A Case Study of Social Work Leadership in Low-Income School Communities

Background/Purpose: Parent involvement (PI) has long been associated with improved school outcomes.  However, in spite of its promise, PI remains weak in many low-income school communities. This on-going difficulty involving parents in their children’s school has prompted the search for alternative methods and models for parent and family engagement.

Collective parent engagement (CPE) represents one such alternative.  In contrast to conventional PI models which aim to involve individual parents in school-directed activities, CPE programs seek to engage parent groups (or collectives) in the design and delivery of services and supports for other low-income parents/families at school and in the community. This integrative improvement strategy positions parents as key leaders in helping schools to: (a) broker needed school-family-community resources at the school site; (b) develop in-school referral mechanisms for children and families needing assistance; and (c) improve the capacity of schools and neighborhood service agencies to respond to parent-identified needs and concerns.

Preliminary research on various CPE models and efforts indicate that it carries significant promise for enhancing school, family, and community systems and outcomes.  However, in spite of CPE’s promise for low-income school communities, the leadership practices which accompany the development of CPE practices and outcomes remain under-theorized, much like a “black box.”  The purpose of the present study was to unpack the leadership practices and associated mechanisms that facilitated the development of CPE in three low-income school communities.  This multi-site case study was designed to fit these purposes, with particular emphasis toward capturing the lived experiences of low-income parents who were engaged in the CPE effort.

Methods: Fifty-six in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with low-income parents who were engaged in three different CPE efforts in two different states.  About 75% of the study sample were Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants, while the remaining 25% were African American.  All parents who participated in the research were mothers with school-aged children.  All interviews were transcribed verbatim and were coded using the qualitative software program NVivo. All data were analyzed inductively to facilitate the development of parents’ emic codes.  Once the primary emic codes were identified, the investigator organized some of the parent-identified themes and categories into etic codes which best fit extant research and theory on social work leadership.

Findings:  Analysis of the data indicated that CPE requires four primary kinds of social work leadership skills.  At the onset, these leadership practices included an intricate blend of “transactional leadership” and ‘transformational leadership” practices. Then, as each CPE effort developed, parents' narratives indicated that a combination of “collaborative” and “distributive” leadership practices were instrumental in helping parents sustain their CPE activities over a multi-year period.

Conclusions/Implications: Findings from this study indicate that social workers and social work education can benefit by adopting a multi-component approach to social work practice and leadership in schools that serve large numbers of ethnically diverse, low-income families.  In addition, they indicate that social work leadership and advocacy represents a necessary ingredient for school community change and improvement in the most disenfranchised low-income, urban centers.