Where Were You on Tuesday? Part 2: Unmasking Parallel Loops: Guarding Against Imposter Advocacy in Our Public Schools
Animated title graphic featuring the text "Where Were You on Tuesday? From Parachutes to Policy: Masks in the Boardroom" set against a blue background with abstract colored shapes.
Dr. Vanessa Marrero, Ed.D.
Part 2 of a 3 part-series: Unmasking Parallel Loops: Guarding Against Imposter Advocacy in Our Public Schools
By definition, an imposter entity masquerades as a legitimate stakeholder while lacking authentic investment or accountability to the community.
In public education, this tension becomes dangerous when parallel advocacy efforts bypass the hard-won work already being led by Black, Indigenous, Latino, and AAPI parent and community leaders. Parent leaders of color are not waiting to be empowered; they are already actively leading policy, driving systemic reform, and doing the heavy lifting of school board governance. Newly minted, parallel organizations—lacking transparency around their origin, intent, and governance—are not merely redundant; they are completely out of touch with ongoing work.
To speak plainly: these parallel initiatives often emerge as privileged, dominant-culture endeavors rather than meaningful attempts to address systemic equity. Creating separate structures instead of partnering with proven parent and community leaders undermines collective progress, fragments community power, and misleads families.
How Parallel Groups Disrupt Effective Coalitions
As Mapp and Bergman (2019) emphasize in their research on family-school partnerships, authentic parent engagement is not about bringing parents into pre-existing, dominant-culture agendas; it is about honoring community wisdom, sharing power, and supporting the self-determination of parents of color. True partnership requires upfront communication, humility, and genuine power-sharing—not retroactive claims or paternalistic oversight.
Transactional Evaluation: Entering community spaces under the pretense of "evaluating" established efforts breaks trust. As education scholar Pedro Noguera (2019) cautions, partnerships must be based on respect, trust, and empathy—not pity, but empathy—and certainly not condescending or patronizing attitudes toward parents. Furthermore, as Maya Angelou (1969) famously observed, when an entity shows you its true priorities through its actions—such as bypassing community dialogue to operate unilaterally—we must believe those actions over performative rhetoric.
Duplication Drains Impact: When groups claim an interest in equity, the most impactful step is aligning at a policy level with established parent and community leaders who are already shaping district governance. Separate, parallel structures only breed division and compete for limited community resources.
Harmful Misinformation: Fragmentation worsens when parallel groups spread inaccurate data and harmful messaging. Universal coalition building requires strict factual integrity; compromising truth disserves families.
The Direct Harm to Diverse Parent & Community Leadership
The proliferation of parallel, dominant-culture groups directly undermines Black, Indigenous, Latino, and AAPI parent and community leaders who have spent years navigating institutional resistance by:
Erasing Cultural Agency: Reducing equity organizations to monolithic labels, erasing the specific identity, governance, and lived experiences of women-of-color and Indigenous leaders. As Toni Morrison (1987) famously wrote in Beloved, "definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" (p. 225). When external groups claim the authority to label or evaluate established leadership, they attempt to strip leaders of color of their own self-determination and agency.
Diverting Focus and Resources: Re-centering district and media attention onto privileged voices—shifting focus away from long-standing priorities established by leaders of color.
Splintering Family Agency: Confusing outreach, which makes it harder for marginalized communities to exercise collective power and hold public institutions accountable.
A Critical Reckoning
This forces a vital question: Where were these newly active voices during severe budget crises, school closures, and historical disinvestment? Where are they during the grueling, unglamorous hours of school board governance? Why now?
Parallel efforts do not merely duplicate work; they create intentional distraction. Yet, as Angelou (1978) reminded us, while truth and history can be distorted by those seeking control, authentic community roots remain unshakable. Parent and community leaders of color who have anchored this work through every crisis do not need to constantly justify their legitimacy to newly arrived entities.
Splintering public education advocacy does not serve families. Strategic advocacy, however, is not about "fighting" for space—it is about demanding structural accountability, protecting organizational boundaries, and ensuring respect for the parent and community leaders who have been doing the work all along.
When leaders of color establish clear boundaries, their actions are often negatively reframed as "fighting" or contentious. Yet, when a white leader demonstrates the exact same strategy, it is praised as proactive, intentional, or "being clear is being kind." Real equity requires dismantling this double standard and respecting the boundary-setting of parent and community leaders of color as necessary, strategic governance.
In Part 3, we dive into what it truly takes to operate with integrity and invert traditional power structures—because how do we move beyond good intentions to build real, collective solidarity?
References
Angelou, M. (1969). I know why the caged bird sings. Random House.
Angelou, M. (1978). Still I rise. In And still I rise. Random House.
Mapp, K. L., & Bergman, E. (2019). Dual capacity-building framework for family-school partnerships (Version 2). Dual Capacity. https://www.dualcapacity.org
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf.
Noguera, P. A. (2019, September 8). 10 ways educators can take action in pursuit of equity (J. Gonzalez, Interviewer) [Audio podcast episode]. Cult of Pedagogy. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/10-equity/