From Research-to-Practice-to-Research: Leveraging Reciprocal Partnerships to Advance Racial and Educational Justice across Ecological Levels

Background and purpose: The current study captures how a reciprocal university-community partnership advanced African American parent supports before and during the pandemic. University researchers partnered with organizational leaders from the College Access Coalition (CAC) to better understand the challenges facing African American families and students on the path to post-secondary educational access, and the strategies they employ to navigate racialized educational barriers. Findings from the study were in-turn used to inform the CAC’s immediate program practices, their strategic planning, and their collective efforts at macro-level systemic change.

Methods: This qualitative study delves into African American parents’ perceptions of barriers to educational success across public and private school contexts, and their own efforts to overcome those barriers, including the role of the CAC programs in their processes. Participants were a set of nearly 50 primary caregivers of Black youth recruited purposefully recruited from the families of current and former participants in CAC programs. Six parent focus groups were conducted, and participants were unique within the broader literature in that most had experiences in both public and private school settings. Deductive thematic analysis was used to analyze the manuscripts.

Results: Barriers to success enumerated by parents included both structural and interpersonal racist factors, with much of the variation patterns grafting on to school settings. Specifically, in public schools these families perceived structural issues of limited rigor and low teacher quality, which they frequently attributed to racialized systems in American society. Meanwhile, families of children attending private schools perceived a tradeoff wherein students experienced racism from adult staff members as well as from peers, alongside economic and social isolation from being one of few Black students in their school. Each of these barriers was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic in unique ways, with implications for student achievement and mental health. CAC parents expanded upon numerous strategies to navigate these barriers, including contextually tailored approaches to school- and home-based educational involvement, socializing their children for self-advocacy, and leveraging CAC programming to compensate for racialized barriers to educational needs, with the programs’ rigorous curricula, diverse enrichment experiences, and COVID-19 pandemic supports all being seen as vital to helping their children overcome the consequences of racialized educational systems.

Implications: Results from this study were subsequently utilized by CAC programs to enhance their own offerings (e.g., strengthening in-school advocacy efforts, increasing social and emotional supports, expanding program size) and to organize their collective macro-level advocacy efforts (i.e. reports to the public, creating parent resources). Ultimately, Black parenting in America is filled with important yet impossible educational choices, including making the most of limited options. Programs like those of the CAC can be invaluable assets in this journey, and reciprocal community partnerships with university researchers can greatly elevate community voices, particularly when there is a shared vision for specific social justice causes and purposes.