4. The Good Parent, the Angry Parent, and Other Controlling Images

The mothers in Madres Unidas understood that UCS was created to give parents and the community a greater voice in the schooling of their children. As founding parents, with the exception of Carmen, they knew the history they had traveled to get here: how the community, through OCCA, had demanded new small schools and had fought for this land where UCS now stood. They also had the proposal, and were aware that the school’s charter document promised new roles and rights for parents. “In contrast to the disenfranchisement often felt by parents,” the proposal stated, “their voices will be valued and they will play a vital role in the decision-making processes of the school.” However, the Madres soon apprehended that only a certain kind of parent was considered deserving of new roles, and that parent participation could swiftly be curtailed or invalidated if it did not conform to the teachers’ images of “the good parent.” Their experience of the discrepancy between the school’s vision and mission and the reality of parent participation shaped their emerging research agenda, and led them to focus special attention on how parents’ roles were being defined and negotiated by school staff, parents, and reform partners.

This chapter examines the negotiation of parents’ roles, and the mothers’ analysis of this process, in the first year of United Community School. I draw on African American feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins’s (2000) concept of “controlling images” to highlight how school staff attempted to manage and control parent participation through the use of a good parent/bad parent binary, in which only certain kinds of participation were considered acceptable. I trace patterns of teacher–parent relations in the new school to the larger discourse of parent participation in the small schools movement. The mothers developed a critique of the way parents were framed based on their own experience in the movement, their experience in the new school, and their interviews with parents and teachers at UCS about parent participation. In the mothers’ analysis, teachers framed the “good parent” as a puppet or a parrot, a mouthpiece for the staff, while invalidating other kinds of participation. Teachers delegitimized the Madres’ participation and critique through the censorship of anger and the privileging of professional “expertise” over experience in the community.

“Controlling images,” according to Patricia Hill Collins, are socially constructed stereotypical images of a subordinate group, designed to serve the interests of the dominant group. They are part of a larger process of objectification in which black women (and other subordinate groups) are constructed as “Other,” as diametrically opposed to the desirable traits of the dominant group, as objects to be manipulated and controlled. Black women in the United States have been subject to, and have resisted, at least four controlling images of black womanhood: the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare mother, and the whore or “hoochie.” The most relevant for the present discussion are the mammy and the matriarch. The mammy image is that of the faithful, submissive domestic servant, designed to justify the economic exploitation of house slaves. Mammies were loving caretakers of white children who were presumed contented with their subordinate status. According to Collins, “the mammy image represents the normative yardstick used to evaluate all Black women’s behavior” (2000, 72). Black women were to be deferent, compliant, and sacrificial. Of course, black women in their own homes were far different than they were as mammies, and for these mothers the controlling image of the “matriarch” applied. While the mammy represents the “good” black mother—under white supervision and control—the matriarch symbolizes the “bad” black mother, the black mother in her own home. The matriarch was a “negative stigma applied to African-American women who dared reject the image of the submissive, hardworking servant” (75). Matriarchs were overly aggressive, un-feminine mothers who spent too much time away from home (working) to properly supervise their children. The controlling image of the matriarch has been used to serve the dominant ideology by explaining unequal social outcomes: the failed black mother became responsible for black children’s poor school achievement.

Although black women have resisted these controlling images and have engaged in creative self-definition in numerous contexts, the prevalence of these images reveals the contours of black women’s oppression and objectification throughout time. Collins writes, “Taken together, these prevailing images of Black womanhood represent elite White male interests in defining Black women’s sexuality and fertility, [and] help justify the social practices that characterize the matrix of domination in the United States” (84). It is the use of controlling images to justify and rationalize domination that deserves our attention.

“Decepcionada, Defraudada, y Desesperada”

In the early weeks of United Community School, it became clear that the patterns of parent exclusion that had shaped the school’s planning process were present in the new school. In spite of parent opposition to multiage classrooms and teachers promises to delay this until they could win agreement from parents, the school opened in September with multiage classrooms in the early grades: Baudelia’s daughter was in a combined first-and second-grade classroom. As the days and weeks progressed, the mothers in Madres Unidas were confronted with a number of other “irregularities” that began to raise their suspicions and renew their fears that parents were being deceived. Some of these anomalies, such as the violations of the school’s admissions policy described in chapter 3, were hidden, discovered only by probing investigation. Others were blatant and enraging, announced shamelessly to parents by school staff. The uniform policy voted on by parents at a meeting over the summer was disregarded by the principal and replaced by another one. When parents protested, Marie agreed to send home ballots to all parents to vote again on the policy. At the meeting designated to announce the results of the vote, Marie said she had lost the ballots, and didn’t have time to count them anyway.

“In everything we have been ignored,” declared Baudelia at one of our Friday meetings. The parents had opposed multiage classrooms; they got multiage classrooms. The parents wanted a lottery; then they found students had been handpicked after the lottery. The parents voted on a uniform policy; Marie disregarded it. “¡A mí me desespera las mentiras!” (I am fed up with the lies!) Baudelia exclaimed. Amelia and Baudelia said they were refusing to go to any more parent meetings, because they were a waste of time. Throughout the discussion, the mothers said they felt “decepcionada,” “defraudada,” and “desesperada” (disillusioned, deceived, and despondent).

Baudelia and Ofelia, as the most outspoken mothers in the group, began to perceive that they had been branded as antagonists, or troublemakers, by the principal and some of the staff, so that any concerns they raised could be dismissed. After confronting Marie privately on some of the conflicts, including the uniform policy, they concluded that she had made up her mind that they were problem parents and would not take them seriously. This was the beginning of a decisive pattern in which school personnel (and eventually, as we will see, some external reform partners) communicated the message that the parents who named the problems were the problems. In framing Baudelia, Ofelia, and the other Madres as angry troublemakers, or alternatively, greedy founding parents who refused to cede control of the school to new parents, the staff could dismiss their critique and delegitimate it in front of the other parents. These identity politics played out in a variety of ways.

In the second month of the school, as part of the school’s plan to involve parents meaningfully in school decision making, a parent governance committee was announced, and parents voted on four representatives. Baudelia, as the parent who had received the most votes, was to be the council president. However, when Marie announced the committee composition at a general parent meeting, she also delivered a warning. As the mothers retold it to me, Marie announced over the microphone that if Baudelia wanted to serve on the committee, she would have to “change her attitude.” I wished I could have been there to see the shock in the room as one of the school’s most respected parent leaders was publicly chastised by the principal. But Baudelia was not upset. As she explained it to us, she could not change her attitude, and if serving on the committee required doing so, then she would not serve, because she refused to be a puppet (“¡No voy a ser marioneta!”). Further disregarding the parents’ votes, Marie appointed another parent, Norma, to serve as cochair with Baudelia. An English-dominant parent who was new to the school community, Norma had a timid disposition and agreed to be cochair only at Marie’s intense coaxing.

Baudelia’s assertion that she refused to be a puppet revealed her doubts about the function of the council. She suspected it would be a token body without any real authority, whose purpose would be to confirm the principal’s and the staff’s decisions. If she would be continually chastised for speaking up, it would be a waste of her time, she told us. She preferred to work for the good of the school through the research and her parent organizing with OCCA. However, after the coaxing of the other Madres who convinced her that the council needed someone like her on it, and with my encouragement, she agreed to serve on the council.

In the same parent meeting when the staff had announced the parent governance council, Marie had informed parents that in the new school they would no longer be able to switch their child from the bilingual program to the English program or vice versa. Baudelia had asked, “Isn’t it the parents’ right to choose a different program, if one isn’t working?” That had been the policy at Whitman Elementary School, which Baudelia knew well. But Marie had responded, “Not in this school.” When Baudelia then asked about the district policy, Marie replied, “This is an autonomous school and this is what we’re doing.”

In our Friday meeting following this incident, the mothers were enraged. This was the first time the issue of “autonomous” came up as a significant and politically loaded word. While not all of the mothers understood what it meant to be an “autonomous school,” they perceived that in this instance it was being used against them. Baudelia believed she knew what autonomous meant and that Marie was using it wrongly. As she put it, “To be autonomous does not mean to take away parents’ rights!” At this point Amelia asked, What does it mean to be autonomous? Baudelia explained that being autonomous was supposed to mean that schools could make decisions democratically with parents. Instead, Marie was using it to mean that teachers could do whatever they wanted.

The meaning of “autonomy” became a platform for claiming and contesting ownership of the school, and the mothers would eventually explore the issue in depth with other parents and teachers in their research. For now, Marie’s use of it signaled to the mothers that the representation of the school, as well as the representation of parents constructed by the staff, could be used to exclude and delegitimate parents’ concerns.

In late October, the mothers’ frustration had reached its peak. Baudelia and Ofelia called a special meeting with the staff to discuss their concerns, and because they were convinced that they would not be taken seriously alone, they asked me to be there. They had decided try one more time to have an open conversation with the staff, to try to counter the image of them as “problem parents” that was being circulated.

We met in the staff lunchroom. As it turned out, the teachers had staggered lunch breaks, so it was impossible to meet with all of them at once. The mothers had short conversations with pairs of them before Marie and Diane, the instructional leader (the administrator second to the principal, who was given this title), came in. Because Diane did not speak Spanish, I translated as the mothers listed their concerns: about the uniform policy, the bilingual policy. The meeting very quickly became a back-and-forth between Baudelia and Marie, with Baudelia growing increasingly frustrated, and Marie becoming increasingly defensive. Finally, Baudelia asked Marie, why should parents come to parent meetings if their decisions would not be respected? Marie responded that if Baudelia would rather stay home and not come out to improve the school, then she had “bad intentions.”

Here Marie avoided dealing with Baudelia’s question by suggesting that Baudelia had a bad attitude. The question was left hanging: why would anyone want to come to a meeting to vote on something that would surely be overturned? What kind of parent participation did the school really want? But these questions were left unexplored. Instead, it was suggested that by raising these questions, Baudelia was simply looking for an excuse to “stay home.” That Baudelia was one of the school’s most active parents who had probably never missed a meeting and spent more hours volunteering and organizing at the school than any other parent was momentarily lost. Her long history of participation and dedication to the school should have been enough to prove that she did not have “bad intentions.” However, it was the nature of her participation that was threatening to the staff. In a power struggle that would repeat itself throughout the year between parents and professionals, Baudelia was being punished for being too angry.

Attempting to defuse the situation, Diane, an elderly white woman with a sympathetic disposition, offered another analysis. “I have a feeling something else is going on here,” she said. She suggested that the group of founding parents were feeling resentful that new parents were being given a voice, parents who had not been involved since the beginning. She was presumably referring to Norma and the other parents appointed to the School Site Council. Now Baudelia and Ofelia were positioned as unwilling to cooperate or share power with new parents. Diane painted this as a natural process of transition and adjustment. However, the concerns Baudelia and Ofelia had brought up were still not addressed. These concerns had to do with parents as a collective being ignored by the staff: their votes overturned, their rights disregarded. In Diane’s analysis, as in Marie’s, the mothers’ long history of participation, rather than entitling them to equal partnership with the teachers, was seen as a liability. Perhaps they had been given too much power, it was suggested, and needed to be put in their place. The possibility that the founding parents never had any real power, as evidenced by the growing body of contradictions and deceptions they were discovering, was obscured.

The censorship of anger has often been used in public schools as a means of exclusion and control (Lareau and Horvat 1999; Crozier 2001; Fine 1991). More to the point, as Mica Pollock (2008) compellingly documents, the anger and critique expressed by parents of color is likely to trigger defensive reactions from educators who fear any insinuation of racial discrimination. Pollock’s study of complaints of racial discrimination filed with the Office of Civil Rights circa 2000 reveals that accused districts went to great lengths to defend educators’ intentions—and attack those of the complaining parents—while failing to explore the actual sources of the critique. The widespread refusal of educators to acknowledge even “partial, unwitting responsibility” for acts of racial exclusion meant that the only possible response to complaints of discrimination was to dismiss the parents who made them as “difficult,” “kooky,” “angry,” or “hostile complainers” (2008, 25, 45, 62, 171). In the meeting described above, Baudelia and Ofelia’s attempt to counter the staff’s image of them as “problem parents” was met with similar responses from both Marie and Diane. The message from both administrators was that Baudelia and Ofelia needed to change their behavior (or their attitudes) in order to resolve the conflict: in other words, the source of the conflict was Baudelia and Ofelia. There was no recognition of error on the part of school staff nor any acknowledgment of the legitimacy of parents’ frustration. As would happen repeatedly throughout the year, the mothers’ concerns were held hostage to a representational battle between “good” and “bad” parents. The use of identity politics to neutralize parent activism has also been documented by Michael Apple (1996), who highlights the role of school officials, as representatives of the state, in limiting the subject positions of parents. As Apple observes, “The subject positions made available by the state were only two: ‘responsible’ parents who basically supported ‘professional decision making,’ or ‘irresponsible’ [parents]” (64). This was also the case at UCS.

These interactions with school staff provided rich fodder for our Friday discussions and began to suggest the shape and course of our research at the school. It was through debriefing together that the mothers were able to collectively develop an analysis that rejected the staff’s image of them as problem parents, and identified the ways in which the staff attempted to manipulate the image of the “good parent” to extend their own agenda at the school. The desirable parent, the mothers recognized, was the parent who said and did exactly as the principal or teachers wanted. The mothers used the words marioneta (marionette puppet) and “parrot” to describe the roles assigned to parents, revealing their analysis that “good parents” were expected to be a mouthpiece for the staff, with no opinions or agency of their own.

A striking example of the “good parent” was revealed at a parent meeting in November. The principal had announced that Norma, the English-speaking parent who was cochair of the School Site Council, would be running the meeting. According to the mothers, Marie then proceeded to dictate to Norma everything she should say. Norma was reduced to repeating Marie’s announcements to the parents, “como un perico” (like a parrot). Like Patricia Hill Collins’s “mammy” who fulfilled her caretaker duties under white supervision and control, the “good” parent representative on the SSC fulfilled her leadership role under the supervision and control of the principal. The mothers discussed this incident with evident anger and disgust. The following exchange I recorded at a Friday meeting reveals their developing analysis of the school’s view of parents:

Baudelia: Siento que están violando nuestros derechos. Ahora, ¿hasta cuándo yo voy a poder cambiar a mi niño de un programa bilingüe a un programa de inglés? ¿Por qué me están quitando ese derecho? ¿Por qué están cambiando los derechos por ejemplo de un comité? Hacerlo como ellas quieren. ¿Quién les da esa autoridad de formar un comité a su conveniencia de ellas? Ser autónoma dice padres y maestros trabajarán juntos, pero ¿de qué manera estamos trabajando padres y maestros juntos? ¿Para organizar festivales? ¿O para organizar programas académicos? ¿Cuándo se nos han dicho, “Padres, vengan para hacer un programa”? ¿Cuándo? A mí no.

Ofelia: ¡Nos llaman para organizar cosas de fiesta!

Baudelia: Pero no están diciendo, “Padres, vengan, ¿qué programa les conviene?” ¿Qué mejoría va a tener un programa bilingüe? ¿Qué problemas vamos a ver en esto? ¿Cuándo se nos han tomado en cuenta? Sólo para lo que les conviene, han estado tomando en cuenta, para beneficios de ellas, para festivales, para reuniones de esto, para reuniones del otro, eso no está bien.

Carmen: Y por eso ya no fui para escoger a la maestra de preschool, me invitó que fuera ayer otra vez, y yo le dije que no tenía tiempo, pero realmente yo no quise ir porque si voy, voy como monigote a decir, “Esa sí me gusta, la otra no me gusta,” pero ella va a decidir por ella misma. [Risa de todas.]

Amelia: Allí lo hubieras dicho a la directora, “¿Para qué usted me está invitando a mí, si mi hijo no va a estar aceptado en la escuela?”

Carolina: ¿Entonces, a ir allí tengo esperanza de que mi hijo va a ir a preschool?

Carmen: Por eso, pero si es que hablar, yo le pudiera haber dicho más cosas, pero me canso … Me desespero y ya no le dije nada.

Baudelia: I feel that [the teachers] are violating our rights. Now, up to what point will I be able to transfer my son from a bilingual program to an English program? Why are they taking away that right? Why are they changing the rights, for example, of a committee? To do it as they want. Who gives them the authority to form a committee at their own convenience? To be autonomous means that parents and teachers will work together, but in what ways are parents and teachers working together? To organize festivals? Or to organize academic programs? When have they told us, “Parents, come help plan a program”? When? Not to me.

Ofelia: They call us to organize things for parties!

Baudelia: But they are not saying, “Parents, come, what program would work best for you?” What improvements will a bilingual program offer? What problems might we see? When have they taken us into account? Only when it’s convenient for them, when it benefits them, for festivals, for these meetings, for those meetings, that is not right.

Carmen: And that’s why I didn’t go to select the preschool teacher. [The principal] invited me to go again yesterday, and I told her that I didn’t have time, but really I didn’t want to go, because if I go, I go as a puppet to say, “That one I like, that one I don’t like,” but [the principal] is going to decide for herself. [Everyone laughs.]

Amelia: There you should have said to the principal, “Why are you inviting me, if my son is not going to be accepted into the school?”

Carolina: So, if I go, do I have hope that my son is going to preschool?

Carmen: Yes, but to talk, I could have said many more things, but I get tired … I get fed up, and then I didn’t say anything.

Carmen, in spite of hours of volunteering for the school and participating in all of the parent meetings, was still not assured of a place for her son in the preschool. Repeated inquiries to Marie always got the same answer: that they didn’t know yet, and that she could not guarantee a place for Carmen’s son. In the above exchange, the other mothers point out the irony of the principal inviting Carmen to help select the preschool teacher when she had no assurance that her son would be admitted into the preschool. Why, then, would she go? But Carmen believed, whether her son was accepted or not, the principal was not really seeking her opinion. She had learned from experience that expressing her opinion had no bearing on the principal’s decisions or actions. She was being asked to participate “as a puppet,” or a dummy. And for that reason, she refused to go.

Baudelia and Ofelia’s point that parents were only called upon to organize festivals revealed their growing sense that parents were used strategically by teachers and staff to accomplish the teachers’ goals. In this and other discussions, the mothers recalled how eagerly the teachers recruited them to go to school board meetings when an important decision was being made and they needed a strong parental presence to pressure the school board. As Carolina put it, teachers called parents “when they just need bodies.” The pattern was for teachers to encourage parent participation “when it benefits them.” In her analysis, Baudelia wrote, “Pero algo que sí puedo asegurar si llegaran a necesitar de pedir algo al Distrito entonces sí se preocupan para que los padres apoyen, se logra lo que quieren y se olvidan que los padres tienen voz y voto” (But one thing you can be sure of is if [the teachers] need to ask for something from the District, then they will make sure parents support them, they will get what they want and they will forget that parents have voice and vote). The invitation to participate in body but not in mind—to be present in the audience at an action or school board meeting, to serve on the School Site Council, to vote on a policy at a parent meeting, while their actual opinions and concerns were silenced—felt distinctly manipulative to the mothers. “Están logrando sus objetivos, no los objetivos de los padres,” Baudelia observed ([The teachers] are achieving their own objectives, not the parents’ objectives).

The mothers discussed a sense of being rendered invisible at the school, even when their actions conformed to the school’s expectations of “good” parent involvement. Ofelia shared the following at one of our meetings: “Yo lo que he aprendido también, que si yo voy como voluntaria a ayudar en la escuela, ya sé que nadie me va a reconocer lo que yo estoy haciendo … Porque, yo ayudé mucho a [la directora], los sábados, a botar basura, he ido a la librería a organizar libros … Nunca me dijo, ‘Gracias por tu ayuda, gracias porque tú me has ayudado’ ” (What I have also learned is that if I volunteer at the school, I know that nobody is going to recognize what I do … Because I helped the principal a lot, on Saturdays, to throw out trash, I’ve gone to the library to organize books … And [the principal] never said to me, “Thank you for your help, thank you because you have helped me”).

Following this story of Ofelia’s, Baudelia suggested that it was because they were seen as problem parents that their participation in the school was no longer recognized or appreciated. Here she articulated her analysis of why their participation was sidelined by the staff.

Baudelia: Porque siempre estamos expresando francamente lo que no nos gusta, y tenemos el valor de decirlo, y no toda la gente tiene el valor. Entonces ya nosotros hace cuenta como que ya lo que nosotros pidamos, o expongamos, hace cuenta como que nos ignoran. Pero yo creo que nosotros tenemos derecho de seguir expresando lo que nosotros sentimos. Y yo siento que a mí se me han violado derechos como padre. Pero yo ya no estoy diciendo nada, pero ya que yo me apunté eso, ¡un día va a explotar! No, la verdad, es que llega un momento en que se cansa—

Ofelia: No aguanta uno.

Baudelia: Eso no es justo. Un día voy a decir, “Si usted no me escucha aquí, yo me voy a ir a otro lado para que me escuchen.”

Baudelia: Because we are always expressing frankly what we don’t like, and we have the courage to say it, and not everyone has the courage. So it’s like now whatever we ask for or express, it’s like they ignore us. But I think we have the right to keep expressing what we feel. And I feel that my rights as a parent have been violated. But I don’t say anything anymore, but ever since I noted that, one day it’s going to explode! No, really, there comes a time when you get tired—

Ofelia: You can’t stand it anymore.

Baudelia: It’s not fair. One day I’m going to say, “If you don’t listen to me here, I’m going to go somewhere else where they will listen to me.”

These Friday debriefing sessions became a key element of our research, in which each mother’s experience became the basis for group learning. Their growing sense that the framing of them as “problem parents” was legitimizing their exclusion gave rise to particular questions and research methods that would shed light on this process. Our group made a number of methodological decisions based on the desire to illuminate and disrupt the controlling image of the “problem parent.” The first decision was to make the parents’ first formal research activity at the school an individual interview with the principal. The mothers felt that Baudelia and Ofelia should conduct this interview as a pair. At first this decision surprised me, given the history of tension between the principal and Baudelia and Ofelia, but the mothers decided that it was precisely because of the conflict with Marie that Baudelia and Ofelia needed to interview her. They saw in this the opportunity to interact with Marie on terms other than those that had shaped their previous interactions, and to gain some credibility for themselves and their research.¹ The mothers were genuinely curious about how Marie viewed her role as principal and her relationship to parents, but they also hoped that the interview might change her image of them and improve their relationship. It was an early indication of how the role of researchers assumed symbolic importance in their quest to recast their identities at the school.

The second methodological decision the group made was to begin, as soon as possible, focus groups with parents. The mothers wanted to talk to as many parents as possible, and had already begun to do so informally. I suggested the focus group methodology as a way to expand the base of their informants and to collect systematically some of the information they had begun to gather piecemeal in casual conversations about how parents felt about the school. The more data they had from parents, I reminded them, the harder it would be for staff members to isolate them as antagonists. So we settled on parent focus groups as an opportunity to both get to know and record parents’ stories and concerns, and to strengthen their collective voice as parents in the dialogue about parents’ roles at the school. The mothers were particularly interested to learn from parents what roles they were playing in the school, what they understood about the school’s vision and mission, and how they felt about the relationship between parents and teachers in the new small school. For parents who had been present in the school’s planning phases, the mothers wanted to hear about their experience in organizing the school and the obstacles they had encountered. The parent focus groups were motivating to the Madres, then, both for the information they hoped to learn from them and for the ways this information could be used to transform controlling images of parents at the school.

“Los Padres Se Sienten Utilizados”

The mothers conducted three parent focus groups, with seven to eight parents each, after school on late fall afternoons. Hoping to record stories about parents’ involvement in the organizing of the school, the Madres were disappointed. Many parents were unaware of the history and origins of the school, having joined the school that year after being chosen in the lottery, or, as described in the preceding chapter, being brought in by a teacher or the principal. These parents were also unaware of the new roles they were expected to play in the school. Amelia recalled, “Otra cosa que yo encontré fue que los padres no saben sobre sus derechos en la escuela. Eso es muy duro porque yo misma tampoco los sabía, hasta ahora que estoy en esta investigación me he estado enterando de nuestros derechos” (Another thing I learned was that the parents don’t know their rights in the school. This is hard because I myself didn’t know them either, until now that I’m working on this research, I’m finding out about our rights). Most parents the Madres talked to had not seen the school’s proposal and were unaware of its contents. Although copies of the proposal in Spanish had been made available to all parents at the end of the planning year, newcomer parents who had not been at those planning meetings did not have access to those documents.

Founding parents and newcomer parents emerged as two distinct groups with contrasting relationships to the school. Newcomer parents, those who had not participated in community organizing or design team meetings before the school opened, expressed more positive views of the principal and the school’s relationship to parents than those who had participated in organizing the school. In one focus group, Ofelia wrote, “the majority of [these] parents sympathize with the principal, I mean they feel in confianza, even though I think it is because for the majority, she is the one who helped them get their children into the school.”² Newcomer parents who had been brought in by the principal or a teacher had no understanding of the politics that had shaped the school’s history or the way parents had fought for a voice in the school. The Madres perceived that these parents were used strategically by school staff to defuse the claims of founding parents. Baudelia, in one of her analyses, articulated it this way:

Mi punto de vista es que actualmente estos padres que entraron de esta manera, se sienten tan agradecidos con la directora y maestros, que no quieren reconocer y apoyar los derechos de los demás padres. Es por eso que tal vez, puede verse cierta división entre los padres. Y se puede ver que estos padres son usados para lograr los intereses del personal.

My point of view is that currently these parents who got in this way feel so grateful to the principal and teachers that they don’t want to recognize and support the rights of the other parents. It is for this reason maybe that a certain division among the parents exists. And you can see that these [newcomer] parents are used to achieve the interests of the staff.

Baudelia drew a direct connection between the existence of hand-picked parents in the school—the admissions “anomalies”—and the division among the parents that the staff exploited to silence some parents. Recall that Norma, the principal’s appointed cochair of the School Site Council, was a newcomer parent. Handpicked newcomer parents were automatic allies of the principal and teachers in struggles with founding parents. Owing their presence in the school to the principal’s or a teacher’s good favor, the Madres believed, these parents were loyal to the staff and anxious to maintain their favor. Certainly, there were divisions among parents before the school opened. As we saw, some parents were always loyal to the principal, and the principal publicly rewarded them as model parents. In place of the school’s good parent/bad parent paradigm, the mothers perceived the division among parents as being a division between those who wanted change and those who supported the status quo. In response to one mother’s charge that the Madres were being “too negative,” Carolina said, “She is the negative one because she doesn’t want to make change!” What the Madres discovered in their research was that the principal and staff, by bringing people into the school in violation of the admissions criteria, had increased the pool of parents loyal to them and the status quo. The principal made use of these parents’ loyalty to delegitimate the claims of “problem parents”—or parents who wanted change.

While newcomer parents were unaware of the school’s history and were more positive about school–parent relations, founding parents were often disenchanted and disillusioned about the prospects for parent participation. Particularly revealing was the case of Samuel, a father who was selected for the school’s English Language Advisory Committee (ELAC). After meeting Samuel in one of the focus groups, the Madres decided to interview him individually to learn more about his experiences with ELAC. Samuel, a hotel worker from El Salvador, had a daughter in fourth grade at UCS. He had participated in the meetings to help plan UCS, and when the new school opened, volunteered to serve on the ELAC committee as a way of staying involved. As Ofelia explained:

Nosotros queríamos entrevistarlo porque queríamos preguntarle cómo estaba en el comité, qué había aprendido, cómo le había parecido el comité de ELAC, qué información iba a tener para los padres, pero nuestra sorpresa fue cuando lo fuimos a entrevistar nos dijo que nunca le habían llamado, que él estaba esperando por todo el tiempo que le llamaran pero que él nunca había recibido una llamada. Le preguntamos por qué no fue a la escuela a decir ¿por qué no le han llamado? Y él dijo, “Porque me da vergüenza.” … Y él estaba triste porque nadie le había llamado y ya había pasado seis meses.

We wanted to interview him because we wanted to ask him what it was like on the committee, what he had learned, what he thought about ELAC, and what information he would have for the parents. But to our surprise, when we went to interview him he told us that they had never called him, that he was still waiting for all that time for them to call him, but he had never received a call. We asked him why he didn’t go to the school to ask why they never called him. And he said because he felt ashamed … and he was sad, because nobody had called him and six months had passed.

For the Madres, Samuel’s story affirmed their own experience as founding parents, and provided a sad counterpart to the stories of newcomer parents. Baudelia commented, “Conocí cómo él se siente al igual que nosotras” (I learned how he feels just like us). Ofelia wrote:

Esta entrevista me sirvió mucho para saber que no sólo yo me siento triste y desilucionada de cómo está trabajando la escuela U.C.S. Pude encontrar respuestas a algunas de mis preguntas, por ejemplo ¿me pregunto por qué no asisten padres a las juntas? Ahora tengo claro, como Samuel dijo, hay mucho entusiasmo pero no hay acción. Creo que los padres nos cansamos de escuchar, participar, ayudar, para que al final no veamos nada en concreto …

This interview helped me a lot to know that it’s not just me that feels sad and disillusioned with how UCS is working. I could find answers to some of my questions, for example, I wonder, Why don’t more parents come to the meetings? Now I know, like Samuel said, there’s a lot of enthusiasm at the school but there’s no action. I think that as parents we get tired of listening, participating, helping, just so that in the end we don’t see anything concrete …

In Ofelia’s analysis, the lack of parent participation at the school was a direct response to the school’s failure to incorporate parent voice. “Por eso pienso que cada reunión que pasa hay menos padres” (That’s why I think with each meeting there are fewer parents). Parents don’t come, she reasoned, because they have already seen it is useless: “we get tired of listening.” Samuel had told the Madres that he had stopped going to the parent meetings out of frustration. Ofelia described him as “ashamed” and “sad.” As the Madres’ reports often did, Ofelia’s reflection contained a suggestion for what would improve the situation:

Como resultado a esta investigación, me gustaría poder hacer reflexionar a la directora para que pidiera una disculpa a padres que han mostrado interés en ayudar y que ella no les dio importancia. Me gustaría volver a tener confianza y esperanza en que nos escuchen y que tomen en cuenta las opiniones de los padres.

As an outcome of this research, I would like to make the principal reflect so that she would apologize to parents who have shown an interest in helping that she didn’t acknowledge. I would like to once again have confidence and hope that they would listen to us and take into account parents’ opinions.

In her summary of how parents viewed their role in the school, Ofelia wrote, “Los padres se sienten utilizados” (Parents feel used).

“We Haven’t Had Autonomy in Any Way”

Two teacher focus groups provided the Madres the opportunity to ask teachers directly how they viewed the role of parents in the new school. The parent facilitators asked teachers what they thought about the relationship between teachers and parents and how they would like to see parents participate in the school. If we had any fears that teachers would exaggerate their expectations for parent involvement when speaking to parent researchers, those fears were quickly dispelled. The Madres were dismayed by the limited visions of parents’ roles that teachers expressed. Many teachers said they had better communication with parents and increased knowledge of students’ families as a result of the smaller class size. But when asked about their ideas for further parent involvement, teachers’ imaginations seemed stunted. Most appalling to the Madres was the following response, from Helen:

Well, I’d like parents to take more of a role in some of the bigger issues of the cleanliness of the school, I mean I’m not saying parents should clean the school, but they should approach the district, approach whoever needs to be approached, beyond Marie [the principal], to help deal with some of those larger issues, because a lot of times the district will respond to parent pressure.

Helen revealed a view of parents that was both condescending and utilitarian. First, parents were expected to be concerned with aspects of the physical environment and facilities, rather than with the instructional program or other academic or social issues. Second, parents were expected to perform roles useful to the teachers that teachers couldn’t or wouldn’t fill themselves, such as procuring goods and services from the district. (Helen went on to suggest that parents pressure the district about why the school was not wired to the Internet.) Helen’s view that the district would respond more to parent pressure than to teachers was common among teachers at UCS. The idea that it was the job of parents to exert political pressure on the district had strong roots in the Oakland movement, as we have seen. Now that they had procured the new small schools, parents were expected to lobby the district for the things teachers were still missing: adequate custodial services, technology, and so on. Teachers also hoped that parents would mobilize for more new small schools. As Janice said:

I would really like to see the parents come out to support City Academy,³ because if the parents are happy with what’s happening here, then they need to fight for the next step, because I think Helen’s right, the district will listen more to the parents than they’ll listen to us.

Teachers were more comfortable thinking about parents engaging with the district than envisioning parents engaging at their own school. This was partly because many believed that parents were already “happy with what’s happening here.” Teachers told us that parents were more involved at UCS than they had been at Whitman Elementary School, citing higher attendance at Back-to-School Night, parent conferences, and parent meetings as evidence of greater parent interest and participation. They also expressed faith in the school’s Leadership Team (School Site Council, of which Baudelia was cochair) as a way of ensuring parents’ leadership roles in the school. As Susan said:

One thing I think is really important that is also a big difference between where we’ve been before [is] the fact that we have parents who are actually involved in the Leadership Team … Parent involvement on Leadership Team at Whitman was a joke. It was the parent center staff, they barely attended, they didn’t really participate for whatever reason. I think the way that we designed the Leadership Team at this school is much more equitable.

Susan expressed no concern about the fact that some parent representatives on a body intended to be elected by parents had been appointed by the principal. Of course, not all teachers shared rosy views about parent involvement in the school. Some admitted that “we have a long way to go,” and that there was a lack of trust between teachers and parents. Some suggested the need for a parent center as a way for parents to begin to feel at home in the school.

Beyond this, however, insight into teachers’ limited views of parents can be found in their own ideas about professionalism and the autonomy that had been promised them as teachers in the reform. In teachers’ views, their professional training and expertise should have earned them ownership of the school. As we will see, teachers’ interpretations of “autonomy”—notably as the ability to carry out their professional expertise with minimal intervention—left little room for collaboration with parents. Even before the parents asked them what they understood by an “autonomous” school, teachers in both focus groups expressed frustration with the district for imposing restrictions on their autonomy. Teachers said that they had been lured by the promise of autonomy—over hiring, curriculum, budget, and enrollment—only to find that they would not get it, and they felt cheated. The following quotes reveal their sense that the district had violated their right, as professionals, to have control and ownership over their school.

“I don’t think we’ve had autonomy really in any way,” Susan said. Laurie put it this way: “The district is still not clear on what autonomy really means for the small autonomous schools. So they attempt some things, then take a few steps back.” Tracy said, “It’s not even that we have different understandings of autonomy, we just didn’t have any autonomy.” In her view, the district’s behavior was a denial of their professionalism:

The biggest thing is we spent a year working two jobs creating this school, proving to them—they approved our proposal. We said, this is what we want to do, and this is why we know how to do it, and here’s the research that supports it. And they’re not trusting us to do that. They’re forcing all these other things on us, which is just not autonomy.

Here Tracy explains teachers’ right to autonomy based on their professional expertise: “this is why we know how to do it,” and cites “research”—not parent participation or support—as granting them legitimacy. Similarly, Tanya explained that being autonomous was about “being professionals,” choosing your own professional development and having control over the way you teach. Instead, teachers described having to attend mandated professional developments, having to work with staff assigned to the school who did not share their vision, and being required to incorporate elements of Open Court⁴ into their teaching. Although they did not say so, the need to collaborate with parents may have been experienced as another restriction on their autonomy.

The Madres saw in the teachers’ resentment around the lack of autonomy a parallel to their own frustration with the school. Teachers felt betrayed by the district, which refused to share power after promising teachers autonomy, in the same way parents felt betrayed by the school staff. Ofelia drew this analogy when explaining to the Madres the teachers’ sarcasm about autonomy. In the English teachers focus group, when asked what they understood by “autonomy,” the teachers had spontaneously burst into laughter. When Ofelia described this to the other parents in Madres Unidas, Carmen asked why the teachers would laugh at the word. Ofelia turned to her and said, “The same way I might laugh if you said ‘social justice.’ You know, like, ‘What justice?’ ” The mothers often talked about how UCS was supposed to be a “social-justice” school. With this, Ofelia effectively conveyed the pain and humor of a word that evoked broken promises.

Teachers were seemingly less aware of the parallel. They had always viewed parents as allies in their struggles with the district, so it is not surprising that they should channel parent involvement toward pressuring the district to provide more support. But while they were hyperaware of the power struggle going on between the district and the new small schools, they were closed to the recognition of the power play within their own school between teachers and parents. Parent involvement was described in a decisively power-neutral language: parents were either “more involved” than at Whitman, or perhaps not involved enough, but at no point were they betrayed, deceived, disillusioned, or used by the staff (words the Madres used to describe their experience).

Why were teachers unable to see within the walls of their school the relationship they so resented with the district? Why should parents’ anger be appropriate at the district but not admissible within the school? The answer to these questions, I argue, can be traced to controlling images of parents that circulated in the small schools movement, which justified parents’ continued subordination in school reform.

The Eleventh Commandment

On a cold Saturday in January, teachers from across the city gathered in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church for the keynote address of the annual small schools conference, convened by BACEE. The speaker, a renowned scholar of school reform from a nearby university, delivered a rousing address on the topic “10 Commandments for Small Schools.” The ten commandments advised educators on aspects of curriculum, instruction, and school structure that research has shown make small schools successful. The speaker ended her address with quotes from Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes and drew a standing ovation from the crowd. At the podium, Assistant Superintendent of School Reform José Morales took the microphone and told the audience he had an “eleventh commandment” to add: “Thou shalt remember thy community.” The audience clapped obligingly, and Morales explained, “We need the community will to change Oakland Unified.”

Morales’s eleventh commandment reveals much about how parents and community were constructed by educators in the small schools movement. That “community” should enter the dialogue only as an afterthought, as an eleventh commandment, is significant. Morales’s emphasis is also telling: “We need the community will to change Oakland Unified.” The community holds the “political will” necessary to make change. Parents’ power lies in their demands. Parents here are a group who should want and demand something different. As Morales told me in an interview, what made the Oakland small schools movement unique was that in Oakland the reform was “politically motivated,” not “instructionally motivated.” Parents are “indignant,” he said, and “that’s great.”

The “indignant parent,” so unwelcome at UCS, was praised as the “engine” of the reform. In the small schools movement, it was “angry parents” who had pushed the school board to pass the new small schools policy and forced officials to provide adequate facilities for the new schools. Parents’ anger was recognized, welcomed, and even encouraged by OCCA organizers and reform leaders who sought crowds of parents at actions to leverage policy change. The following field notes taken at a local organizing committee meeting illustrate how anger was used strategically by OCCA organizers to prepare parents for their role in public actions.

About 25 parents gathered in the cafeteria of the parish school. After the parents who had met with public officials reported on their meetings, Laura, an OCCA organizer, led the group in a discussion of the upcoming action. She began by asking the question, “¿Qué es una acción?” (What is an action?). Baudelia was one of the first to reply: “Pedir lo que necesitamos a los encargados que pueden hacer una solución, exigir que lo hagan” (To ask for what we need from the authorities who have the solution, and demand that they do it). Others followed with, “Es una manifestación, para exigir los cambios que necesitamos” (It’s a demonstration, to demand the changes that we need). Laura affirmed this, saying “an action is to make change.” When Laura asked, “What power do we have?” Baudelia replied, “¡La unión! ¡Voz y voto!” (Unity! Voice and vote!).

Martha, another OCCA organizer, reviewed the Oakland schools map showing the disparities in size and achievement between the schools in the hills and the schools in the flats. She asked, “¿Es justo?” “No!” everyone cried. Then Laura did an exercise showing “Power respects power.” “Who will we be inviting to the action who has the power to make decisions?” They listed the public officials they have been inviting: the mayor, the superintendent, city council members, school-board members. She wrote their names on the poster paper. “What power do they have?” They make decisions, and they have money. She told the parents, “The Oakland School District has $30 million to buy new facilities.” Then, on another sheet, “What power do we have?” Baudelia cried out, “¡Voz!” But Laura waited for another answer. Others cried out, “¡Voto!” “¡La unión!” and finally someone said, “¡Gente!” and that’s when Laura drew a whole bunch of stick figures standing together in the middle of the page. “Nosotros tenemos gente” (We have people).

In this meeting, parents are told that their power resides in their numbers: the crowd of stick figures is juxtaposed to the names of the public officials they will be confronting. And it is through numbers, and the “electoral threat” they represent, that OCCA achieves its victories.⁵ OCCA organizers appeal to parents’ anger at the injustices they are faced with—the Oakland schools map serves as the prompt for this—to encourage them to bring large numbers to the action. Anger at inequities is the basis on which parents can demand change.

There is no doubt that this training gives parents new confidence and skills and accomplishes significant political victories. The action for new small school sites, when it did happen several weeks later, was attended by the mayor, the superintendent, and prominent school-board and city council members, and gained commitments from these officials to open three new small schools in the Fruitvale-San Antonio neighborhood by the following school year. But in the context of the small schools movement, parents were taught that their role was to be one of many in an angry crowd demanding change. Their participation was directed to exert political pressure on the city and the school district, not to be involved in discussions of what kind of change was necessary or how it should be achieved: as Morales had told me, OCCA was the engine of the movement, but BACEE was the brains.

While parents packed auditoriums for public actions, they were notably scarce at Incubator meetings where teachers were being trained for their roles in the reform, and where the nuts and bolts of school design were being discussed. The Incubator, the primary vehicle for providing coaching and technical assistance to design teams as they planned their new small schools, played a major role in shaping how teachers perceived and related to parents. Consider the advice given to teachers in one Incubator session I observed in 2000, in a handout distributed by BACEE and titled “12 Ideas for Designing New Small Schools.” The purpose of the “12 Design Ideas” was to introduce teachers to “what school reformers have learned over the past 20 years that can help you design a school that will be truly different.” Parents appear in only one of the twelve design ideas, titled “Team Composition: Who is on your Design Team? Why are all voices needed?” This section contained the following clause:

What is essential is that all [new small autonomous schools] be designed by the educators who hope to teach there, with support, input and advice from parents, students and others who care. The educators who will teach in the school must have the responsibility for the design because they are the ones, day in and day out, who will make the school live and flourish. But the school can only succeed in partnership with the parents and the students. (Emphasis added)

Teachers reading this could have interpreted it as official permission to sideline parent input. Teachers and aspiring new small school leaders were told directly that they had primary responsibility (and therefore authority) in school design, and parents were there to “support” them. It was assumed that teachers know best what parents need.

The Design Ideas document advised teachers to incorporate current learning theory, current brain research, child-development theory and practice, and research on cultural and racial diversity, among other things, into their school vision. In none of these areas were parents authorities. Even “cultural and racial diversity,” presumably the area where parents’ experience would be relevant, was to be understood by research, removing it one step from parents’ authority and experience. The implication that parents’ needs were encompassed by “cultural, linguistic, and racial diversity,” and that a body of research already existed to explain this, made parent participation on design teams all but unnecessary. And certainly, the exclusion of community needs from the coaching at Incubator meetings was made easier by the absence of parents at these meetings. Parents were often not invited to Incubator sessions, or, if they were, according to parents at Whitman, they were unable to attend because the meetings were held too late in the evening and no child care was provided.

Reformers and organizers gave many rationales for the lack of parent participation on small school design teams. Recall the retired elementary school teacher in chapter 2 who told us that parents probably wouldn’t want to help with the writing of the school’s proposal. Assumptions about what parents wanted, what they were capable of, and what they valued revealed two controlling images of parents in the small schools movement: the passive and submissive Latino parent, who deferred to teachers’ authority and was uninterested in school design issues; and the angry and impatient parent, suitable for turning up at large actions, but not for engaging in a deeper discussion about reform. Both controlling images served educator self-interests in rationalizing a subordinate role for parents in reform.

Erica, a BACEE staff member told me, “I don’t imagine that every parent is going to have the capacity to sit home at night with their computer and type up their educational theory.” Like many reformers and organizers in the small schools movement, Erica had been a classroom teacher before joining BACEE, and her experience with parents as a teacher shaped her expectations of parent behavior in the small schools reform. “It’s like developing a new culture for parents, too,” she said. “It’s having parents think differently about what they expect of teachers, specifically Latino parents who are, like, ‘Whatever the teacher says is right.’ You know, they’re not like Baudelia, most of them, you know, most of my parents were, like, ‘Whatever you say, maestra!’ ” Here, the active parent (Baudelia) is seen as an exception to the norm of passive, subservient Latino parents.

Rather than seeing patterns of passivity as an outcome of parents’ experiences with school personnel, reformers saw these as reflecting cultural traits of Latino parents. There was no recognition that all parents, if given the opportunity, might have an interest in school design. A senior staff member at BACEE wrote in a memo to other small schools activists: “Often what parents really want is to be heard and considered. They may be less concerned with the details of design and more interested in making sure that the changes educators make will really address their issues. It is likely that leaders will emerge from the community who want to be active in planning reform while others will feel that that is the job of the school professionals. My advice here is to encourage participation and leadership but to keep an eye on process and on making sure that decisions about what you intend to do get distributed widely for comment.” Here, the possibility is granted that there may be some exceptional parents who will be more active in planning reform, but not that all parents have the potential to become involved at this level. Patterns of parent involvement are accepted as a given, and not seen as something that educators have the power or responsibility to change.

The angry and impatient parents, while key figures in the small schools movement through their role at public actions, were not suitable for participating in long-term planning for school reform. “Parents are interested in immediacy, this school year,” reformers often said. A senior staff member at BACEE told me that while policy makers think and plan for the long term—in two-, five-, or seven-year periods—community members want immediate gratification. It was easier to mobilize them for new resources or facilities than to involve them in planning a reform that might not take effect until after their child graduated from school. In fact, however, I met more than one parent who defied this assumption, organizing for new schools as a way to help their community.

Certainly, reformers and organizers had the desire to involve parents in new ways and were reflective about the challenges this posed. The small schools reform represented a new role for organizing, and the partners were only just beginning to grasp the implications of this. As OCCA’s director said, “Part of what this small school stuff has done for us is brought parents to the table as different kinds of partners than they have been before,” adding, “I don’t know what this is gonna look like.” Erica, from BACEE, reflected, “As I become more and more involved in this, I realize that schools are not like other organizing efforts which involve getting a grocery store or speed bumps put in a neighborhood. The job of the organizer ends when the victory is gained in those arenas. But the work of creating a sustainable and strong school in many ways begins the day that the school opens its doors.”

But in their efforts to involve parents as “different kinds of partners,” reformers and organizers were limited by controlling images of which even they seemed unaware. Parents were constructed as fixed in time and unchanging, with needs that were readily explainable by education professionals: either too angry and impatient to get involved with the “details of design” or culturally incapable of seeing themselves as intellectual equals with teachers. While the Madres through their research at UCS identified patterns of parent participation as being shaped by the school, through teacher–parent interactions, the reformers’ discourse about parents showed no awareness that parents’ “nature” was at all socially constructed; that is, the very patterns of parent behavior that educators identified and described were institutionally produced, much like the patterns of student achievement that these educators aimed to change.

The Resignation

Early one morning in March, Baudelia called me to tell me that she had resigned from the School Site Council. It had been a dramatic week at UCS. On Monday, Baudelia submitted a letter of resignation to the principal and the members of the council. Within two days of Baudelia’s resignation, Baudelia’s cochair, Norma, had also resigned. Both the principal and Linda, Baudelia’s daughter’s teacher, had called Baudelia individually to plead with her. Linda wanted to call a meeting with Baudelia and the council to discuss Baudelia’s reasons for resigning and what they could do about it. Baudelia told her she wouldn’t meet with them without me and Martha, the OCCA organizer, also being present. So Baudelia was calling to invite me to the meeting and to talk to me about what she should say.

Baudelia’s resignation letter read as follows:

Directora y Leadership Team:

Através de este medio quiero informar a ustedes que apartir de hoy dejo de pertenecer a este comité. Mis razones son las siguientes:

-No estoy de acuerdo en la forma de organizar para trabajar.

-Falta de comunicación entre los miembros de este equipo.

-Hasta este momento desconozco mis funciones como miembro de este comité.

-He perdido algo que es muy importante para continuar: y esto es la confianza, aclarando este punto no es en general para todos los miembros de este comité.

-No quiero seguir siendo una persona que exige demasiado. No me gustaría que ustedes piensen que reacciono así porque he gastado cierta energía, sino al contrario porque me gustan las cosas claras, la verdad y la justicia.

Gracias,

Baudelia.

Principal and Leadership Team:

Through this communication I would like to inform you that as of today I no longer belong to this committee. My reasons are the following:

-I do not agree with the way the work is organized.

-Lack of communication between the members of this team.

-Up to this moment I do not know my functions as a member of this committee.

-I have lost something that is very important to continue, and that is trust, clarifying that this point is not meant in general for all members of the committee.

-I don’t want to keep being a person who demands too much. I don’t want you all to think that I act this way because I am worn out, but, on the contrary, because I like things to be clear, truthful, and just.

Thank you,

Baudelia.

Baudelia’s last point indicates her understanding that she was being viewed as a difficult person, “a person who demands too much,” by the other members of the committee, and her rejection of this identity. “I don’t want you all to think that I act this way because I am worn out,” she emphasized, again rejecting the image of the overworked founding parent. In submitting a formally written letter of resignation, Baudelia attempted to make her critique of the committee known to all.

Baudelia had many reasons for resigning, the most egregious of which was a recent incident when she had been asked by the principal to sign a blank form. It turned out the form was authorizing the budget, but Baudelia wasn’t allowed to see what the items were. Marie had told her that they urgently needed to send it to the district, and Baudelia was essentially forced to sign. She had told Marie that was the first and last time she would ever sign “un papel en blanco.” Then there was the fact that Marie never called her for planning meetings. Marie would meet privately with Norma and then tell everyone that the committee had met. Baudelia would find out after the fact, or sometimes hours before the meeting, from the OCCA organizer. Then she would show up, surprising Marie with her uninvited presence.

The Madres tried three times to interview Norma, Baudelia’s cochair, about her experiences on the council and at the school. Each time, Norma made the appointment and then failed to show up. Not long after her resignation, the mothers heard that she had moved to a town in the Central Valley. We never got her story.

A week after the resignation, a group of teachers and parents assembled anxiously in the staff lunchroom to discuss Baudelia’s reasons for resigning. The meeting, attended by five parents, five staff members, including the principal, and myself, revealed the staff’s use of controlling images to censor Baudelia’s critique. Baudelia addressed the group, explaining that she had the intention of working for the good of the school, and that she did not intend to offend anybody, but she had to be honest. From the start of the meeting, then, she took the opportunity to publicly name and deny the identity politics that would mark her as a person with bad intentions. She held a copy of her resignation letter, which everyone was to have read, and said she would be happy to further explain or answer questions about any of the points in the letter. The group asked her to go point by point, so she did.

When it came to explaining the “falta de confianza,” or how Baudelia had lost trust in the team, Baudelia gave the example of how Marie had asked her to sign a blank form authorizing the budget. This appalled one of the parents, who said she would never have signed a blank form. Another parent suggested that Marie was probably feeling pressured and rushed, and because of the confianza she has with parents, thought she could get a signature from Baudelia without explaining everything. Nancy, the teacher sitting next to Marie, asked Marie if the form Baudelia had signed was really blank, and Marie confirmed that it was. Nancy raised her eyebrows and said, “Oh!” Marie did not apologize for asking Baudelia to sign a blank form. A little later in the meeting, she explained that the form was authorizing the allocation of the budget into three distinct funds so that the school could access it, but it wasn’t designating particular expenditures. Linda said that she would like some commitment from Marie that this would never happen again, that nobody would be asked to sign a blank form for anything again, but Marie did not respond to this request.

The discussion continued. Baudelia explained that in general she felt that parents were not listened to at the school, that parents did not have a voice. She gave the example of how parent meetings were often not translated, making it difficult for parents like her to communicate with English-speaking parents. Marie asked for another example. Baudelia brought up the uniform policy: how parents had voted at a meeting, but the decision was disregarded. She then gave the example of the meeting when Marie had told parents that they were not allowed to switch their children from a bilingual to an English program or vice versa, because this was an “autonomous school.”

After this, Nancy said, “These examples happened way back in September. Is there anything more recent?” However, Baudelia had started out with two recent examples: that she was not informed about Leadership Team meetings, and that she was forced to sign a blank form. Only when Marie asked her for more examples did she bring up the meetings from the past. Nancy’s question seemed to imply that the recent examples Baudelia had started with weren’t good enough.

Baudelia, unfazed, responded with another recent example of mis-communication to the parents. Here Nancy said to Baudelia, “You and Norma are cochairs. Why did Norma know about this and not you?” Her tone was distinctly accusatory. Her use of the present tense—“You and Norma are cochairs,” rather than “were cochairs”—denied that Baudelia and Norma had both resigned. And her question placed blame on Baudelia for not knowing about something that Norma knew about, rather than inquiring why Marie would consistently inform Norma and not Baudelia. But nobody said anything. Baudelia then gave the example of the meeting when Norma had been forced to repeat everything Marie said, and said that she (Baudelia) would never do that. At this point, another parent defended the principal, saying that she was teaching Norma how to run a meeting. She said, “We don’t have the leadership skills, we need help.”

After some more discussion, Nancy addressed Baudelia, “We need to know: Are you going to resign or are you going to stay and help us work out these problems?” Each time Nancy spoke, her voice rang out across the table in a loud, confrontational tone. Her question implied that it was up to Baudelia to make a change, rather than up to the Leadership Team. I spoke up and said, “I don’t think it’s fair to put pressure on Baudelia to make a decision tonight. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss her concerns and reasons for resigning, and if anything the Leadership Team has a task now to decide how it is going to change.”

Nancy responded, “We are going to change, we’ve all admitted there’s a communication problem. The question is, is Baudelia going to come and be a part of the change or is she going to stay out and watch it happen?” The implication, “You’re either with us or against us,” invoked the good parent/bad parent normative apparatus to censor Baudelia’s critique. If Baudelia was a “good parent,” that is, cooperative and compliant, she would keep her position on the School Site Council. If she chose to maintain her resignation, it would be assumed that she had a bad attitude.

The message to the other parents present was that they too would be punished for speaking up, for critiquing the committee, for daring to resign. There was no inquiry into what had gone wrong on the committee that had marginalized Baudelia or what abuses of power had enabled the principal to force Baudelia’s signature on a blank form. The one attempt, by Linda, to secure a commitment from Marie that this would not happen again was unsuccessful. The meeting was conducted as if Baudelia were on trial. I felt myself getting a stomachache, and remembered how Baudelia and Amelia always said they left parent meetings with a stomachache or a headache.

Baudelia, however, refused to be pressured. She told the group calmly that she always wanted to work with parents for the good of the school, but she didn’t need a position on the council to do that. There are a lot of ways to work with parents, she said. (Before the meeting had started, she had spoken to me excitedly about her ideas for a parent center, and her recent visit to the Whitman School Parent Center.)

As we got up to leave, Linda asked her, “So you’ll think about it and let us know your decision, right?” Baudelia uttered a very noncommittal “okay.”

I drove Baudelia and her two daughters home, and we talked about the meeting. She said she felt better now that she had unloaded. But when I asked what she thought about keeping her position, she told me she was inclined not to. She was more interested in talking to me about the parent center. She spoke so fast about her visit to the center at Whitman that I almost couldn’t keep up with her. When I dropped her and the children off in front of their apartment building, Baudelia was in good spirits. I drove away with renewed admiration for her, and a smile playing at my lips all the way home. If anyone at the school thought they had reined in her defiant spirit, they were sorely mistaken.

In this chapter I have attempted to show how professionals in the small schools movement made use of controlling images to limit the subject positions of parents and to punish parents who transgressed accepted roles. The “angry parent,” while useful to reformers at a district-wide level, was threatening to professionals within the new small schools and was quickly condemned. The mothers in Madres Unidas, in their research meetings, were able to recognize and reflect on these dynamics and collectively fashion their resistance. Baudelia and Ofelia’s meeting with school staff, and Baudelia’s resignation from the School Site Council, were two early attempts of the mothers to “talk back” to the staff and reposition themselves as responsible parents. In the face of frustration and exclusion at the school, participation in Madres Unidas offered the mothers a new way to view themselves and to engage with the school. As I will argue in the next chapter, Ofelia’s kitchen became a site of renewal and resistance.