Affirming Immigrant Families’ Educational Expectations: Race-Conscious Transformative Leadership Breaking the Educational Racial Contract

There are currently 57 million children attending primary and secondary schools in the United States (NCES, 2018), of whom 20 million are first-generation immigrants or born to immigrant families (Child Trends, 2018). Since 1994, that population has increased by 51% (Child Trends, 2018) as the United States continues to be a destination for immigrants (Banks, Suárez-Orozco, & Ben-Peretz, 2016). Domestically, decades of gentrification in working-class immigrant communities (Hwang, 2015) prompted forced migration that has since transformed the demographics of many communities. Despite immigrants’ increasing visibility across the country, schools continue to be ill-equipped to respond to the educational needs of their students. As immigrant students are disproportionately impacted by school-related inequities (Nava, 2012), there is a widely held belief that their home language and cultural values are barriers to their education, prompting public support for language-restrictive policies and other nativist measures calling for their assimilation (Perea, 1997; Tran & Birman, 2019).

Given the importance of family-school partnership in promoting students’ educational attainment (Henderson & Mapp, 2002), school leaders’ abilities to understand immigrant families’ educational expectations are vital to cultivating positive relationships with the communities they serve. For purposes of this study, familial engagement refers to family members’ support for and participation in the educational endeavors of children (Jeynes, 2007). The nature of the family-school partnership establishes the premise for a social contract that defines how students and their family members are treated, as well as the ways educational accountability is constructed to ensure equity. A major problem undercutting work with immigrant families is the persistent racial attitudes about their presumed disinterest in education, despite research documenting the variety of ways that immigrants of color communicate high academic expectations in the home (Auerbach, 2006; Golden-berg, Gallimore, Reese, & Garnier, 2001; Liou, Ambroso, & Antrop-González, 2018). These persistent racial attitudes often subjugate immigrant children to lowered teachers’ expectations in the classroom (Hill & Torres, 2010; Liou, 2016), prompting assumptions that their advancement in society will “naturally” increase through learning English and generational assimilation (see Warriner, 2015).

Confronting negative educational expectations and stressors while living in a new and racialized context characterizes the experiences of many K-12 immigrant students. While many immigrant families carry the brunt of the blame when their children do not succeed academically, there is strong evidence showing substantial school-based barriers that immigrants experience when they attempt to participate in their children’s education (Ber-nal, 1998; Ramirez, 2003; Wang, 1974). Such structural negation of immigrant families creates the premise for the construction and reconstruction of their presumed absence, perpetuating a racial “otherness” to justify their continual exclusion in educational spaces that claim to welcome their involvement.

The issue of race is uniquely situated in family-school connections for this population and is a dynamic that school leaders cannot ignore. For many teachers, teaching immigrant children is associated with lower professional status in the school (Dabach, 2015), and the children are often perceived as a “problem” that they prefer not to have in the classroom. From this perspective, the concept of school-family engagement is no longer ambiguous but a part of the racial formation of immigrant children and their families (see Omi & Winant, 2014). The problem is not about school leaders’ willingness or abilities to be responsive in working closely with immigrant families, but rather a question of one’s worthiness as determined by the educational racial contract (Leonardo, 2013).

Before delving into the educational racial contract, it behooves us to revisit social contract theory. Social contract theory (Rousseau & May, 2002) posits that the sustainment of society requires the will of the people to enter into a set of implicit (shared beliefs, values, and expectations) and explicit (law, taxation, and representation) agreements to advance the common welfare. In a society where everyone presumes to live under the same social contract, thereby operating on an equal playing field, Mills (2014) argues that contract was historically written to benefit White citizens at the expense of people of color. He suggests that social contract theory is incomplete without considering how some people are subjugated to a subordinated contract by virtue of their race and other intersectional identities. The formation of Whiteness requires racialized subjects to be subordinated under a racial contract—rather than truly participating in the social contract—to justify social, political, and economic hierarchy through a process of exclusion and domination. Given the centrality of White supremacy in shaping society, people of color do not have the institutional power to contest or reset the terms of their subordinated racial contract through law, taxation, and representation. Thus, leaders must be race conscious when considering the ways school norms, as a microcosm of society, may conceal the ways race, immigration, and Whiteness manifest collectively to articulate a structure of domination in a hierarchical society (Allen & Liou, 2018).

In a racially contracted society, the presumption of immigrant parents of color’s disengagement is a socially constructed process that racializes the notions of engagement as simultaneously nonimmigrant and White. For example, if one’s working-class status is a marker for disengagement, then another person’s middle-class or affluent status infers their positive engagement. If speaking English is a determinant of a knowledgeable parent, then the construction of the opposite is someone who speaks with an accent or in another language. Most immigrant parents speak a language other than English, and they are perceived negatively in traditional school settings where partnerships are expected. These representations of race become a part of the school norms, where leaders develop racial meanings through families’ visibility and invisibility in educational spaces, making home-school relationships a part of the racial project. The construction of race infers the opposite of the construction of Whiteness, where the White, school-centric frameworks of engagement are used as a universal standard for the acceptable social contract between families and educators.

This cyclical process of White norming and racial othering becomes the implicit agreement for how school staff and families are expected to interact. Given the ways in which the educational racial contract operates in the school context (Allen & Liou, 2018; Liou & Rojas, 2018), the hierarchical construction of family engagement provides the justification for leaders to sustain Whiteness in their interactions with students and their families. The contracta-rian perspective posits that school leaders’ calls for more family participation are often insincere or misguided, especially in racialized spaces where structural barriers continue to impede immigrant families’ abilities to set the terms of engagement. Indeed, the terms are more often than not imposed on, instead of coconstructed with, families.

This article posits that school leaders must learn to break the educational racial contract with immigrant families in order to construct authentic relationships to collectively work toward justice. As family-school connections continue to be defined through service-oriented activities that privilege Whiteness (Warren, Hong, Rubin, & Uy, 2009), the need is pressing for school leaders to reconsider their practices to affirm the educational expectations of immigrant families as a method to develop a racially just educational contract. Since school leaders are expected to be reflective and reflexive in their practice, this retrospective study is intended to both contribute to the literature on antiracist leadership and transform the future preparation of aspiring school leaders working in diverse communities. This paper asks the following research questions:

1. How do school leaders in a large high school elicit the expectations of immigrant families to rewrite the educational racial contract for their students?

2. How do school leaders at a large high school counteract the educational racial contract with immigrant families to affirm their collective expectations for young people’s educational success?

These two research questions guided our examination of the first author’s previous school leadership experience of breaking the educational racial contract and affirming immigrant families’ academic expectations in California. This article starts by drawing on the tradition of the educational racial contract as a theoretical lens to challenge dominant perceptions of immigrant families as a “problem” in the context of family-school engagement. We then use this contractarian perspective to interrogate the literature, exposing Whiteness in perpetuating dominant narratives of family engagement, negating many of the “unseen” educational and child-rearing activities that take place in immigrant communities. The study then turns to the framework of transformative leadership to understand how the first author navigated the context of family-school engagement to disrupt the educational racial contract and affirm the expectations of immigrant parents. The study concludes by calling for the preparation of race-conscious transformative leaders who are willing and able to disrupt the racial binary of family engagement and disengagement, and to rewrite the educational racial contract with immigrants and other members of marginalized communities.

Arias and Murillo-Campbell (2008) report that families of diverse cultural and linguistic groups share a deep concern for their children’s education. This holds true even in situations with family members who may have limited or negative schooling experiences. Despite the overwhelming consensus on the importance of family-school partnerships among educators at all levels of education (Epstein, 2018; Henderson, Mapp, Johnson, & Davies, 2007; Jeynes, 2007), the current state of family engagement is still largely transac-tional and service oriented.

To date, school leaders are often the first point of contact with families as they also assume responsibility for scheduling meetings and events for community partnership to occur. Despite the need for a dialogic nature of school leadership (Shields, 2004), studies have reported that educational practices are not reciprocal; instead, they disadvantage and disengage families in their child’s education (Turney & Kao, 2009). Most teachers seldom attend parent association meetings, and schools often fail to address accessibility by providing families with food, childcare, translation services, and transportation to facilitate their participation. In disciplinary and special education situations, school leaders are often the least helpful in guiding immigrant families to become aware of their rights or to ensure due process. These multiple forms of exclusion are often accompanied by the exclusive use of English, with school-based jargon that makes meetings unwelcoming and irrelevant to those who are not fully familiar with the U.S. educational system. The existing practices of Whiteness in family engagement teach immigrant parents and guardians of color the ways in which they are racially, culturally, linguistically, and financially inadequate to support their children’s education (Nava, 2012).

López (2001) documents how immigrants of color often view and practice engagement in their children’s education very differently than the ways engagement is traditionally conceived by school leaders. He reports that immigrant families often demonstrate engagement by connecting their children to the workplace as a method to show them their family’s economic realities and the importance of educational attainment. Nava (2012) illustrates that immigrant families define their engagement in education through material support, cultivating human agency, making personal and economic sacrifices, and mentoring children to develop the tools for academic resilience and excellence. Their findings demonstrate the types of engagement that are informed by the families’ social and economic circumstances, resulting in particular expectations that are purposeful for the children to do well in school. These expectations for engagement are fundamentally different from those in the school system, where families’ participation is largely based on concerns for students’ attendance, test scores, graduation, and other immediate outcomes that contribute to the effective operation of education.

For this reason, some school leaders may assume a particular model of family engagement that sharply contrasts with how immigrant families practice engagement: Family engagement is conceptualized to serve White, middle-class, single-income households with two English-speaking and college-educated parents. In the end, this creates a disconnect between how immigrant families engage and how they are expected to engage. It is school leaders’ responsibility to ensure that the process of engagement is bidirectional and that families truly benefit from their engagement with schools to reinforce educational expectations for their children. This is a problem especially because schools tend to be more effective in engaging families when they are highly accountable to their needs in a consistent and sustained fashion (López, Scribner, & Mahitivanichcha, 2001). As such, the needs of immigrant families must be considered when conceptualizing family engagement.

Research suggests that immigrant families prefer having both traditional and alternative models of family engagement, where their language skills and modes of communication are actively respected, facilitated, and integrated within the school culture (Arias & Murillo-Campbell, 2008). Further, immigrant families come with unique needs and hold high aspirations for their children to attend college yet lack access to information and people to assist them with postsecondary planning (Epstein & Sanders, 2002). Without these resources, the systems of negation are compounded by a societal context wherein immigrant communities face persistent criminalization, economic exploitation, and political alienation (Paredes Scribner & Fernández, 2017). Yet this is the type of educational contract usually offered to immigrant families, and at the intersection of race, immigration, and social class, this model fails to account for the political forces reshaping family structures ( Baquedano-López, Alexander, & Hernández,2013).

These structural dynamics disproportionately impact families of color, as the redistribution of labor to counteract English-monolingualism and wage suppression has reshaped how parents and guardians participate in their children’s education. When immigrant families of color fail to participate in school events in White-centric ways (e.g., showing up to PTA meetings during work hours, leading fundraisers, or attending sports, award ceremonies, and other school events), their absence is conveniently explained through racial stereotypes that denigrate their motivation and work ethic (Nava, 2012). For example, the second author is a former classroom teacher in South Los Angeles. Although it was very difficult for parents of her students to contribute to fundraising or attend functions during school hours due to work schedules, these families offered home-cooked meals, invited retired grandparents, and offered to support after-school events, displaying types of engagement outside the traditional.

The educational racial contract perspective tells us that the foundation of family engagement is deeply racial and not one dimensional. Whereas school leaders often seek recommendations from affluent White parents, they seldom take time to understand ways to construct educational opportunities that are consistent with immigrant families’ expectations. The educational racial contract insists that, without the ability to participate in children’s education in school-centric ways, immigrant families’ educational values are to be systematically invalidated. These power differentials exist in many family engagement activities, relegating immigrant families to secondary citizenship (Nava, 2012). Arias and Murillo-Campbell (2008) suggest that the ongoing anti-immigrant political climate makes immigrant family engagement in schools more important than ever before. Since inaction is still an action, the failure to disrupt inequitable expectations for family engagement demonstrates the ways in which the educational racial contract is operative.

Shields (2018) highlights the importance of transformative leadership as a response to social injustices. She writes that leaders are not strictly positional but rather people striving to make a difference. In differentiating transformative leadership from all other frameworks, Shields (2010) contends that the nature of non-transformative, transactional leadership does not account for problems concerning structural domination, and therefore, its emphasis on reaching mutual agreements between stakeholders often reinforces the existing educational racial contract, leaving intact hierarchical structures for familial participation. Although transactional leadership begins to focus on equality and organizational change, its limited focus often fails to connect students’ education to the larger society and their role as knowledge producers and problem solvers to deeply engage in social justice. Other research has shown that school leadership needs critical rearticulation (Marshall & Olivia, 2006), as transactional frameworks are no longer adequate to address systemic inequities (Quantz, Rogers, & Dantley, 1991).

Since White supremacy functions at the structural and ideological dimensions of education, Weiner (2003) illuminates the importance of leaders using transformative leadership to tackle the issue of hegemony and the role of schools as culprits in the manufacturing of common sense. Given that school leadership is inherently political, the ongoing silence and inaction against the educational racial contract brings up the question of justice at the intersections of race, immigration, and family engagement. Transformative leadership is differentiated from transactional forms of leadership due to its linkage of mindset, practice, and the larger questions of justice and democracy (Shields, 2010).

The literature on transformative leadership calls for critical frameworks to challenge oppression and for leaders to leverage the power and assets of historically marginalized communities to galvanize social change. Research on transformative leadership describes these types of leaders as cultural workers driven by antideficit models of education (Wilson, Douglas, & Nganga, 2013), and as people who are able to reposition schools to respond to demographic imperatives (Cooper, 2009) and challenge White supremacy (Shields, 2009).

Critical race theorists and ethnic studies researchers have extensively highlighted coun-terstories of racial justice leadership in historically marginalized communities of color (Alemán, Bernal, & Cortez, 2015; Arriaza, 2004; Fuentes, 2013; Horsford & Sampson, 2014; Stovall, 2013; Urrieta, 2004; Wang, 1974; Wang, 2009; 2018Welton & Freelon, ). These stories counter the myth of the “absent parent,” as many family leaders navigate their life circumstances to organize for educational justice. This rich body of literature on parental leaders of color has not historically been acknowledged within the concept of transformative leadership and in traditional school-based leadership research.

To reinforce the dialogic nature of leadership, it is important for studies on transformative leadership to move in a direction that elicits the perspectives, expectations, and leadership stories of racialized subjects and those who are historically underserved. Importantly, the concept of transformative leadership needs to expand to include social movements of all scales to fully document the contributions of historically marginalized communities in school transformation. This outside-in perspective should be deployed to support school leaders in disrupting racial hierarchies (see Glanz, 2007; McLaughlin, 1989), setting new terms for a racially just educational contract and improving the preparation of future school leaders.

The current concept of extending leadership outward, from transactional to transformative, must also lead to perspective-taking and sincere invitation for families of color to expect accountability from leaders and cosigners of the educational racial contract. From the school’s perspective, the risks of political backlash from White and English-monolingual families can be a legitimate concern. For this reason, it is important for families and school leaders to leverage state policies, mandates, and leaders of immigrant communities to develop a self-sustaining framework of inclu-sivity and infrastructure to support broader forms of engagement. Challenging the totality of White supremacy requires school and community leaders to reject dominant views of family engagement and position historically racialized communities at the center of their work.

This study combines the tenets of transformative leadership (Shields, 2015) and critical race theory in education (Solórzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000) to serve as an analytical framework to expose the interlocking systems of racial hierarchies and the realities of the educational racial contract (Leonardo, 2013). Combining these frameworks foregrounds White supremacy in leadership studies to challenge traditional definitions of school leadership and research methods that focus on policy and the use of principals and administrators as the unit of analysis. Leadership is a transdisciplinary phenomenon, which should draw on critical perspectives from ethnic, LGBTQ, Whiteness, and women’s studies, as well as other disciplines, to interrogate the intersections of leadership, education, and social transformation.

This joint framework creates a space for scholars, activists, and historically marginalized communities to generate knowledge and explore alternative ways to understand various forms of oppression, political resistance, leadership, and asset models of education. Race consciousness is a process of identity development rather than a destination (Urrieta, 2007), and therefore the basic tenets of race-conscious transformative leadership (RCTL) do not have to operationalize equally, sequentially, or simultaneously to be considered “transforming” or “transformative.” As an analytical framework, we offer RCTL, as it serves as a toolbox to examine and theorize about the social context of education linking leadership to justice and transformation.

The foundational tenets of RCTL include: (1)the mandate to name the injustice and effect deep, equitable, and systemic change that focuses on race and racism and their inter-sectionality with other forms of oppression; (2) the centrality of experiential knowledge of racialized subjects to deconstruct and reconstruct dominant ideologies that perpetuate legal, social, and material constructions of race; (3) a commitment to address institutional power and the inequitable distribution of resources perpetuating hierarchical constructions of schooling; (4) an ideological clarity in the intentions and consequences of leadership in influencing private, public, individual, and collective good; (5) a focus on race-conscious emancipation, democracy, equity, and justice based upon the terms set by those who are directly impacted by systems of othering and oppression; (6) an emphasis on interdependence, connectedness, and global awareness without compromising individual or group abilities to be intellectually, politically, and economically self-reliant; (7) the necessity of structural critique with the promise of critical action and reflection; and (8) the call to demonstrate moral courage to act in solidarity with and demonstrate respect for the human dignity of racialized populations.

The methodological approach to this paper, autoethnography (Camangian, 2010; Denzin, 2013; Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), insists that school leaders’ accounts of history and experiences can help them and others to be reflective and reflexive in thinking about their beliefs, assumptions, and practices. Since perceptions shape reality (Thomas & Thomas, 1928), autoethnographies by racialized subjects can provide structural and interactionist views of inequities that are often concealed through scholarly traditions that deny the reality of racism in its premise of research. Similarly, those designs that seek to generalize findings to an entire population also tend to decenter the experiential knowledge of people of color, therefore concealing the role of race and other forms of oppression in society (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).

From this methodological stance, our design insists that transformative leadership starts with the self, as one cannot engage in transforming social structures until one has actively and continuously sought clarity about one’s history, identity formation, and sense of purpose in education. As people of color, our narratives and biographies are living theories of race that need to be shared, given the ways in which our leadership experiences often go unacknowledged and invalidated. Autoethnog-raphy is conceived as situating the self in the historical practices of schooling; the process of recalling and reliving the past presents a method for transforming those experiences in relation to ourselves and the current social contingencies. These ethnographic accounts change how we relate to the body of knowledge that shapes our world.

This methodological stance provides us a starting point to identify leadership lessons that we learned over the years as a method to respond to deficit narratives that negate schools’ accountability to immigrant students and their families. For the purpose of this paper, we draw on the first author’s experiences as an exemplar of community leadership that elicited the expectations of immigrant families to address systems of racial inequities at a large comprehensive high school. The first author is a first-generation immigrant and person of color who comes from a single-parent household, where for decades his mother worked as a part-time waitress. Once a bilingual school administrator, he had a particular reaction when deficit narratives were repeated between administrators and teachers, which he believes further racialized his experiences as an educator of immigrant students.

The second author is a second-generation immigrant and person of color who also comes from a single-parent household. Once a classroom teacher, she had similar reactions to how deficit narratives poorly position students of color. The method of autoethnography allows us to reflect deeply on racialized experiences and how the first author’s personal story can inform aspiring school leaders seeking their own clarity about race and racism in education. In this article, we draw mainly from the first author’s experiences in school leadership to frame this study, and together we analyze those experiences. As such, the narration will, at times, change to the first person singular to indicate the first author’s experience. Through dialogue and a process of recalling the past, we then come together to deepen the analysis in a unified voice.

Our own efforts to uncover memories and stories of the past is an important praxis to recount the race, class, and gender struggles of people of color. Initially, we had to identify the sources of data that inform the first author’s recollections. We conducted a review of peer-reviewed academic articles and books that had been written on the high school where he worked for 6 years as a bilingual administrator. These articles and books were not cited for the purpose of protecting the confidentiality of the school. We then compared and contrasted this body of research conducted by university researchers with his recollections of events, personal encounters, and observations of others during that same time period. During those years, he worked closely with immigrant families, lived in the school’s community, and kept careful written documentation of his work. We then compared these sources of data with the RCTL tenets and the literature on family engagement as a method to identify the vignettes that stood out to us, as well as specific themes that resonated with the RCTL tenets for further analysis and theorizing. We then assigned pseudonyms to the school and all individuals to retell the story of his experiences with immigrant families.

Ohlone High School (OHS) is a large high school located in Ohlone, California, and is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse schools in the country. At the time of the first author’s employment, the education system was impacted by Propositions 187, 209, and 227, where voters sequentially denied services to undocumented immigrants, eradicated affirmative action, and took an English-only stance to legalize language discrimination. There are 3,000 students attending OHS each year. Among the student population, 56 languages are spoken. African American students make up 22% of the student population, compared with Asian Americans at 9%, bira-cial or multiracial at 12%, Latinx at 16%, Native Americans at 1%, and Whites at 40%. English language learners form 10% of the school’s population. Consistent with many urban schools, African American and Latinx students experience a high push-out rate, while White students are disproportionately able to matriculate into 4-year universities.

In 1987, immigrant families filed a lawsuit against the school district, contending that their children were not receiving adequate resources and an equitable education. One of the district’s responses was to create the English Language Learner (ELL) department, consisting of a three-person administrative team and 16 classroom and after-school tutors who were highly educated bilingual and multilingual immigrants. The department eventually grew to offer five levels of English courses and a combination of instructional methods that included English language development and specially designed academic instruction in English. Participating students had access to all other essential core content courses throughout the school day.

During the first author’s tenure, the ELL leadership team included a department chair, a bilingual administrator responsible for family and community connections (the first author), and a bilingual secretary. The department chair and secretary both were Latinx and Spanish-speakers, and all the ELL teachers were White. The leadership team embodied a distributed model wherein everyone took part to enhance teamwork and leverage one another’s expertise and linguistic capabilities. The first author’s primary role was to be a community liaison, working closely with both in- and out-of-school stakeholders to establish support and monitoring systems to ensure that the California bilingual mandate was followed. This position was established as a result of the 1987 lawsuit, where families called for the hiring of bilingual administrators to strengthen the school’s connections with the immigrant communities. Even though his position was located in the ELL program, he also monitored the academic progress of immigrant students in “mainstream” classrooms. At one point he was the only Asian American who spoke more than one language (Taiwanese and Mandarin) working in the school district.

As the first person in my (first author’s) own family to graduate from high school and attend college, I began to ask emergent bilingual and multilingual students about their future goals and aspirations soon after I was hired at OHS. Many of the students wanted to attend college, though some felt as newcomers that they did not have the necessary information to navigate the admission process. Even those who did not share the same collegiate aspirations stated career goals requiring them to have a college degree.

During that time, I made home visits at least twice per week for the purpose of getting to know the families I served. The topic of college was frequently mentioned by immigrant families, and many parents and guardians had expectations for their children to “do better” in the areas of job security, educational attainment, and ability to fully navigate and contribute to their new country. One father, who received his college education in Vietnam, was adamant about his expectations for his daughter to reach postsecondary education. Other families had the same goals for their children. These expectations were consistent with those of the families in Lopez’s (2001) and Nava’s (2012) studies, as well as my own experience with my mother, who stressed the importance of going to college as a method to address our economic reality.

To reinforce immigrant families’ educational expectations, I shared my home visit documentations with school counselors, teachers, and the administrative team. Some teachers described the students as “slow” and pointed to the Latinx students’ family “culture” and Asian American students’ low English proficiencies as the reasons to “keep these expectations realistic.” The ELL department chair envisioned an education that focused on developing students’ life and vocational skills, so they could acquire a job immediately after high school. In other words, the school’s expectations for immigrant students largely focused on graduation, while their families viewed a high school education alone as not fully preparing them for the future. In contrast, many counselors helped newly arrived European students to avoid ELL services and instead go directly into advanced courses, while offering no such benefits to newly arrived students from other countries. Additionally, the math department chair created additional barriers for emergent bilingual and multilingual students who received As on their report cards to participate in Advanced Placement and Honors classes, which systematically disadvantaged many immigrant students in their college applications. Despite the school district’s positive intentions to equalize education through the creation of the ELL department, these encounters quickly demonstrated that deeper and more equitable systemic change was necessary.

As someone who had learned about the work of racial formation theory (Omi & Winant, 2014) early in my career, I began to consult with the bilingual tutors, teachers I considered to be equity-minded, and researchers studying the high school at the time. Through my observations of ELL classrooms and consultations with others, it became clear that educators were conflating the ability to speak English with their idea of a college-going student. Others also pointed out that these immigrant students of color’s linguistic capital and ELL classification were racialized in a way that subjugated them to lowered expectations in the school. This racial subjugation of ELL students was a part of the sustain-ment of Whiteness, as the school largely viewed White students as college worthy, regardless of whether they spoke English.

As I continued to draw on the intimate knowledge of tutors and the bilingual secretary to connect with families, we started to use students’ academic and attendance records as a strategy to affirm families’ educational expectations. During our home visits, regardless of how well a student was doing in school, we would discuss the student’s academic standing and how she or he was perceived by teachers. The conversation often included having the family members help interpret student data, as well as provide context for what influenced the student outside of school. We then used the family’s perspectives to give us a better understanding for how to respond to the needs of individuals, as well as to develop a concrete plan for the student to eventually complete the ELL, high school graduation, and University of California admissions requirements, believing that students’ abilities to do well with these requirements would likely make them competitive for many other colleges and universities. We often left these home visits with a sense of optimism and a parent-signed academic plan for what the school and the family were each going to do to jointly support and monitor the student’s academic progress.

We then shared these agreements with administrators, counselors, and teachers to deconstruct dominant ideologies perpetuating the educational inequities encountered by these students. Soon, students who attended school intermittently or had long periods of absence began to return to the classroom. Many high achievers could then identify individuals at OHS with whom they could consult about taking the right courses for college. As for the teachers, many saw the background stories of these individual families help them to be more responsive in the classroom. Many became receptive to attending the monthly parental advisory meetings, as well as participating in home visits to learn more about the community. In seeing how these achievement patterns improved over time, teachers started to opt into the academic plans, even though many still were unconvinced that these students should be going to college.

These efforts to affirm families’ educational expectations led to an increase in parent and guardian participation in the district- and site-based bilingual advisory councils. We used these opportunities to connect families to direct services, such as after-school programs, college preparatory programs, college admissions and financial aid officers, health services, job-training programs, and other resources that already existed but were underutilized in the local community. This strategy helped to connect many families to community leaders who looked and spoke like them to further reinforce their sense of conne tion to the school and their larger ethos. addition to having these meetings at the hi school, we also met families in Spanish-spea ing churches, the adult school, and the midd schools that fed into OHS. About 30 imm grant families and their children regular attended these events, and we provided foo babysitting, translation services, and carpoo ing as a way to ease their participation. T most-attended meetings were the ones whe the families knew in advance that their child teacher was going to be present and/or th there would be discussions about colleg social services, budgets, and topics that a directly related to helping families prepare st dents for the future.

During this time, some immigrant famili expressed the desire to defer school-bas decisions to the educators; however, engagi them in leadership opportunities through t bilingual advisory council opened a space f them to utilize their voices, empower ea other, and take on responsibility to advoca for the education of all immigrants. One exar ple of this was the district’s consolidation management and services, leading to a chan in the funding formula from a department to per-pupil basis. This dynamic, along with t school principal’s own budget priorities, dest bilized the resource allocation for emerge bilingual and multilingual students. Whenev immigrant families felt the budget cut essenti services, hundreds of families would active protest at school board meetings and descri the importance of fully funding their children education.

Unfortunately, despite their efforts, over t next 5 years, the ELL department lost its stat and was downgraded to a program after faci significant budget reduction. Tutorial servic went from 16 staff members to three, and t leadership team became overwhelmed by t number of racist incidents faced by immigra students at the school. Many families and EL leaders perceived these annual budget cuts disregard of the 1987 lawsuit and a threat the school’s ability to meet the state’s bilingu mandates. The department chair worked tirelessly to engage with the school principal on these budget setbacks. The school principal’s response was to attend one parent advisory meeting, which he left after a 2-minute introduction of himself to the immigrant families. Further adding to the problem was mainstream teachers’ continual resistance to working with newly redesignated students from the ELL program. Consistent with Dabach’s (2015) research, these teachers felt that their status at the school was dependent on their ability to teach advanced and honors courses. Many also felt that teaching these students would require them to lower their expectations for the entire classroom. As ELL students were negated to secondary status, OHS teachers were actively protecting the educational contract of White students, a clear manifestation of White supremacy.

As time passed, there were several changes to the ELL chair position. After a period of transition, the school principal appointed a math teacher to serve as a resource specialist to lead the program. During this time, OHS partnered with a university on a self-study to address the persistent racial opportunity gap at the school. Though I had left my position by this time, at the invitation of the research project, I was able to return to OHS to assist the program with special projects and collaborate with several immigrant parents to gather data for the study. Working alongside a team of four university researchers, we discovered two significant forms of inequities concerning immigrant students.

The first was how emergent bilingual and multilingual students were socially, program-matically, and structurally isolated in school. This was mostly due to the large and impersonal school structure that lacked sensitivity to the needs and aspirations of immigrant communities. The second form of inequity took place within the ELL program, as teachers were found to have low expectations for students. The curriculum was discovered to be outdated or age inappropriate, and many students were verbally discouraged from considering college. Further, the program was responding to the annual budget crisis by holding onto their students too long, denying them access to “mainstream” teachers, honors classes, and educational opportunities outside of their immediate setting.

The research team was able to submit a written report and privately shared our findings with the ELL chair. Many families began to arm themselves with the study results and took on leadership responsibilities at the school to demand additional research and transparency in school data and to openly address the issue of low expectations with the ELL teachers. These efforts resulted in several meetings held at a Spanish-speaking church, where more than 300 immigrant families gathered to address the teachers, the superintendent, and members of the school board about the kinds of changes that were necessary. Within these moments, the families’ educational expectations were reaffirmed and their engagement evolved into mobilization, demonstrating the moral courage to act in solidarity with and respect for the human dignity of racialized populations. At the time, however, it was not clear the extent to which immigrant families’ knowledge and expectations were actually used to equalize power to address Whiteness as the foundation of the educational racial contract at OHS.

It was these battles, small and large in scale, that led the community to resist and reject the educational racial contract. In response to the ongoing racial opportunity gap, OHS soon restructured into one high school operating six small autonomous academies. The first author returned to OHS many years later and found the ELL program continuing to operate in isolation, as the educational racial contract persisted and actively excluded immigrant students from a reform that was intended to promote equity at OHS. At the same time, despite immigrant families’ call for deep-level change, the school administration supported affluent White families in keeping a segment of the school for themselves, so they could sidestep the small-schools movement to maintain the status quo. Despite the state bilingual mandate and the 1987 lawsuit that provided immigrant families with legal pathways to equity, their leadership was negated by the system. Immigrant families were treated as disposable parents and their voices were concealed by the dominant narrative that supported the new small-schools reform, a redesign that promised to bring equity without any real intention of serving these families. In retrospect, real systemic change would require OHS administrators to not simply connect their practice to the community but to significantly address White supremacy at the ideological and material levels of education (Weiner, 2003).

The terms of justice related to interdependence, connectedness, and global awareness must be articulated by the people directly impacted by racial othering and systems of oppression. In failing to truly address educators’ beliefs, we find the creation of the small learning academies a rearticulation of the educational racial contract to maintain social and linguistic hierarchies. As long as the ELL program continues to operate under the per-pupil funding formula, the faster pace of exiting students into the “mainstream” will hinder the program’s chances to operate at a scale to embody and advocate for equity. Our findings show that immigrant students and their families routinely continue to encounter materially different educational expectations in the ways they are treated in schools.

Without addressing the material meaning of race, the concepts of interdependence and connectedness are constructed in two problematic ways at OHS. First, despite the leadership provided by the bilingual communities, these efforts have not fundamentally transformed the hierarchical relationship between the ELL program and the rest of the school. By keeping these structural hierarchies intact, reform strategies such as a faster pace of exiting students and relocating the ELL program to a different part of the school did little to disrupt systemic low educational expectations and give immigrant families the autonomy to define the terms of the educational contract for their children. Even though the rest of OHS can benefit from seeing the interconnectedness between themselves and the many immigrant families that have come to send their children to the school, the bilingual communities actually need the resources and political autonomy to be self-reliant in defining the kind of education their children deserve. The current construction of connectedness between immigrant students and the rest of the school is only making them more politically isolated and disempow-ered.

Second, even though there is evidence of improved relationships between immigrant families and the school, the foundation of that relationship is still based on the school’s agenda, where the intellectual activities of emergent bilingual and multilingual students are defined by traditional measures of achievement such as attendance and homework. Since the school has not attempted to support these students’ intellectual life outside of the educational system, the first author’s visitations with immigrant families also became a form of hegemonic intrusion to set the terms of the educational contract in the home (Baquedano-López et al., 2013). Thus, the concept that insists school leaders extend their practice into the communities can also turn out to be hegemonic, due to many leaders’ lack of preparation and mindfulness to operate outside of the school-based educational contract. For authentic family-school partnership to occur, leaders on all level of schooling must embrace the knowledge production that takes place in communal spaces. That is, the educational conformity of racialized subjects should not be mistaken as an expectation for interdependence with the English monolingual communities. Instead, radically breaking the educational racial contract requires leaders to not only open school doors to welcome families but to embrace the home-based intellectual activities of immigrant children to transform curricular expectations in the classroom.

Given that leadership is a relational phenomenon, the reciprocity generated between the ELL department and the immigrant community eventually grew into political mobilization, where the community gained strength through collective action to challenge White supremacy and the educational racial contract. Immigrant families discovered how to best utilize their voices, intellectual curiosity, and grassroots connections to hold OHS accountable. Consistent with the literature, that story shows that immigrant families will actively intervene on behalf of their children when they encounter educational injustice (Bernal, 1998). Another lesson learned is the importance of using student data as a tool for transformative leadership. We believe the initial use of home visits, sharing students’ academic records, and listening to immigrant families’ stories and aspirations were catalysts to elicit their educational expectations for their children. These strategies for family-school partnership created the conditions for parents and guardians to define their own educational contract and pathways for students to be successful instead of being forced into a prescribed notion of familial engagement. Essentially, by cocon-structing expectations with immigrant parents, the stronghold of Whiteness is lessened.

The story of OHS remains one of continual resistance and transformation. A part of the moral courage is for us to point to the contradictory nature of this particular school reform. To date, OHS remains racially integrated when looking from the outside but racially divided within. In retrospect, the reform options—one to structurally integrate emergent bilingual and multilingual students into the “mainstream” and the other to prolong their education in the program—are both inequitable and unjust. We say this because the school, and our society by extension, simply does not have enough educators who fully understand and embrace this population. The argument of racial integration versus segregation has its limits for this particular population, because schools like OHS continue to operate in the context of English-monolingualism as a major part of the educational racial contract. Since systemic inequities are manifestations of societal “isms,” organizational change initiatives must directly confront the ideological and hierarchical construction of education (Weiner, 2003).

The analytical framework of RCTL allows us to understand that transformation and justice are not linear or mere destinations. Counteracting the educational racial contract is a process that requires sustained political struggle, self-reflection, and resetting of goals. The method of self-narrative has helped us to gain new insights into ourselves and to realize that consciousness and the construction of one’s leadership identity must also come from the ability to examine one’s own relationship with social structures. Our structural critique of and reflections on OHS has reenergized our sense of purpose and optimism in our role as university faculty members. Currently, we teach courses on race, school, family, and community connections at our universities, and our optimism is fueled by the next generation of school leaders and their curricular engagement with racism and asset models of education.

The preparation of transformative leaders must include what we call an epistemic shift toward the existing arrangements of education as a method to deconstruct the racial subjugations of students and their families. Leadership preparation programs must address English-monolingualism and other systems of power to help future leaders effectively navigate these racialized contexts and affirm the histories and perspectives of the immigrant community (Liou & Hermanns, 2017). As university faculty, we have the responsibility to create conditions for aspiring school leaders to examine their own socialization in the societal images and narratives that underpin their systems of beliefs and disbeliefs. This includes the learning and unlearning of perceptual frameworks of people’s superiority and inferiority as a method to understand constructions of self. It is through this process of disrupting Whiteness norming and racial othering that aspiring school leaders can begin to reconstruct who they are and who they want to be as leaders. This process of self-interrogation, actualization, and transformation must be accompanied by the acquisition of new skills to identify and coconstruct a justice-oriented educational contract. Transformative leaders must be race conscious and community centered, capable of coconstructing solidarity with communities in the pursuit of racial justice.