This article, written with Greg Toppo and Jo Napolitano, originally appeared in Education Next on July 19, 2022.
The challenges of urban education weren’t new to Lakisha Young. She’d grown up in San Francisco housing projects, joined the Teach for America corps in impoverished Compton, California, and spent more than a decade trying to attract talented teachers to high-needs schools, first for The New Teacher Project, then for the KIPP charter school network.
But when Young’s own daughter won one of 11 coveted seats in a charter school lottery in Oakland—out of more than 90 students who applied—she vowed to do more for the Black and Latino students and families the school district had been failing for generations.
So, late in 2016, Young left KIPP to launch The Oakland REACH, a network of Bay Area parents who fought and won a battle to give Oakland students affected by school closures and consolidations priority admission to other campuses. The fledgling organization has trained hundreds of parents historically shut out of school decisions to advocate for their children’s needs just as many affluent white families do routinely.
When Covid struck and schools closed, The Oakland REACH went further, launching an online Hub to provide underserved families with high-quality instruction and enrichment activities, technology training, and family liaisons to keep them informed about their children’s learning, among other projects. The Hub’s success drew plaudits from Oakland officials. But just as important, says Young, building the Hub forged a sense of agency among low-income parents and parents of color who often have been excluded from their children’s educational lives. She says it helped create “a sense that we don’t have to settle for inequitable learning.”
The pandemic has given rise to new, conservative parent organizations making headlines for turning traditionally sedate school board meetings into community punch-ups as they battle over mask mandates, vaccines, and how race, gender, and sexuality are discussed in schools. The potency of the conservative backlash by organizations like Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021 by three past and present local Florida school board members with ties to the state’s Republican party, and Parents Defending Education, a national organization launched the same year by Nicole Neily, a former manager of external relations at the libertarian Cato Institute, helped Republican Glenn Youngkin win last fall’s Virginia gubernatorial race on a “parents’ rights” platform and spurred Republican lawmakers in more than two dozen states to introduce legislation giving parents a greater say in local school curricula.
But while conservatives’ battles against Covid mandates and diversity efforts in schools have put them in the news, a different network of activist parent organizations in the mold of The Oakland REACH has been evolving largely under the media radar for nearly a decade, organizations with names like Atlanta Thrive, PAVE (for Parents Amplifying Voices in Education), The Memphis Lift, and the National Parents Union that represent a new voice in the fight to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for low-income students.
Propelled by the internet, the rise of video conferencing, social media, and millions of dollars in backing from foundations seeking to bring the voices of underrepresented families and communities into the work of school improvement, the organizations are pushing policymakers for stronger schools, resource equity and transparency, teacher quality and diversity, and more school options, among other reforms.
Many of the organizations have created non-profit governance structures. The groups may represent a more permanent change in the education landscape than single-cause or ad hoc parent advocates of the past—and a significant new force to contend with for superintendents, school board members, city council leaders, and state legislators.
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