Edward M. Olivos

Fostering Collaboration With Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Families of Children With Moderate to Severe Disabilities

In this review, challenges to family-school collaboration and a framework describing how special educators can foster a climate of collaboration with culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) families of children with moderate to severe disabilities are described. Conditions for collaboration in this circumstance require that educators understand how they, as agents of schools, accept a CLD communitys culture, power, and knowledge in the school context and how they align their own values and beliefs, as well as the schools policies and practices, to the communities they serve. Included is a critical analysis of relevant literature through which we identify factors that facilitate school-family collaboration and can be used to guide special educators in identifying practices either fostering or precluding authentic collaboration.

Collaboration With Latino Families: A Critical Perspective of Home—School Interactions

This article focuses on how education personnel can foster a climate and infrastructure for working collaboratively with Latino families. The author argues that collaboration is facilitated when educators understand how they, as school agents, accept a Latino community’s culture, knowledge, and power within the school context and how educators align their values and beliefs, as well as school policies and practices, with those of the community. Included is a review of relevant literature as well as suggestions for Latino family collaboration that can be used to guide educators (special and general) in identifying mind-sets and practices that either permit or preclude authentic collaboration.

Immigration and Educational Inequality: Examining Latino Immigrant Parents’ Engagement in U.S. Public Schools

More foreign-born people live in the United States now than ever before in the countrys history. Immigrants from Latin America, primarily from Mexico, constitute the largest proportion of all immigrants. Schools are the main vehicle, sometimes the only one, to integrate immigrant families and their children into U.S. society. This article, argues, however that broader social inequities affecting Latino immigrants infiltrate the practices of the public school system, galvanizing educational inequality around (perceived) deficiencies of Latino families, including their immigration status, via subtle (and often not so subtle) exclusion of Latino parents from active participation in the schools. We argue that the constructs of language proficiency, socioeconomic status, immigration status, and race/ethnicity pose challenges to Latino children and parents in U.S. society and its schools. A convergence of these 4 constructs creates vulnerabilities that constrict the opportunities for many Latinos. This article proposes that limited parental and community engagement can be understood as consequences of social inequities which remain unaddressed in the institutional context of public education.

Operationalizing Transformative Parent Engagement in Latino School Communities: A Case Study

The article examines a model for transformative parent engagement in predominantly Latino and ethnically diverse school communities. A case study illustrates the initial phases of the five-level process and the challenges of actualizing the parent engagement process. The authors challenge commonly accepted boundaries of bicultural parent involvement. A case study provides a real-life example of a large urban school district that has introduced community school-based reform to create and apply the hopeful vision of what authentic and democratic parent engagement can become, and how parents can be transformative change agents for their children and their schools. The authors outline challenges and provide recommendations to operationalize transformative parent engagement in predominantly Latino communities.

Latina/o identities, the racialization of work, and the global reserve army of labor: Becoming Latino in Postville, Iowa

This article argues that the experiences and group formation of the Latino population in the United States can best be understood by employing a framework which examines global economic and political forces—forces which draw upon Latin America’s global reserve army of labor to meet and exceed U.S. national labor demands in order to increase capital accumulation. While cautioning against viewing Latinos as a homogenous “culture,” the authors’ framework acknowledges shared racialized historical experiences and examines how a large segment of the Latino population fits into distinct spheres of the U.S. labor and economic system. The authors ground their theoretical framing using a case study of Guatemalan immigrants in a small U.S. Midwestern town. The authors conclude that Latinos in U.S. labor markets are used to perpetuate power dynamics, disrupt worker consciousness, and racialize Latinos around jobs.

Latino parents in dual language immersion programs: why are they so satisfied?

ABSTRACT Educators (school administrators, teachers, district officials, etc.) often use parental satisfaction ‘as one indicator of school success or one outcome of school effectiveness’ [Parkes, J., and T. Ruth. 2011. “How Satisfied are Parents of Students in Dual Language Education Programs? (Me parece maravillosa la gran oportunidad que le están dando a estos niños).” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 14 (6): 701–718]. Parent satisfaction is particularly attended to in educational settings where participation is voluntary (such as magnet or charter schools, for example). This article examines Latino parental satisfaction in four Oregon dual language immersion (DLI) schools. If past research, and our findings, are accurate, then researchers and educators can convincingly conclude that Latino parents are highly satisfied with bilingual education programs in general, and DLI programs in particular, and there is no need for improvement. We argue, however, that uncritically reporting high levels Latino parental satisfaction in bilingual programs can lead educators to become complacent to these parents’ concerns. Latino parental satisfaction must be viewed through multiple lenses in order to avoid silencing their voices in DLI settings.