Black Parents' Critical Consciousness: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Links to Parent School Engagement

Abstract

Parent involvement in schools has been identified as an important contributor to children’s academic success. However, due to deficit-based views that educators can hold, Black parents are often labeled as disinterested or not invested in their children’s education. Beyond deficit-based attitudes, relationships between Black parents and schools are influenced by structural racism that reproduces and maintains historically-rooted systemic racial power dynamics (Salter & Haugen, 2017). The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how Black parents’ beliefs about educational inequities impact the way they choose to engage with their children’s schools. Using critical race theory (CRT) to highlight the ways in which structural racism impacts Black parent participation and the conceptual framework of critical consciousness (CC), I argue that parents’ analysis of inequities present within schools influences the reasons and ways in which they engage with their children’s schools. When taken together, parents’ critical analyses of racism within schools creates particular forms of parent participation, which I label critical parent school engagement, that accounts for parents’ intentions for their involvement with a consideration of their understanding of racial inequities. This dissertation consists of three stand-alone manuscripts that together: 1) propose a new theoretical integration, 2) explore that proposed integration through interviews with Black parents, and 3) develop a measure to quantitatively explore Black parent CC in regard to their engagement with their children’s schools. Chapter two proposes a theoretical foundation for the conceptualization of CC for Black parents by integrating CRT and current understanding of CC. To explore Black parents’ awareness and analysis of systemic inequities inherent in schools and how that may influence the ways in which they interact with these institutions, qualitative interviews were conducted and described in chapter three. Results suggest that parents largely hold both types of beliefs—critical and traditional—and engage in both types of actions and that the relationship between beliefs and action are nuanced. Using data from these interviews chapter four outlines the development and validation of a measure of Black parent CC. Through the process of factor analysis five internally consistent factors were found and the resulting model was a good fit of the data (RMSEA = .05, CFI = .93, TLI = .92, and SRMR = .07). Those five factors include: 1) structural attributions, or parents’ perceptions that inequities are caused by systemic factors, institutional racism, etc., 2) group participation, or parents’ participation in formal and informal groups for the benefit of their children’s education, 3) internal efficacy, or parents’ belief about their ability to make change, 4) individual attributions, or parents’ belief that educational inequities are caused by individual factors, and 5) school-based engagement, or the actions that parents engage in at the school site. This scale has the potential to shed light on parents’ understanding of social structures, inequities present within them, and how that might be related to the academic messages they send to their children and subsequent engagement with their children’s school. Elucidating the ways that Black parents critically view the racially oppressive nature of public schools and how they subsequently engage advances current scholarship on parent engagement that is devoid of considerations of race and racism.