USA TODAY International Edition
Schools are training white parents in anti- racism
New approach looks to connect communities
Amid the blowback over anti- racist lessons for America’s schoolchildren, another effort to grapple with structural racism has gained steam: training white parents.
Lessons can be as simple as lunch. White, affluent volunteers have been overheard commenting to kids about the nutritional value of a meal such as Lunchables, said Christina Feliciana of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Social Welfare, in a 2020 YouTube video.
But a parent’s decision to place “junk food” in a student’s lunch may be the right choice. Calorie- dense food often is cost effective – and a way for a caregiver to show love to a child. The food may be a reward recommended by a therapist. Feliciana’s co- presenter and colleague, Robert Watts III, added that students with special needs can have rigidity around texture. Allergies can rule out alternatives. Plus, people derive value from hewing to family and community traditions around food.
In response to an offhand remark like “That’s not healthy” or “Tell your mom to pack you fruit,” Feliciana said, a child whose family already felt disconnected and disempowered might repeat the message at home, making the family even less likely to engage with school.
Lessons in cultural humility such as these have been a feature of teachers’ professional development for quite some time. Yet training has largely focused on how students are treated, not families, and they’ve been targeted at school officials, not parent and caregiver volunteers.
That’s changing, especially in neighborhoods experiencing gentrification and in predominantly white areas grappling with issues of race and class. In Missouri, New York, Virginia and other places across the U. S., communities are tackling the work of facilitating connection across racial and socioeconomic lines, often starting with white people, through trainings led by people of color.
Every family interaction is crucial
The benefits associated with family engagement and trust in education are well- documented. Individual students with involved parents are more likely to get better grades, score higher on tests, have better attendance and go on to postsecondary education, regardless of family income and background. According to the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, elementary schools are 10 times more likely to show improvement in math and four times more likely to show improvement in reading with strong parental involvement than without it.
Vameka Davis, a certified athletics trainer and entrepreneur, said she and her husband were wary as their children approached school age in Washington, D. C. In their own schooling, they had both experienced what she described as “Black voices not being heard, or this pseudo, ‘ We care, and we are going to do something,’ and then it never happens.” Later, Davis had watched as her cousins’ and nephews’ educational needs were overlooked and ill- served.
She’s far from alone. When parents in underserved groups, including those who speak English as a second language, have a history of negative interactions in schools, Feliciana said, they “just feel like it won’t make a difference” to be in touch with teachers or participate in school activities.
To change that, schools have tried to move beyond parent- teacher conferences, focusing on training teachers and administrators to communicate with families effectively all year long and conduct home visits.
But school officials aren’t the only ones interacting with students and families. Parent volunteers are, too. And that can go a lot more smoothly when they’ve been given training or opportunities to connect with parents from different backgrounds.
Programs from Kindred Communities, a Washington- based nonprofit, aren’t your typical training. They involve three years of small group dialogue, with the expectation that the groups will produce an action plan to advance racial justice and equity at their school. The process gives white parents “a deeper understanding of how our own socialization leads us to play certain roles, to say certain things in mixed- race spaces that are not well received,” founder and former executive director Laura Wilson Phelan said.
Davis participated in 2019, when her oldest child began kindergarten at Garrison Elementary School in Washington. Just three weeks after school started, parents in the program were able to tackle difficult topics effectively in a multicultural setting. “We can actually have a conversation about what we felt,” Davis said. “I’ve never experienced that in my life.”
As a white woman from New Hampshire, said Alison Ray Cavanagh, “my exposure to different races and ethnicities growing up was very limited, and my family never talked about race.” Then she participated in a Kindred program at E. L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington. Before, she’d hesitated to approach people of other ethnicities for fear of saying the wrong thing. Now, she said, she had a “tool box” – and determination.
“The more conversations you have, and the more practice you have, as the white person, you get better at leaning into that discomfort and owning it.”
Experts’ advice for white parents
Most directives for white parents boil down to an overarching piece of advice: Don’t assume you know what’s going on or what’s best, and don’t impose your own values and norms onto other people. And don’t forget, no one is perfect.
Feliciana routinely reminds others to use inclusive language like “your grownup” or “your caregiver,” because not all kids live with a parent. And yet one day at a park, she observed a young girl being bullied and beginning to cry. Feliciana asked her where her mom was, and the tears redoubled as the child said, “I don’t have a mom.”
“We all make mistakes, no matter what our training is,” Feliciana said in her 2020 video.
This type of explicit permission to be imperfect can partially allay the anxiety white parents feel around issues of race, said Macheo Payne, a professor at California State University, East Bay.
Without such coaching, attempts at anti- racism can go off the rails.
Anna Lodder, who is white, got involved with Integrated Schools and decided to enroll her child at a Los Angeles school, where approximately 75% of students were Latino and 86% received free or reduced- price meals.
Lodder described other white parents advocating for a theater program, a garden and a PTA. She too had shown up ready to make improvements.
“I found out the school didn’t need me to save it,” she said. “I saw how alienating it was that we had all these ideas and that we weren’t listening and following the lead of the parents already in the community.”
When whiter, richer group arrives
When cities experience an influx of higher- income residents, changes to a neighborhood include displacement of preexisting community members. A big surge in that phenomenon dates to the early 2000s, which saw more white college graduates interested in raising children in an urban setting, said Maia Cucchiara, a professor at Temple University’.
But different people talk about the phenomenon differently, Cucchiara said. Some look at white parents investing in public schools in places including San Francisco and Washington, D. C., and say: “This is so awesome. Thank God these people have come along.” The other common take, she said, is: “Look at these super obnoxious white parents.” Integration generally benefits all kids, she said, but both narratives are problematic.
Training along the lines of “how to be a white parent in an integrated school without being a total jerk” can provide a nice middle ground, she said. But for all families to feel comfortable at school, it’s not enough to make parents nicer.
Instead, school leaders should ask, “How can I help advocate that ( disadvantaged) families be actively included and their voices heard in broader, schoolwide conversations?” said Alexandra Freidus, a parent of school- age kids and an educational leadership professor at the University of Connecticut.
Teaching for Change, another Washington nonprofit, created a do’s and don’ts list for PTA leaders. It includes directives such as: “DO communicate in all major languages spoken by families,” and “DON’T only communicate with parents via email or listservs,” as well as “DO pay attention to the times of meetings — who can come and who cannot?”
But is all the training for parents making a real difference?
Programs that address more concrete, child- centered scenarios and inspire empathy — like the Lunchables exercise – seem most promising.
Imagine being an 8- year- old, said Payne: Having an adult at school approach your background as if it’s questionable “is devastating to one’s academic identity.”
Or worse, Payne said, a child might think: “Somebody just reminded me that I’m a bad person, that I have a bad history, that I come from a bad community.” To the extent that these programs reduce microaggressions, he said they undoubtedly make a difference, even if only to a handful of children.
Yet anti- racist training for white people has its critics. It can devolve into an exercise in white navel- gazing.
But with persistence, it works, experts insist. “The truth is, doing this work is like riding against gravity,” said Barbara Gross of the Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative in New York City. “The gravitational pull is back to racism and white supremacy culture. So you can’t take even a sixmonth workshop group and then be like, ‘ I’ve got this.’”