School–Community Partnerships, Friend or Foe? The Doublespeak of Community With Educational Partnerships

In recent reform efforts, school–community partnerships have been touted as a means for promoting student success (Decker, Decker, & Brown 2007 Decker, L.E., Decker, V.A., & Brown, P.M. (2007). Diverse partnerships for student success: Strategies and tools to help school leaders. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education. [Google Scholar]; Epstein 2010 Epstein, J.L. (2010). School/family/community partnerships: Caring for the children we share. Phi Delta Kappan, 92, 81–96.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and meeting student needs (Hands 2010 Hands, C.M. (2010). Why collaborate? The differing reasons for secondary school educators' establishment of school–community partnerships. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 21, 189–207.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Yet, despite any accolades, the motives and results of school–community partnerships are contested. Gary Anderson (1998 Anderson, G. (1998). Toward authentic participation: Deconstructing the discourses of participatory reforms in education. 715 American Educational Research Journal, 35, 571–603.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) points out that partnerships tend to be designed to graft members into prior objectives and goals instead of being designed to facilitate staff members in working together to redefine goals. Auerbach (2010 Auerbach, S. (2010). Beyond coffee with the principal: Toward leadership for authentic school–family partnerships. Journal of School Leadership, 20, 728–757. [Google Scholar]) echoes this concern, suggesting that the literature regarding school partnerships focuses primarily on academic achievement while operating under “limited school agendas or mandates for collaboration” which do little to promote “socially just” schools (p. 729). And, schools are egregiously unjust. Thus, in this article, I first evaluate the school–community partnership in a new light by broadly conceptualizing how community exists as a term within the public education system and considering the impact of the historical situatedness of communities and political lines on renderings of community. Second, I offer an understanding of how school–community partnerships are discussed in terms of doublespeak, illustrating how the very word community can be employed across a spectrum of different meanings, interpretations, and implications. Last, I argue that community partnerships have been promoted as educational reform with little prospect of challenging meta-narratives that tell a story of who has something to offer to our schools and who does not.