On the evening of Sept. 19, more than 30 Oakland, Calif. mamas, grandmas, dads, and uncles graduated from the Oakland REACH’s Literacy Liberator fellowship. Our fellowship is a six-week learning experience that provides both leadership training and teaching skills to parents and caregivers who want to be literacy tutors.
The “Liberators,” as we call them, have the opportunity to then become paid tutors in one of 30 Oakland Unified School District elementary, middle, and high schools that need extra support. They will now join over 150 tutors across 65 schools in OUSD. Some of these tutors now work at the same school their child attends.
During the graduation ceremony, our parents and caregivers received a completion certificate and stipend of $1,650. I watched as their children ate cake, vigorously smiling from both the sugar high and their parents’ accomplishment. They know their mama is about to change her community. I thought to myself, “This is power. This is transformative.”
Graduation night for the Literacy Liberators. Courtesy of Oakland REACH.
Misconceptions about parent engagement
During graduation, one mom, Danielle, shared with the group that “it takes a village,” which was met with smiles and a sea of finger snaps. Shortly after, I addressed the graduates, and in the spirit of Danielle’s comment, I reminded them that they have been the missing part of that village.
I also exchanged numbers with Danielle, because she has been placed at my youngest son’s school, and – Black mama to Black mama – I asked her to keep an eye on him. She smiled, and understood the assignment.
Which pulls me back to “parent engagement.” Parent engagement misses the mark on what it promises Black and brown parents and caregivers. Families are conditioned to believe that their children will do well in school if they are “engaged,” for example, by regularly showing up at school, attending information sessions, and speaking at board meetings. We initially believed that, too, and we spent our first few years organizing and training our parents with these activities. We won a couple of policies, but our children were still not reading or doing math on grade level.
Graduation night for the Literacy Liberators. Courtesy of Oakland REACH.
When we built the Virtual Hub during the pandemic, we shifted to focusing on the actual instruction students are receiving. And this evolved to building the Liberator model, a multi-generational approach giving parents and caregivers the skills to provide evidence-based early literacy instruction. Now, we’re launching the same thing in math.
Most parent engagement opportunities start and end with talking about the status quo. We don’t need to have that conversation again. We need to invite parents into solutions. We need to be tapping into their skills and unleashing their power. REACH has replaced talking with building.
We’ve replaced parent engagement with parent agency.
At 7:30 p.m. on graduation night, when both our Liberators and the audience were over-stimulated from applause, photos, selfies, and good food, I looked around the room and saw so much power. All of the Liberator fellows successfully completed the fellowship.
Our Liberators are proof that parents can indeed make change happen when they are included in the emerging solutions for systems change. Community-building can be as old-school as “keep an eye on my child” and transformative as “thank you for helping my child read.”
Parents are powerful. If you’re just engaging them, you’re wasting their time — and worse, you’re failing to unlock a key asset of that “village.”
Leader-to-leader collaboration: Real talk, real results
This past November was a dream come true for The Oakland REACH—and for me as a leader. For two days, leaders from Rochester, Birmingham, New...
Lakisha Young
Senior Fellow
Teachers and tutors together: Reimagining literacy instruction in Oakland
High-quality tutoring has become a critical tool for addressing pandemic learning gaps and accelerating student learning, but access to tutoring programs remains an issue. CRPE...
Ashley Jochim
Consulting Principal
Eupha Jeanne Daramola
University of Southern California
Morgan Polikoff
Professor of Education, USC Rossier School of Education
Communities in the driver’s seat: Intensive training, deep investment power parent-led literacy programs in Oakland
Across the country, school systems are struggling to implement effective, research-based literacy instruction and to help students recover from lost learning time during the pandemic....
Travis Pillow
Guest Author
Bargaining for the ‘common good’ meets parent pushback in Oakland
Last spring, three weeks before the end of the school year, Oakland teachers walked off their jobs, causing the cancellation of eight days of instruction....
Paul Hill
Founder, CRPE and Professor of Practice, MLFTC
Business as usual won’t get our kids reading
Lakisha Young explains how Oakland REACH is training parents to be literacy tutors.
Lakisha Young
Senior Fellow
Amid school closures, Oakland REACH parents created a path into higher-performing schools. Here’s how they did it.
Lakisha Young writes about building pathways for minoritized students to access higher-performing schools when their current schools were closed during the pandemic.
Lakisha Young
Senior Fellow
‘Do this!’ How Oakland parents are fighting for better schools — and a more responsive system
Lakisha Young writes about starting The Oakland REACH.
Don’t engage families: Liberate them
I set out to reflect on parent engagement as we settled into another school year in the U.S. where 84% of Black eighth-graders lack proficiency in reading. And then something happened.
On the evening of Sept. 19, more than 30 Oakland, Calif. mamas, grandmas, dads, and uncles graduated from the Oakland REACH’s Literacy Liberator fellowship. Our fellowship is a six-week learning experience that provides both leadership training and teaching skills to parents and caregivers who want to be literacy tutors.
The “Liberators,” as we call them, have the opportunity to then become paid tutors in one of 30 Oakland Unified School District elementary, middle, and high schools that need extra support. They will now join over 150 tutors across 65 schools in OUSD. Some of these tutors now work at the same school their child attends.
During the graduation ceremony, our parents and caregivers received a completion certificate and stipend of $1,650. I watched as their children ate cake, vigorously smiling from both the sugar high and their parents’ accomplishment. They know their mama is about to change her community. I thought to myself, “This is power. This is transformative.”
Misconceptions about parent engagement
During graduation, one mom, Danielle, shared with the group that “it takes a village,” which was met with smiles and a sea of finger snaps. Shortly after, I addressed the graduates, and in the spirit of Danielle’s comment, I reminded them that they have been the missing part of that village.
I also exchanged numbers with Danielle, because she has been placed at my youngest son’s school, and – Black mama to Black mama – I asked her to keep an eye on him. She smiled, and understood the assignment.
Which pulls me back to “parent engagement.” Parent engagement misses the mark on what it promises Black and brown parents and caregivers. Families are conditioned to believe that their children will do well in school if they are “engaged,” for example, by regularly showing up at school, attending information sessions, and speaking at board meetings. We initially believed that, too, and we spent our first few years organizing and training our parents with these activities. We won a couple of policies, but our children were still not reading or doing math on grade level.
When we built the Virtual Hub during the pandemic, we shifted to focusing on the actual instruction students are receiving. And this evolved to building the Liberator model, a multi-generational approach giving parents and caregivers the skills to provide evidence-based early literacy instruction. Now, we’re launching the same thing in math.
Most parent engagement opportunities start and end with talking about the status quo. We don’t need to have that conversation again. We need to invite parents into solutions. We need to be tapping into their skills and unleashing their power. REACH has replaced talking with building.
We’ve replaced parent engagement with parent agency.
At 7:30 p.m. on graduation night, when both our Liberators and the audience were over-stimulated from applause, photos, selfies, and good food, I looked around the room and saw so much power. All of the Liberator fellows successfully completed the fellowship.
Our Liberators are proof that parents can indeed make change happen when they are included in the emerging solutions for systems change. Community-building can be as old-school as “keep an eye on my child” and transformative as “thank you for helping my child read.”
Parents are powerful. If you’re just engaging them, you’re wasting their time — and worse, you’re failing to unlock a key asset of that “village.”
AUTHORS
Lakisha Young
Senior Fellow
Related Publications
Leader-to-leader collaboration: Real talk, real results
Lakisha Young
Senior FellowTeachers and tutors together: Reimagining literacy instruction in Oakland
Ashley Jochim
Consulting PrincipalEupha Jeanne Daramola
University of Southern CaliforniaMorgan Polikoff
Professor of Education, USC Rossier School of EducationCommunities in the driver’s seat: Intensive training, deep investment power parent-led literacy programs in Oakland
Travis Pillow
Guest AuthorBargaining for the ‘common good’ meets parent pushback in Oakland
Paul Hill
Founder, CRPE and Professor of Practice, MLFTCBusiness as usual won’t get our kids reading
Lakisha Young
Senior FellowAmid school closures, Oakland REACH parents created a path into higher-performing schools. Here’s how they did it.
Lakisha Young
Senior Fellow‘Do this!’ How Oakland parents are fighting for better schools — and a more responsive system
Lakisha Young
Senior Fellow