Public education is full of buzzwords, used individually or strung together into slogans.  Nowhere is this public-relations practice more evident than in the Los Angeles Unified School District. You’re always hearing and seeing them: Student Achievement, School Safety, Transparency, Accountability, I Love LAUSD and, most recently, Kids First.

Another popular slogan often tossed around is Parent Engagement. This sounds wonderfully warm and fuzzy when it’s mentioned at Back to School Night, in a PTA meeting or at an orientation session for school volunteers. The term conjures up visions of bake sales, field-trip chaperoning, helping teachers in classrooms, working with the principal to hammer out next year’s budget, and all the things we usually associate with being an involved parent at our child’s school.

While some school principals understand the tremendous value of proactively engaging their students’ parents on campus, many don’t.  Whether it’s due to inexperience as a school leader or a wrongheaded philosophy that parents are a potential problem to be controlled, the belief among some administrators that they don’t need or want to parents to fully participate in the education of their children is unfortunately pervasive throughout LAUSD.

So it’s no surprise that as administrators rise through the District ranks to positions of increasing authority, their mixed feelings about parent engagement continue to influence their actions and decisions. This same uncertainty affects the trio of District-level parent committees: the Community Advisory Committee (CAC), the District English Learner Advisory Committee (DELAC) and the Parent Advisory Committee (PAC).

Members of these committees are recruited from schools all over LAUSD, and while they come with the best of intentions to volunteer their time in the hope of helping the District improve their own kids’ education and the education of all students, often they find that their contributions are not valued and appreciated in the way they expected.

A system-wide model of Collaboration has the potential to be a win-win for the district and teachers. Teachers get freedom, and the district gets results that stem from the peer accountability this model creates. And as for parents -- who are forced to navigate this fractious war over how to improve public education – they get a détente so we can all focus on the kids.

When schools officially adopt a PLC culture, accountability infuses every aspect of the school, from contracts to schedules. Teachers have the clearly defined responsibility of documenting how well students are progressing with the curriculum and sharing their findings every week or two. If a teacher shows up to meetings empty handed, everyone notices, helps and/or pushes back. So while districts, unions and reformers work through the difficult process of creating a holistic teacher evaluation system, this model can create a quiet peer accountability that is both effective and uncontroversial. 

While educating parents and soliciting their feedback on school-site issues is important, authentic parent engagement goes further. Parents need access to the knowledge and tools to engage in policymaking at the district and school board levels, where real power to make positive change resides. We at Speak UP, a Los Angeles–based grassroots organization of parents who want a more powerful voice in education policy, believe that the district should play a role in those efforts.

Parents are generally kept in the dark about how the most important decisions affecting their children’s education are made. In LAUSD, some of the farthest-reaching policies stem from the collective bargaining agreement between the teachers union (United Teachers Los Angeles) and the school district. These include not only salaries and benefits but also how teachers are assigned to schools and classrooms, the frequency and parameters for their performance evaluations, the criteria for layoffs and dismissals, and parent participation in school leadership councils.

Most parents don’t know that tenure doesn’t refer to “10 years” and are shocked that it takes only 18 months to achieve lifetime job protections in their schools. They are unaware that seniority, rather than performance, determines where teachers teach, how much they make, and whether they are laid off first. They do not know that the contract actually limits their decision-making power on school leadership councils by mandating that teachers make up the majority voting bloc.