struggle for the land, and the image of blight and abandonment that occupied that space before. When Barbara from OCCA spoke of the eight-year struggle to open the school, she was grounding the school in that community history, reminding all those present of its roots.

This history is important because it shaped community members’ perceptions of the school in distinct and powerful ways. For parents who lived in the community and witnessed the transformation of the site, including many OCCA parents who had participated in the struggle to win the land for schools, UCS was indeed a symbol of hope; its purpose and existence were tied inextricably to the aspirations of the community. Teachers and reformers, however, did not necessarily share this view of the school. As discussed in chapter 1, not all teachers had been a part of the long struggle for the land or recalled it as a key part of the school’s history. While teachers celebrated with the community the victory of the school on that day, they brought different memories of what it had taken to get to this moment, and different ideas of what the school was about. For this reason, the struggle of the community to gain control of the land would not end when the school opened. After participating in the struggle to bring UCS into existence, the mothers in Madres Unidas would find themselves raising the question of what it means to be a “community school,” and who, after all, was “the community”?

This chapter examines competing visions of community that underlay teachers’ and parents’ negotiations in the process of deciding who would attend the new small school. In the months before the school opened, contentious debate to determine a fair admissions policy shaped interactions between teachers and parents, bringing tensions about the character and membership of “community” to the fore. Not only did parents and teachers bring distinct cultural values and understandings of community to the discussion, but their ability to operationalize their values in school policies was conditioned by cultural politics that privileged teachers’ interpretations while silencing those of parents. By analyzing both the “ideals” for community and the discourses, spaces, and practices through which they were negotiated, I argue that teachers constructed “community” in ways that undermined the claims of Latino parents, and served to minimize Latino parents’ power and participation in the shaping of the school. Madres Unidas, through their research into the admissions process after the school opened, uncovered the harmful consequences the school’s mistakes had on the community, and suggested other values that should shape the school’s admissions decisions.

Soon after their proposal for a new school was accepted, sixteen parents and five teachers had gathered in a classroom of Dalton School, adjoining Whitman Elementary School, to discuss a name for the school. The mood was jubilant. Parents called out ideas in Spanish, and teachers offered English translations. Both parents and teachers wanted to know how each name would sound in both languages. Early in the discussion, Baudelia said that the name should reflect the community, because, she said, “this school has been a community effort.” She suggested United Community School. After much discussion and many ideas, an English-language teacher asked the group if they couldn’t come up with a name that reflected their social-justice theme.

Baudelia responded in Spanish, “Social justice for whom? It starts in the community.” A name that comes from the community, she argued, is a name that reflects social justice. In a struggle that would repeat itself many times in the development of the new school, the Latino parents fought to connect the school’s social-justice vision to the immediate community, or the parents and families who had struggled to make the school a reality. The teacher’s suggestion that the name United Community School did not reflect their social-justice vision revealed a conception of social justice that surpassed, and perhaps superseded, the local community of parents and families. This would be a point of contention that animated disagreements between parents and teachers over the next several months, but, like an undetected parasite that surreptitiously drains the body’s resources, was never addressed or treated. Instead, teachers chose to run meetings in a bureaucratic format that minimized spaces for open discussion and dialogue, and prevented both parties from reflecting on and articulating their own images of “community.” In the end, the group voted for the name United Community School, which they decided to translate into Spanish as Escuela del Pueblo Unido (literally, School of the United People), or, as it came to be known among Spanish-speaking parents, Pueblo Unido School. But it was not until Madres Unidas began their research, well into the school’s first year, that the question was raised, what exactly is a “community school”?

United Community School is located just down the street from the old Whitman Elementary School, near the busy intersection of two main thoroughfares in Fruitvale, the heart of Oakland’s largest and most established Spanish-speaking community. Across the street from the school, in front of a Goodwill store, Latino day laborers lined up each morning hoping to be picked up for jobs. Although some parents complained that they didn’t want their children walking past “those men” on their way to school, other parents, including Ofelia, argued that the day laborers were “part of our community” and had the right to be there. All parents, who lived in the neighborhood and walked their children to school, knew there was much that needed to be changed about their community. In an essay she wrote for her GED called “Oakland Streets,” Ofelia wrote that she worried about her children’s safety. She described walking past the park with her eight-year-old son where groups of men were drinking and smoking marijuana, and having to explain to her son why they were smoking.

Fruitvale faced the challenges common to distressed urban neighborhoods everywhere, including joblessness, inadequate housing, low levels of educational attainment, and high rates of poverty. In 2000, Fruitvale was Oakland’s most densely populated district, as well as one of its most diverse. A port-of-entry neighborhood in a city that was one of the top ten destinations for immigrants in the country,³ Fruitvale experienced rapid population growth between 1990 and 2000, with the largest growth in its Latino population. Data from the 2000 census show that Fruitvale’s population was 50 percent Latino, 24 percent African American, 17 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 8 percent white. Its total population of 54,857 represented an increase of 15 percent since 1990.

In 2000, 43 percent of Fruitvale’s residents were foreign-born, and roughly half of those had arrived in the previous ten years. A third of residents were noncitizens, and nearly two-thirds of the population spoke a language other than English at home. Of these, the vast majority were Spanish-speaking. Seventy percent of the foreign-born population originated from Latin America, primarily from Mexico and Central America. Fruitvale’s main thoroughfares, Fruitvale Avenue and the busy International Boulevard, are lined with Mexican restaurants, bakeries, markets, and carnicerías selling Mexican and Central American products, and agencies for sending remittances to Mexico and Central America. The neighborhood continues to attract many new immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

The economic obstacles and barriers to education facing the community are also evident in the census data: Only 11 percent of the population twenty-five years and older had a college degree in 2000, compared to 27 percent in the state as a whole. Nearly half of the adult population (47 percent) were not high school graduates. Twenty-one percent of families lived below the poverty level, and 25 percent of individuals did. Only a third of residents owned their homes.

In the face of these statistics, a strong network of well-established community organizations worked to support Fruitvale’s immigrant population. St. Isabel’s Catholic Church, a large multicultural parish more than a hundred years old, had an active Local Organizing Committee since the early 1970s. This was the committee that spearheaded the demolition of the abandoned department store and pushed for the construction of new schools. The Unity Council, founded in 1964, brought a number of important services to Fruitvale, including Head Start, the Fruitvale Senior Center, home-ownership assistance and affordable housing, employment services, and new parks. Fruitvale was also home to the People’s Clinic, the Spanish-speaking Citizens Foundation, and the Latino Legal Counsel Center, which provide health and legal services, education, and advocacy for Spanish-speaking residents.

If the parents at UCS had one thing in common, it was the experience of struggle and setback that their neighborhood had witnessed over the past several years. As Baudelia had learned in her five years of organizing in Fruitvale, no service was won without a struggle. As a stark reminder of this, a tragic accident in the school’s first year shook the community to its core. One morning in January, two families from the school were crossing the street on their way to school when they were hit by a speeding driver. The driver did not stop. All of the children and one of the mothers were hospitalized in critical condition; that night, five-year-old Lucy, a kindergarten student, died. The UCS community mourned the death of little Lucy with a pain all the more acute for having foreseen such a tragedy and having tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent it. Parents had organized to demand that a stoplight or a crossing light be installed at the intersection where the accident occurred, before the school opened. The city had promised them a crossing light, because it was cheaper. They got nothing. In the first few days of school, there was a crossing guard. Then even the guard was taken away, transferred to another school. With no protective measures on one of the busiest streets in Oakland, UCS parents sent their children to school with some apprehension, but without, it seemed, much choice. Now they wondered, how many children’s lives would it take for the city to pay attention to this neighborhood? How many of their children?

At an angry meeting with city representatives five days later, parents demanded to know why the city let this happen, and why City Councilman Ignacio de la Fuente had not shown up to face them himself. They were informed by a representative of the traffic department that the intersection where the accident took place was ninth on a list of intersections in the city that needed stoplights. Ninth. At a meeting back in August, the month before the school opened, parents had been told that traffic lights cost two hundred thousand dollars apiece to install, and that the city had money for only two per year. At that rate, it would be more than four years before the school could expect a stoplight. In the meantime, parents were assured once again that flashing yellow lights would be installed. If parents had expected a public apology, and a promise for a swift installation of a new stoplight, they found instead a labyrinth of bureaucratic excuses. They had heard it all before, and they were sick of it. Many of them expressed their rejection of the city’s response to the crisis by walking out of the meeting.

In fact, the city mobilized much more quickly than anyone expected. A new stoplight was installed at the intersection of the tragedy in March 2003, just over a year after the accident. Ofelia was one of the parent organizers of a ceremony to publicly thank Councilman de la Fuente for his attention to the community. But the stoplight had come at a high price—too high a price—and it confirmed what the parents at UCS already knew: progress for their children would come only with struggle and sacrifice. The memory of the tragedy remained strong in parents’ minds, adding to the repository of experiences that shaped their sense of community. Collective suffering, writes sociologist Mary Pardo (1998), is a powerful force shaping community identity.

Pueblo Unido School’s teachers may not have shared the local community’s history of hardship and struggle, but they certainly intended for their school to be an integral part of this community, and to add to the resources that would make Fruitvale a better place. The ethic of community and collaboration, however vaguely defined, was at the core of their vision. Their proposal read: “Our school will build bridges among the diverse cultures represented within the student population, as well as within the community, through our social justice approach, collaboration, and integration … These bridges will be constructed in a climate of respect, safety and inclusion.” This excerpt suggests how teachers believed they would achieve their goal of community. “Integration” was a key feature of the teachers’ vision for a community school, reflecting their desire for an ethnically diverse, integrated school and for an equal number of bilingual (Spanish-speaking) and English-speaking students with plentiful opportunities for the two language groups to interact. Their experience of bilingual education at Whitman, a segregated school, had shown that their ideas about language learning were difficult to implement without sufficient speakers of English. They hoped to rectify this situation at UCS by having one classroom each for Sheltered English and bilingual education at each grade level.

Ironically, the teachers’ goal of an integrated school, rooted in sound educational philosophy, created serious complications for carving a community school out of Whitman. In the first place, Whitman Elementary was 75 percent Latino, and nearly all the parents who had been participating in the organizing were Spanish-speaking. Where was the team going to find the English-speaking parents that their plan required? And how would they choose from among the Spanish-speaking families seeking admission to the school’s bilingual program? As a small school, UCS’s admission was capped at 240; and they were pulling from a school of nearly 1,400. Many dedicated parents had worked long and hard throughout the fall planning for the new school, but still were not assured of a place for their children in the school. Yet, several times these parents were asked by teachers to help recruit other, English-speaking parents. Recall that at the very first meeting with parents, called and organized by Baudelia (described in chapter 2), one of the three questions teachers posed to the group of Latino parents was, “How can we include parents of other ethnicities who don’t speak Spanish?” So, from the beginning, teachers were preoccupied with the issue of diversity, and sought to involve Spanish-speaking parents in helping them bring in parents of other ethnicities. During another meeting I observed, when teachers asked for help in recruiting English-speaking parents, Ofelia had immediately objected, “How are we supposed to do that if we don’t speak English?” The desire for integration thus introduced a dramatic tension into the design team, whose parents were almost without exception Spanish-speaking. The instructional ideal of an integrated, balanced student population was given priority over the needs of the parents immediately present.

Every two weeks for the several months before the school opened, more and more parents showed up at the designated classroom or cafeteria, having heard word of the new small school and eager to learn whether their children could attend. Mothers arrived with strollers and toddlers in tow, whispered among themselves, and rocked their babies while waiting for the meetings to start. There was a palpable anxiety in the air, as parents did not know who would be admitted to the new school, and parent leaders were still unclear about many aspects of the school’s program. Teachers, for their part, were still waiting for answers from the district on critical issues, and found themselves explaining to parents their frustrations with the district. Facing a limited amount of time and a pressured situation, teachers opted to run these meetings in a bureaucratic format that minimized spaces for public discussion and debate. Although some teachers and OCCA organizers supporting the team made serious efforts to give parents leadership roles, these efforts were ultimately sabotaged, I believe, by a cultural value system that prioritized professional expertise over relationship building. The following examples illustrate the way spaces for authentic conversation and community building were gradually closed.

One teacher began the practice of inviting parent volunteers to help plan and facilitate the larger parent meetings. The three or four parent volunteers would meet the day before the large meeting to create the agenda. These “prep meetings” were an opportunity for parents to get to know one another and contribute their ideas to the planning process. In one such meeting I observed, the parent volunteers had a rich discussion about the challenges of increasing parent participation, and whether parent participation should be required as a criterion for admission. At this meeting, the OCCA organizer, Laura, asked me to help the parent who had volunteered to keep track of time. After the parents left, she told me and the teacher, “We have to help the parents develop that discipline.” She said that it was good that “they saw what happens without discipline today,” when parents were talking out of turn and talking over each other, because now they would be conscious of it tomorrow. From her perspective, the planning meeting had been undisciplined and drawn out. From my perspective, it was one of the few opportunities that parents had been able to genuinely speak on an issue important to them. This was not usually possible in the larger meetings, which were run in a question-and-answer format, with teachers dispensing information and parents asking questions.

In my observations of parent meetings for the small school design team over the course of a year, parents and teachers had remarkably few opportunities to get to know one another personally, or to discuss in any depth their goals and desires for the school. The teachers, it seemed, had had that opportunity among themselves when they first began planning the design team. As Linda explained to me, the social-justice theme had emerged from group discussions “where we all went around and shared about our histories, our personal histories. The level of activism that there has been in this group is really, really, incredible.” Parents had not been present at those discussions, and had not had a similar opportunity to share their histories. The only time that I saw parents invited to share their personal experience and discuss their concerns in small groups was in the very first meetings that Baudelia had organized.

The OCCA organizer, Laura, was also concerned about the lack of opportunities for personal sharing. Sharing stories, she told me, is a “basic principle of organizing.” At the next planning meeting, we suggested the idea of breaking the parents into small groups for discussion, as Baudelia had done at the first large meeting. The parent volunteers were immediately enthusiastic and incorporated it into the agenda. But what happened to this in practice the next day was illustrative.

Parents arrived to find Marie, the school’s newly selected principal, running the meeting. Marie did not seem to remember the facilitating roles that were delegated to parents the day before, and ran the meeting as if no planning had taken place. Aside from Marie, there was only one other teacher present. This meeting erupted in chaos, as parent frustration reached a boiling point and Marie struggled to maintain control. As the following description reveals, controversial issues were handled in a way that served to exacerbate the conflict.

The first item on the agenda was the enrollment criteria for the new small school. This was the issue foremost on everybody’s minds. At the last large meeting, many parents had spoken up to say they believed selection should be based on children’s need. Several parents shared stories about injustices in the way their children had been treated at Whitman. Now parents arrived to find that the selection criteria had been decided. Marie had written the criteria on poster board in English and Spanish and taped it to the blackboard. They were as follows: (1) parent involvement in the development of UCS (United Community School), (2) parent interest and lottery, keeping siblings together, (3) special-needs kids, by teacher recommendation, and (4) waiting list.

When Marie explained the first criterion, that parents who had participated in organizing the school would have preference for their kids to go to the new small school, Baudelia immediately asked, “Participation starting from when? What about the parents who were very involved last fall who are not here today?” This triggered a lengthy debate about how parent participation should be measured, and how much would count to give kids preference. Marie said this was open to discussion and that the parents should help them decide this, but a little later, she said that if a parent had attended at least three meetings, that would qualify their kids for preference. It was not clear who had decided this or when.

Then Baudelia wanted to know, what was the point of inviting new parents to these meetings if there was no more room in the school? They had been told the bilingual program was full. Parents come to these meetings with the hope that their children will be able to attend the new small school, Baudelia said, and she didn’t want to lead them on. As she had said to me earlier, “No me gusta que me engañen ni me gusta engañar” (I don’t like to be deceived, nor do I like to deceive others). Throughout the meeting, Marie was trying to translate into English for a couple of Asian parents, but the debate was heated and parents weren’t waiting to be translated.

Marie then explained that the principal of Whitman was not letting them announce the new small school from the classroom, so teachers could not recruit English-speaking parents or students from Whitman. This issue had come up during the planning meeting the day before. At that time, Marie had explained the need to recruit non-Latino parents, and had encouraged the parent volunteers (who were all Latina) to bring their non-Latino friends to the next meeting. Ofelia had asked, “How are we supposed to do that if we don’t speak English?” She thought that should be the principal’s responsibility. “Doesn’t the principal know we’re doing this for the good of the community?” she had asked. Now, Ofelia again expressed her anger that the principal was not supporting them; and the need for a group of parents to go meet with the principal was discussed as an “action item” for the end of the meeting.

Significantly, by channeling the parents’ frustration toward the principal of Whitman Elementary School, the teachers shielded from public examination or critique their vision of an integrated school. The teachers’ desire for an equal number of English-speaking (sheltered) and bilingual students in the new small school was potentially problematic given the demographics of Whitman and the design team. But this was never a design issue that was open for debate.

Each time Marie switched to the English translation, the room erupted in murmurs, as parents whispered and talked among themselves. At some point, Marie called order and said that they really had to stick to the agenda. She told parents that if they had a question that was not related to the topic being discussed, to write it down on a pad of paper that she placed on the floor in the middle of the circle. She said these questions would be addressed at the end of the meeting. I wondered who would write down their questions in such a chaotic environment, when there was no guarantee that they would ever be addressed. But one mother immediately came forward and took the pad.

Next, Marie explained the lottery, which unleashed many more questions, and the “special-needs” criterion. Two spots in every grade were being reserved for students with special needs, who teachers thought could most benefit from being in a smaller school. Marie explained that it was necessary to reserve these spots because some children don’t have parents who advocate for them, and teachers have to advocate for them. She reminded the parents that the purpose of this school is “social justice,” and implied that teachers recommending special-needs kids was the “just” thing to do. Again, the parents who had made the effort to advocate for their children were made to feel that they would take second place to families of the teachers’ choosing. In the teachers’ vision of a diverse, integrated school—with full inclusion of special-needs students and equal numbers of English-and Spanish-speaking students—many Latino parents who had fought to open the school might not find a place for their children.

At this point in the meeting a conflict between the parents became evident. Some of the parents tried to support Marie in quieting the group, and became angry with the parents who were whispering. Baudelia, exasperated with how the meeting was proceeding, talked to Ofelia and me the entire time. She told me that Ana, who was standing at the front of the room trying unsuccessfully to maintain order, was one of those passive parents who say to the teachers, “Sí, maestra, ¡lo que usted diga!” (Whatever you say, maestra!). Ana had been at the prep meeting the day before, but did not appear bothered by Marie’s taking over the agenda that had been created by and for parents.

The last item on the agenda was the “parent participation contract,” which Lupe, a parent, had volunteered to explain. Under the contract, parents would be required to volunteer at the new small school; their support was essential in order to get the school off the ground. Baudelia immediately objected that parents couldn’t be required, because many worked long hours and could not afford to spend time at the school. She said that parent participation should be voluntary, strongly encouraged, but not obligatory. Marie said the teachers wanted parents’ feedback about this, and that they would discuss this in small groups next.

The purpose of the small-group activity, which had been planned the day before, was to have the parents get to know one another in a more personal way. Marie was there when we planned this, but had apparently decided to change it. “In small groups you can discuss the parent contract and what your ideas are for parent participation in the school!” she announced. She wrote the discussion points for the small groups on the whiteboard. When I reminded her about the activity’s original purpose, she added, “get to know each other” to the list. “Get to know each other” was now one of four things they were directed to accomplish in small groups, in no more than ten minutes. A chaotic period of dividing people into groups followed. In such a context, there was not even time to ask parents to introduce themselves.

At seven o’clock Marie flashed the lights on and off to indicate that the meeting was over. She asked each note taker to turn in her sheets indicating what kinds of committees parents were interested in participating on. Our group hadn’t gotten to discussing the committees. Quickly, I asked for volunteers to go meet with the principal, or form a safety council, or help with registration. I wrote down a few names. By this time everybody was leaving, and parents who volunteered were asking me, “When do I have to do this? Who will tell me what to do?”

After people had left, Ana complained to me about Baudelia’s and Ofelia’s behavior. “They were talking through the whole meeting!” she said.

In this meeting, rising tensions between parents and teachers were exacerbated by an authoritarian leadership style that systematically shut down parent voice. First, Marie disregarded the roles parents had volunteered for in the planning meeting and attempted to facilitate the meeting herself. When parents resisted by talking over her and questioning the decisions she presented them with, she attempted to rein in the discussion by limiting their questions to writing on a pad, which would be addressed “at the end of the meeting.” Then, what was intended as an open-ended small-group activity was turned into a closed, ten-minute exercise in which parents were told to discuss predetermined questions of the teachers’ choosing. In an example of what Gregory (1998) has termed the “governing of deliberation” and the “regulating of dissent,” the single opportunity for parents to discuss among themselves was restricted to ten minutes at the end of an already chaotic meeting.⁴ It was “regulated” by the need to produce a list of volunteers for various parent committees. This function of the small-group activity served the teachers’ interests, because it supplied a pool of volunteer labor that teachers could draw on for later work. However, in limiting the small-group discussions to this purpose, teachers and parents both lost the opportunity to engage in a dialogue that might have illuminated some of the underlying conflict.

Angela Valenzuela (1999), in her seminal study of a predominantly Latino high school in Texas, argues that Latino youth and non-Latino teachers held competing definitions of “caring,” with harmful consequences for student achievement. Whereas teachers subscribed to an aesthetic or technical definition of caring, Latino students sought an authentic form of caring grounded in Mexican cultural views of educación. Under aesthetic caring, writes Valenzuela, “teachers expect students to demonstrate caring about school with an abstract commitment to ideas or practices that purportedly lead to achievement” (263). When students did not demonstrate this, teachers assumed that they “did not care” about school. Latino students, however, articulated a vision of education and caring derived from the cultural concept of educación, in which reciprocal, trusting relationships constitute the basis for all learning. When teachers failed to initiate these relationships, Latino students assumed they “did not care” about them. The Latino concept of educación, well documented by other scholars, is communal in orientation, emphasizing respect and responsibility to the community, rather than simply the individual acquisition of skills and knowledge.⁵ This view of education was reflected in the work of Madres Unidas and in their expectations for their children’s school, which, in their words, should “develop positive habits of social cooperation and living together (convivencia).” In defending this vision at the school, the mothers also found themselves battling aesthetic or technical definitions of community from their children’s teachers.

Baudelia’s assertion that “social justice starts in the community,” like her earlier question, “Aren’t we also going to talk about us?” reflected a principal difference in perspective between parents and teachers. For Baudelia, decisions ought to have been made based on responsibility to personal relationships with people in the school community. This was especially true in the question of selecting who would attend the new small school. While teachers followed a rule-based, bureaucratic procedure (any parent who had attended at least three meetings would have priority for the new school), Baudelia felt a personal responsibility to the parents she had organized throughout the year who for various reasons stopped coming in the spring. Teachers might not have noticed the sudden absence of these parents; Baudelia did. She worried that some of these parents might not make it into the small school under the new criteria. In this meeting and in others, she repeatedly pushed teachers to seek out the parents who had stopped coming, at one point even giving the teachers a copy of her sign-in sheets from those early meetings.

Ironically, the teachers’ decision to reserve spots for special-needs students who “don’t have parents who advocate for them” was rooted in a desire to provide a fair opportunity to families who may not have participated in planning the school. However, this decision alienated the community of parents who had been participating, because teachers had reserved the right to identify who had “special needs.” The teachers sought to make admissions decisions according to abstract principles of fairness, even if it meant harming or excluding parents from the community who had personal relationships with the design team. Arguably, all parents who attended the meetings felt their child to be strongly in need of a new educational environment. Now they were being told that teachers might find other children to be more deserving of a new school than theirs. Furthermore, parents were informed of these decisions “after the fact,” without being given the opportunity to discuss or question them. When Marie announced the special-needs criteria, she had reminded parents that this was a “social-justice” school, thereby deflecting any criticism or debate.

I often heard it said that teachers were in a better position to enact fair policies, because teachers had the interests of all the children in mind, while parents were focused narrowly on their own children.⁶ However, this assumption fails to capture the cultural understandings of community that Latino parents brought to the design team. Parents more often explained their dedication to the new small school as part of their desire to help their community. Recall Ofelia’s question, “Doesn’t the principal know we’re doing this for the good of the community?” and Baudelia’s linking of social justice to the community. A concern for the larger community was evident from the earliest design team meetings, when parents worried about the future of Whitman Elementary School, which they would leave behind. In the first meeting, described in chapter 2, when one father asked what would happen to Whitman after the new small school opened, Baudelia had responded by saying that they would have to work to improve the education at Whitman, too, because they are all “part of the same family.” Parents raised questions about the future of Whitman in nearly every small school design team meeting. Some parents I met who were active in the organizing had either no children left in school or a child who would have only one year in the new school, but they worked tirelessly because they believed their community needed it. A web of social relationships of friends, relatives, and neighbors who had experienced the same injustices shaped the consciousness of Latino parents who struggled for the new small school. Most of the teachers did not live in the community, and would not have to face the consequences of an angered neighbor or a severed friendship that might result from misguided admissions policies. While many teachers cared about the students and parents at Whitman that would be left behind, they did not count these people among their immediate family or circle of friends. Parents, by contrast, knew that they would see them on a daily basis: at church on Sundays, around their kitchen tables, for children’s birthday parties and barbeques. What happened to these other members of the community mattered, in a deeply personal way.

Thus, while teachers made decisions based on their educational philosophy and integrationist ideals, parents reacted from the very personal experience of the needs and relationships in their community. It was this difference that was at the core of conflicts between teachers and parents during the months before the school opened, and it was precisely this difference that was never openly addressed. In the absence of spaces for honest discussion of differences—between teachers and parents, and between parents—the creation of “community” remained an elusive goal. Instead, a bureaucratic and authoritarian management style fostered resentment and mistrust between parents and teachers, and divisiveness among parents. Some parents, like Ana and Lupe, thought that the demands of community required standing by the teachers, no matter what. The teachers were overworked and under pressure, and needed the support of parents to get the new school off the ground. Others, like Baudelia and Ofelia, believed that the creation of community required fighting for a real voice. As we will see, the principal and some teachers would later exploit this difference among parents, using a strategy of divide and conquer to undermine parent input.

“They Don’t Think We’re Capable”

In late spring, at the request of one of the teachers, Linda, and with the help of the OCCA organizer, I began meeting with some of the parents alone to discuss these issues. Linda had told me that teachers were “feeling overwhelmed and need all the help we can get.” She asked Laura, the OCCA organizer, and me if we would be willing to meet with parents on our own, without the teachers, to help resolve some of the conflicts. I had spoken to her about my desire to involve the parents in participatory research, and she had been enthusiastic. “I liked your idea about empowerment and leadership training, or however you called it,” she told me.

At first, the parents were not excited about coming together. By this time, Ana and Lupe and Baudelia and Ofelia were almost arch-enemies. Ana and Lupe had come to regard Baudelia and Ofelia as troublemakers, and Baudelia and Ofelia saw Ana and Lupe as puppets of the teachers. Both groups were skeptical of the other’s willingness and ability to help the school. But they also recognized the need to work together and to address some of the conflicts before they snowballed.

So, on a Wednesday afternoon late in May, we gathered at the home of Ofelia. Reserving a room at Whitman had proved to be too complicated, so Ofelia had offered her house, just down the street from the school. Perhaps because of the change in scenery, the tone of this meeting was markedly different from the parent meetings at the school. The meeting began with informal conversation about the mothers’ personal lives, triggered by a story from Baudelia’s English class at a local college. Baudelia shared how the teacher punished her for using Spanish in the class. For every word she said in Spanish, she was made to write and say it in English five times in front of the class, and felt humiliated. The mothers immediately offered expressions of sympathy and solidarity, and launched a rich discussion on the difficulties of learning English. After the conflicts in the last meeting, they discovered that they all faced the fear that “if we say something wrong, people laugh at us.” The conversation brought the mothers into a common space of fellowship and solidarity, a safe space from which to approach the conflicts at the school.

As we switched to discussion of the school, I said that I believed the teachers wanted to involve parents, but didn’t know how. Baudelia responded, “They don’t think we’re capable.” To nods of agreement, Lupe said, “We need to work together. This shouldn’t be about fighting.” The mothers discussed the main issues of conflict that had arisen in the past weeks: the parent participation contract, the selection criteria for students, and the issue of special-needs students. On points of disagreement between them, such as whether parent participation should be voluntary or mandatory, they addressed each other directly and openly, explaining their reasons for why they disagreed. They also shared concerns that had not been discussed in the larger parent meetings. We wrote up the major concerns on butcher paper and discussed possible ways the parents could address them. Ofelia served coffee. Now the conversation was casual and joking. And over coffee and donuts, the mothers decided to have a potluck for the teachers. They hoped to invite teachers into an honest conversation—significantly, away from the school, at a place where they could set the tone. Ofelia volunteered her house.

After the tense bureaucratic meetings at the school, the personal conversations in Ofelia’s living room felt like a breath of fresh air. Conflict was no less present at this meeting than at the school’s parent meetings, but it was addressed openly as between friends, rather than pushed to the margins. There was coffee and donuts and laughter and jokes. The mothers had found common ground, and perhaps a little more trust.

On a Friday evening some two weeks later, six mothers spread platters of food on Ofelia’s kitchen and dining-room tables. In addition to Baudelia, Ana, and Lupe, Ofelia had invited her sister Carmen, and another mother, Carolina. The tables were overflowing. There were tostadas, enchiladas, tamales, rice, and many kinds of salad. To drink there was homemade horchata (a rice beverage), Kool-Aid, and soda pop. The teachers arrived together, coming directly from a business meeting at the school, and were immediately invited to eat. The atmosphere was festive and joking as everyone helped themselves to heaping plates of food. Compliments for the mothers’ cooking abounded.

After a half hour of eating and socializing, Baudelia called the meeting to order. She explained that the purpose of the meeting was to have an informal conversation between parents and teachers, and to figure out a way that parents could participate in the planning and decision-making process of the school. She suggested as a way to start that parents individually share their experience with the process to date and how they were feeling about it. She began. She said she felt that parents had been working in an isolated fashion and that teachers did not take them into account in decision making. She said parents always heard about decisions after the fact—such as the decision to reserve two spots in each class for students with special needs, and multiage classrooms. The parents had been promised that the new small school would not have multiage classes, but lately they had heard word that in fact there would be combined classes. The “combined” classes Baudelia was referring to were Linda and Sandy’s team-teaching arrangement. Many parents Baudelia and Ofelia had spoken to were not happy with this arrangement. When other parents shared, the issue of multiage classes kept coming up. Finally, Baudelia asked the teachers, “What is the objective of multiage classes?” And Sandy, in exasperation, responded, “Do you have another few hours? That is a whole different discussion that we don’t have time for now.” Baudelia seemed frustrated. Linda and Sandy were clearly upset.

During this discussion, a few people tried to translate for the two or three teachers who didn’t speak Spanish, but translation was spotty and inconsistent. As the debate became heated, there was no time to translate. One teacher walked out in frustration because she didn’t understand what was going on, and, she later said, “nobody was translating.” The teachers who stayed explained that they were exhausted from working ten-to twelve-hour days and didn’t have time for more meetings with parents. They invited parents to attend their weekly business meetings at the school, where important issues were discussed, but assured parents that these were tedious. Still, parents expressed a willingness to attend and agreed to rotate, sending two or three representatives at a time.

Ironically, the parents’ first attempt to open a dialogue with teachers resulted in an even firmer, more deafening silence. The attempt went down in the teachers’ lexicon as “the tostada meeting,” as in, the infamous tostada meeting that left several teachers in tears. I later learned that teachers felt attacked by the parents. Marie asked to speak with me privately at the school the next week, and told me that Linda and Sandy had been deeply hurt by the parents’ questioning of their team-teaching. She asked me to work with the parents to teach them how to express their concerns more sensitively, to “depersonalize” them. There was no attempt to explore the parents’ concerns or the sources of their frustration. To the parents’ claim that they felt excluded or did not understand the objectives of teachers’ reform ideas, teachers responded that they had no time for that. The claim of exhaustion shielded the staff from having to examine or account to parents for their practice. Deborah Meier, reflecting on her experience founding a small school in Harlem, writes, “We were often exhausted by the things that mattered least to us” (1995, 25). This could well capture the sentiment of teachers on the Whitman design team, who were so frazzled that they had neither the time nor the energy for an honest conversation with parents. The net result of the fallout from the tostada meeting was to silence the parents’ critique, and to ban further dissent.

The Lottery

The lottery for United Community School took place one day in late June after school had let out for the summer. The school held one lottery for the bilingual program and a separate one for the sheltered English program, both on the same day, and in public. But on the awaited day, the teachers found they had a problem. Even in the “sheltered” pool, or students seeking admission to the English program, Latino students outnumbered non-Latinos three to one. In order to get the diversity they desired, therefore, teachers would have to handpick non-Latino students before the lottery. There was much debate among the teachers on the design team about how to handle this. Some thought it would be unethical to automatically place the non-Latino families, since families had been told they would be selected randomly by lottery. In the end, the teachers decided to bring the problem to the parents, who were waiting in the cafeteria. In the words of one teacher, this is what happened:

The parents came through. The parents came through. The parent group that was there that day was, I believe, 100 percent Latino. And some of those parents had indicated that they wanted sheltered classes. But almost every parent in that room said, “It’s more important that we have a diverse school than my child get in just because I put sheltered.” And they said to factor ethnicity into the lottery process. The parents were amazing.

Teachers often retold this story as an example of how parents and teachers arrived at a shared vision of a community school. Latino parents voted against their own self-interest, the story went, to create an ethnically diverse school. On the surface, the parents’ vote confirmed the teachers’ view that this was the socially just thing to do. However, as the mothers in Madres Unidas would discover after the school opened, the story was much more complicated. The lottery vote, as perhaps all simple votes, masked a host of underlying confusions and exclusions that ultimately shaped who ended up attending United Community School.

The Chosen and the Excluded

Early in the Madres’ research, Baudelia’s worst fears appeared to have come true. Baudelia had mobilized many parents to attend the design team meetings, telling them that their children would receive preference for the new school if they got involved. But when the school opened, she was dismayed to discover that some of these parents were not in the new school. Through their interviews with parents, the mothers learned that these anomalies were not simply isolated cases or the inevitable margin of error: they were part of a troubling pattern suggesting that the selection process had not taken place the way they had thought at all. As they delved deeper into this question, the mothers came face-to-face with some of the harmful consequences the school’s “mistakes” had on the community.

The realization first became apparent in the parent focus groups, when the Madres asked parents how they got into the new small school, and what they thought about the selection process. Many parents responded that they had been brought in by a teacher or by the principal, often after the lottery had taken place. Some parents who had participated in the planning meetings found their children excluded nonetheless, and had to struggle to get their children in. The following example, from the second parent focus group was illustrative.

Teresa: A mí el sorteo que se hizo por último no me gustó. Porque yo estuve en todas las reuniones de cuando empezamos a cerca de cómo se iba a tumbar este edificio, y yo estuve allí, y muchos padres fuimos allá a pelear … [Pasa el BART y no se escucha] y al último no me gustó porque se hizo el sorteo y a mí no me tocó. Y habían dicho que se les iba a dar preferencia a los papás que asistían a las reuniones, y no fue así. Y a mí no me tocó porque no salió el niño en la rifa que hicieron. Entonces salieron padres que no asistieron a las juntas, y pues yo sé que fue una rifa …

Baudelia: ¿Y cómo llegó aquí?

Teresa: Espéreme, ¡allí voy! [Risa de todos] No pues, lo que pasa es que, Linda, yo hablo muy bien de ella porque ella es muy buena maestra y mi hijo ha estado con ella desde el primero … Entonces Linda vio que yo estaba desde el comienzo, pienso que ella dijo que no estaría justo si la señora quedara a fuera, mas bien mi niño, ¿no? Entonces, pues no sé cómo fue que lo hizo pero me dijo, “Aquí está, señora, su hijo [está a dentro].” Yo la verdad me puse muy contenta porque yo estaba luchando tanto para que viniera acá.

Maria: Así me pasó.

Baudelia: ¿A usted lo pasó lo mismo?

Maria: [Indica que sí.] O sea, yo no asistí a muchas juntas, pero yo llegué aquí por la maestra. Porque ella quiso traer a mi hija para acá.

Todos: O, ¡qué suerte!

Lucia: A mí también, la maestra me empezó a decir, “Mire, esto le conviene, y esto, haga esto.”

Teresa: I didn’t like the lottery that they did in the end. Because I was at all the meetings since we started about how they were going to tear down this building, and I was there, and many of us went to fight … [The BART passes and some words are lost] and in the end I didn’t like it because they did the lottery and I didn’t get picked! And they had told us that they were going to give preference to parents who attended the meetings, but they didn’t. I didn’t get in because my son didn’t get picked in the lottery. So parents were picked who didn’t attend any meetings, and well, I know it was a lottery …

Baudelia: And how did you get here?

Teresa: Wait, I’m getting to that! [Laughter] No, what happened is, Linda, I speak very highly of her because she is a very good teacher and my son has been with her since first grade … So Linda saw that I had been there since the beginning, I think she said that it wouldn’t be fair if I was left out, or my kid, you know? So, I don’t know how she did it, but she told me, “Here, señora, your son is in.” And I was very happy because I had struggled so much for him to come here.

Maria: That happened to me.

Baudelia: The same thing happened to you?

Maria: [Indicates yes.] I mean, I didn’t attend many meetings, but I got here because of the teacher. Because she wanted to bring my daughter here.

Everyone: Oh, what luck!

Lucia: Me too. The teacher told me, “Look, this would be good for you, do this.”

In this exchange, Baudelia and Amelia learned that a parent who had been involved since the beginning was wrongly sent to the lottery, and only afterwards rescued by a teacher who recognized the mistake. Tellingly, after Teresa shared this story, two other parents who had not been involved since the beginning said that they also got in because a teacher helped them. These glaring inconsistencies disturbed the mothers, who began to question the school’s identity as a “community school.” How could parents feel ownership of the school if they had entered so haphazardly, by chance or by “pure luck”? It was clear many of these parents did not know the history of the school and did not understand the sacrifices others had made in order to open the school. When asked how they felt about the selection process, one parent’s response in the third focus group was indicative:

Veronica: Pues, ¡yo estoy contenta porque mi niña pues sí le tocó! Yo la verdad yo quería la Whitman, porque allí todas mis niñas desde chiquita … ¡Pero ahora hubo la oportunidad de entrar aquí me siento pues más contenta!

Ofelia: ¿Y usted le parece justo?

Veronica: ¡A mí se me hizo justo porque fue lo último pues! Que yo, me dijeron hay un cupo de pura suerte.

Veronica: Well, I’m happy because my daughter got in! The truth is, I liked Whitman, because all my girls had been there since they were small … But now there was the opportunity to come here and I feel even more happy!

Ofelia: And you think it’s fair?

Veronica: I think it was fair because it was the last minute! I, they told me there was a spot by pure chance.

In her reflection after conducting this focus group, Ofelia wrote:

Estoy muy impresionada de escuchar de la mayoría de padres que sus hijos están en esa escuela porque les ayudó la directora o porque les ayudó una maestra. Es muy raro escuchar que están ahí porque participaron en juntas o porque salieron en la lotería o simplemente porque el padre o madre estaba interesada.

I am really amazed to hear so many parents say their children got into the school because the principal helped them, or because a teacher helped them. It’s very rare to hear that they are there because they participated in meetings or they came out in the lottery or simply because the father or mother was interested.

Ofelia also learned of other parents who met the school’s criteria but had been excluded. One parent told Ofelia in an individual interview, “Many parents who came to the meetings, their children are not in the school. There was favoritism, preference.” As founding parents, the mothers were concerned about the effects of this favoritism on other parents and the community. How did it affect the parents who had been involved since the beginning to know that many parents were there by favoritism? What about the parents who had been left out altogether? As Baudelia shared during a Friday meeting:

Son cosas que te hacen sentir bien mal, y tú tienes que reprimir ciertos sentimientos. Por ejemplo, yo cuando … me toca estar y estoy preguntando, “¿Cómo se ingresó a esta escuela?” Y que dicen, “¡Yo nunca vine a esta reunión, yo nunca supe, yo nunca nada!” Entonces yo me pregunto, yo me siento mal pensando en toda la gente que participó que ni me han reclamado, entonces yo estoy diciendo, ¿Cómo es posible?

These are things that make you feel really bad, and you have to repress certain feelings. For example, … when it’s my turn to interview and I’m asking, “How did you get into this school?” And they answer, “I never came to meetings, I never knew, I never nothing!” Then I wonder, and I feel bad thinking about all the people who participated who haven’t even complained to me, so I’m saying, How is this possible?

To answer these questions, the mothers decided to interview more parents individually, and, significantly, to interview some parents of children who did not make it into the new school. As we approached our winter recess, having conducted three parent focus groups and one teacher focus group, the mothers made a plan of individual research activities over the next month. They could interview anyone they wanted, as long as they could justify to the group its importance to the study. Baudelia chose to interview two parents she knew personally whose children had not made it into the new small school, and who still attended Whitman. She wanted to hear their perspective on the selection process and their experience in the school’s organizing. She invited anyone who wanted to come with her. Amelia accompanied her on one of the interviews; Carolina went with her on the other.

When the mothers reported back to the group on their research, these eye-opening interviews deeply moved the group. Baudelia’s first interviewee, a woman named Alicia, had participated in several meetings at Whitman, but because her name did not appear on the sign-in sheets, she was not given preference. She figured she had failed to sign in when she arrived late to two meetings. When she protested to the principal, she was told she was number 16 on the waiting list. Alicia told Baudelia she still wanted to transfer her children to the new school, and asked her to find out where she stood on the waiting list. In her reflection Baudelia wrote: “Me gustaría que los padres se involucraran en la selección de los niños dándoles prioridad a las personas que hayan participado, y me gustaría que se dieran a conocer los nombres de las personas que están en la lista de espera” (I would like for parents to be involved in the selection of students, giving priority to people who have participated, and I would like for us to find out who is on the waiting list).

The second interview, with a woman named Nora, was even more sobering. Nora had worked closely with Baudelia in the early part of the planning year, organizing parents to attend actions and meetings at the school. In the spring, she fell ill and missed the last three meetings. Her son brought home a letter saying he was being entered in the lottery. Indignant, Nora went to the school and asked a teacher, “¿Cómo es eso que él va a ser sorteado? ¡Si a mí me dijeron que les iban a dar preferencia a las personas que participaron y yo anduve ayudando y llevando gente para la acción y yendo a las reuniones!” (How is it he is going in the lottery? They told me they were going to give preference to the people who participated and I went around helping and bringing people to the action and going to the meetings!). The teacher said she did not know anything. Nora then went to the principal, who told her that only the parents who had attended the last three meetings were given preference. Nora said nobody had ever told her that they were going to count only the last three meetings.

From Baudelia’s interview transcript, the following words of Nora’s stand out: “A fin siempre reciben más beneficios las que no participan para nada, y yo lo digo porque a la escuela UCS entraron personas que yo conozco y familiares míos que nunca se pararon a una reunión … y me da mucho coraje ver a esa gente que lleva sus niños ahí y no movió ni un dedo” (In the end, those who don’t participate at all benefit the most, and I say this because UCS admitted people I know and relatives of mine who never set foot in a meeting … And it makes me furious to see those people bringing their kids there [to the new school] when they didn’t even lift a finger).

Baudelia and Carolina recounted their interview with Nora to sympathetic shaking heads and clicking tongues around Ofelia’s kitchen table. The mothers were horrified that some parents who had given their time to the new school’s organizing had been treated so badly by school staff. Carolina emphasized in her reflection that, after being wrongly excluded from the school, what particularly hurt Nora was her meeting with the principal:

No encontró ninguna salida con la visita que le hizo a Mis Campos. Porque al contrario se sintió más decepcionada y triste porque Mis Campos le comentó que las últimas tres reuniones fueron las que los padres de familia tenían que haber asistido … Pero ni siquiera Mis Campos la comprendió lo que ella esperaba era recibir una orientación de parte de Mis Campos, pero no fue así.

She didn’t find any solution with the visit she made to Ms. Campos. On the contrary, she felt more disappointed and sad, because Ms. Campos told her it was the last three meetings that parents were supposed to attend … But not even Ms. Campos understood that what [Nora] hoped for was to get some guidance or encouragement from Ms. Campos, but she didn’t get it.

Nora’s story illustrated that the wounds of this experience were deeper and more lasting than any of them had imagined. As Carolina said, “Ella se quedó bien desconsolada y desde ese momento ella dice que ya no va a poder asistir a ningunas reuniones, y ahora … le aconseja a los padres que no asistan a las reuniones, porque los que asisten a las reuniones son los que no tienen el valor de quedarse” (She was left very despairing and from that moment on she says that she’s not going to go to any more meetings, and now … she advises other parents not to attend the meetings, because those who attend the meetings aren’t rewarded). As founding parents who had participated in the selection process, the Madres felt a personal responsibility to parents like Nora. Baudelia, in particular, was disturbed by these interviews. She wrote:

Para mí fue muy difícil dirigir esta entrevista porque en cierto punto me culpa a mí diciéndome que yo no le dije que sólo iban a contar las 3 últimas reuniones, pero la verdad es que cuando yo la invité al final ella estaba enferma.

Yo siento un compromiso moral de estar al pendiente de investigar en qué lista de espera se encuentra esta persona. Me gustaría que hubiera un poco más de justicia, que los maestros y la directora tomaran en cuenta dando prioridad a las personas que hayan participado antes. Porque de esto no se puede culpar a las maestras o a los padres, esta decisión de selección se tomó entre todos juntos … Aprendí a reconocer nuestros errores.

It was very difficult for me to conduct this interview because to a certain extent I blame myself, telling myself that we didn’t tell her they were only going to count the last three meetings. But the truth is that when I invited her at the end, she was sick.

I feel a moral obligation to find out where this person is on the waiting list [for the new small school]. I would like for there to be a little more justice, for the principal and teachers to take into account and give priority to the people who participated before. Because this can’t be blamed on only the teachers or the parents; this decision about the selection was made by all of us together … I learned to recognize our mistakes.

The mothers discussed feelings of regret, frustration, and helplessness in the face of the mistakes the school had made in the selection process. Ofelia said:

Para mí siento que la lotería de los niños fue injusto, yo siento que yo como padre que tuve participación en eso, yo reconozco que cometí un error, y eso ha servido para yo ver, esta investigación ha servido para yo ver mis propios errores. A mí me hubiera gustado si otra vez volviera pasar, hacer otro plan, o ser diferente.

I feel that the lottery for students was unjust, and I feel that I as a parent who played a role in that, I recognize that I made a mistake. And this research has helped me to recognize my own mistakes. I would have liked to see the admissions process happen again, to have another plan, to do it differently.

Baudelia felt there was still something to be done to make it up to these parents who had been left out, if only the teachers would involve them in admissions decisions. As she explained:

Ya cometimos un error, se puede remendar ese error. [Las maestras] tienen la lista de los padres que participaron, a ver cuáles yo conozco, compararla con la lista que yo tengo, porque yo tengo una lista, pero nunca se nos informan. Ellas, ¿cómo lo están valorando? Yo siento, eso es lo que me ha hecho sentir a mí mal, como impotente.

We already made a mistake, we can correct it. [The teachers] have a list of the parents who participated, let’s see which ones I know, compare it to the list that I have, because I have a list, but they never inform us! They, how are they valuing it? This is what has made me feel bad, like impotent.

The findings about the school’s admissions mistakes were painful for the Madres, because they deeply felt the hurt and resentment of the parents who had been left out. Teachers, by contrast, were unaware of any cases of parents who were unfairly excluded or admitted, and did not mention the waiting list. The Madres’ interviews with teachers revealed a dramatically different perspective on the admissions process. In teachers’ minds, the greatest potential for error was in not reaching enough parents with information about the new school, not in excluding some parents who should have been in the school. As Susan, in the English teachers’ focus group, said, “I don’t think [the selection process] was perfect, because I know there are still families who didn’t get the information, and that wasn’t right or fair.” Teachers spoke of the challenges of conducting outreach and giving information to parents of 1,400 students at Whitman with no support from the district. But given those challenges, most believed, as Sandy said, that “it was as fair as possible.” In Susan’s words, “With what we could do, with the amount of outreach we were able to achieve, I mean we did, based on the knowledge we had and the advice that we tried to get from a few other people, we conducted the best selection process that we were able to.” The prioritization of educational goals for a diverse, integrated school led teachers to be more preoccupied with outreach to new parents than with including all of the Spanish-speaking parents who had participated since the beginning. Outreach to a wider group of parents would increase their chances of attaining a student body that would best support their pedagogical goals. The possible exclusion of some members of the Spanish-speaking community who had participated in the organizing was not a concern. This was either inevitable, necessary, or, in the teachers’ interpretation of the lottery incident, understood and supported by the parents themselves.

Madres Unidas would make the admissions process a major focus of the presentation they prepared for school staff on their research findings, in which they highlighted the consequences of the school’s admissions decisions. They informed teachers that the exclusion of parents who had participated in the school’s early planning meetings “brought resentment to the community, to the people who organized the meetings, and resentment to the school.”

In negotiations over who should get into the new small school, and how this community should be formed, profoundly different values and understandings of “community” caused friction between teachers and parents, but were never openly addressed. For teachers, community was to be created in the service of their educational goals. Their educational philosophy called for a diverse, integrated school, with multiage classrooms and full inclusion of special-needs students, and admissions decisions had to be made to meet those goals. Like the teachers in Valenzuela’s study, teachers at UCS expected parents to demonstrate commitment to these pedagogical principles, which reflected the best professional wisdom about reform, in order to support the school. The mothers in Madres Unidas, by contrast, articulated a view of community that prioritized reciprocal relationships as the basis for all learning and school reform. Even the most well-intentioned or pedagogically sound reform strategy could not compensate for the harm caused to relationships in the community, if these were not considered during the reform process. The next chapter explores how these competing views of community further shaped parents’ roles and parent–teacher relations in the first year of the new school.