Building a Power Base for Better Education

At 42 campuses throughout Los Angeles County, a grass-roots movement is underway to show how a school’s disparate constituencies--parents, teachers, principals and support staff--can band together to solve problems. Their name captures their mission: “Alliance Schools.”

The aim is to give all parties, especially parents, a say in how to improve a school, from controlling dangerous traffic on nearby streets to deciding how to spend the budget.

In Texas, Alliance Schools are a legendary statewide network of elementary and high schools whose parents, teachers and administrators over two decades worked to become an influential force in that state’s school reform debate.

In Texas and now Los Angeles, Alliance Schools are part of the complex community organizing work of the Industrial Areas Foundation, for decades a prominent group nationally in the grass-roots activism movement.

The foundation’s organizing tools--house meetings, seminars and retreats--are designed to galvanize people around common concerns and prepare them to be active in civic affairs.

The organizing that has been occurring over the past year at Sierra Park Elementary School east of downtown Los Angeles illustrates the patient process of building that power.

After months of house meetings and one-on-one chats, the effort finally paid off one recent Saturday morning for about 300 parents, teachers and school staff who gathered on campus for a short rally. Then, chanting and carrying signs, they dispersed into the square-mile neighborhood around the school to knock on doors.

The aim was to ask parents what they thought were the main problems hindering their students at the low-performing--though improving--school.

“We want you to get involved in your children’s education,” parents such as Cynthia Benitez, mother of two daughters at Sierra Park, exhorted other parents who opened their doors.

The march, called a Walk for Success, is a benchmark for parents and staff organized under the foundation’s principles--the first fruit of their labor after months of organizing.

“I felt that we all needed that first step,” said parent Valerie Munoz, “to bring us together as parents and teachers and administrators--people in the community.”

Last summer the foundation received the blessing of Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Roy Romer to begin organizing parents, teachers, classified employees and administrators at 25 campuses.

“I believe in community organizing,” Romer said in an interview. “We share common roots and interests in how you bring renewed energy into instruction.”

A year later, foundation organizers are working at 27 L.A. Unified schools--such as Trinity Street in South Los Angeles, Park Avenue in Cudahy and North Hollywood High--and expect the number to grow to 35 by year’s end. The group is also working at 15 schools in Pomona, Pasadena, Lynwood, Compton and Glendale.

To band together different campuses, the foundation holds conferences where school leaders can discuss the issues they all face. Last year more than 700 delegates attended the foundation’s education summit at Occidental College. About 400 delegates gathered recently at Sacred Heart Church in Lincoln Heights for the foundation’s Spring Assembly, where they urged local superintendents to send principals to Alliance Schools training.

Alliance Schools’ aim is to transform what the foundation sees as hierarchical chains of command at schools--orders trickling down from the top--to systems in which all parties, particularly parents, participate equally in improving children’s education.

Foundation staffers do not run the schools or set agendas. Instead, they train educators and parents on how to work together.

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Educator Writes Books on Texas Movement

The work of Alliance Schools in Texas is seen by some in academia as unique in school-reform strategies.

“It’s some of the best stuff going on,” said Dennis Shirley, chairman of Boston College’s department of teacher education, who has written two books on the Texas movement. “The critical piece is the parent-engagement component.... You can’t be a victim: ‘My life is hopeless, I can’t do anything to improve my life.’”

Like foundation organizers, Shirley prefers the word “engagement,” rather than “involvement,” to describe parents’ role.

The difference to him is that engagement grants parents power, such as helping a principal determine how to spend a budget. Parental involvement as practiced in most schools, Shirley said, is a more passive role, in which parents help with activities, such as reading to a group of children, but are kept out of the decision-making process.

The foundation hopes that its work in schools here eventually will equal its record in Texas, where the organization has the ear of state education officials and politicians are eager to speak at the Alliance Schools’ annual conference.

“We are not trying to replicate Alliance Schools per se,” said Ken Fujimoto, a foundation organizer working with schools on the Eastside. “We are trying to learn from the experience of Texas.”

In L.A., organizers are selecting schools with principals open to the group’s philosophies, particularly those open to parents’ constant presence on campus.

“What we want to do here is to engage the parents to have some type of ownership of the community and the schools,” said Eugene Hernandez, principal of Sierra Park.

What sets Alliance Schools’ strategy apart is its aim of turning parents and school personnel into a voting bloc.

“If you want more resources for things like after-school programs, they’re not going to hand them over just because you ask for them,” Fujimoto said. Politicians “have to feel there’s a constituency out there.”

“I don’t think there are, in my humble opinion, a whole lot of other people who are trying to fight for school reforms, thinking about the question of power,” he added.

Alliance Schools is not the first time that activists associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation have spoken out on school reform in Los Angeles.

Some of the ideas for the LEARN Schools strategy--which sought to increase local control of schools and was implemented at about 400 L.A. Unified campuses--started with foundation-affiliated community activists.

But the strategy, launched in 1993, was shaped by numerous other voices in the community and school district officials. L.A. Unified has shut down the office that used to coordinate LEARN programs, but at many schools the LEARN committees, composed of school principals, parents and civic leaders, still meet in an unofficial capacity.

In the end, foundation organizers argue, the LEARN program did not include the parental involvement that Alliance Schools worked to achieve in more than 120 schools in Texas.

The crown jewel of Alliance Schools’ success there is a yearly grant from the Texas Legislature. The grant has provided millions of dollars to support Alliance Schools’ projects at individual schools, such as special training for parents and teachers or improving facilities.

In one of his books about Alliance Schools, “Community Organizing for Urban School Reform,” Shirley presented five case studies of low-performing schools that turned things around.

One was Ysleta Elementary in El Paso where, as frequently happens at Alliance Schools, the most pressing concern parents had was not education but safety. The Ysleta community had long complained about the lack of crosswalks and traffic lights around the school.

Finally, after a girl was hit by a car, angry parents formed a traffic committee and, through a series of confrontational meetings with public officials, got them to install various traffic controls.

Another concern was the children’s health. The parents took a survey and found that many children came to school sick because their families could not afford medical or dental care. So, the school acquired funding and opened a health center.

The school also opened a parents center where adults could brush up on math and reading to help their children do homework.

The actions paid dividends in the classroom. One example: In 1993, according to Shirley’s book, only 27% of Ysleta’s fourth-graders passed the reading portion of a state test. But by 1994, 61% passed the same portion.

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‘They Had People From Everywhere’

Such successes are all the talk at the annual Texas Alliance Schools conference.

Some of the parents, teachers and principals organizing in the Los Angeles schools have traveled to the conference. Sierra Park fifth-grade teacher Rafael Alvarez Jr., who helped organize his school’s Walk for Success, found it inspiring.

“They had people from everywhere: El Paso, Houston, Dallas, Austin,” he recalled. “They talked about the problems they have been able to tackle. That brought in the big picture: These are the possibilities.”

Now Sierra Park, like other L.A. schools, is reaching for those possibilities.

After the school’s Walk for Success, the next weekly evening meeting drew about 40 parents and school staff.

The No. 1 concern they heard during their walk was that numerous stray dogs roam the neighborhood. As a result, the group assigned someone to invite L.A. City Councilman Nick Pacheco to their next meeting to ask for his help.

But Sierra Park has bigger goals, such as forming a “parent academy” where parents can learn academic skills.

So, with those goals in mind, the Walk for Success marked just the beginning of a long journey.

“When I first started, I thought it was going to be one walk and we were going to see instant change,” said Benitez, a parent leader. “Now I see it’s going to take a lot of time and energy.”