While in the past, parent engagement was relatively neglected by school districts and only slightly attended to by scholars, there is a well-funded and fierce battle for the political voices of parents today, especially in low-income communities. Using observational data from school closing hearings in New York City, I argue, first, that the school-closings process pits parent groups and sectors of the community against one another in their similar quests for good schooling. Second, I discuss contradictory orientations toward parent engagement: one based on free market ideology, and another on principles of democratic participation and engaged citizenry. Finally, I argue that parent engagement is becoming a commodity in the larger battle over the direction of public education.

The state mandated public hearings concerning school closing proposals in New York City provide a window into a diverse set of policy actors and their deliberations. Opposition to school closures is often cast as entrenched interests, emotional attachment, support for the status quo or at worst negligence. However, content analysis reveals that testimony offered by parent, community, and educator leaders contained a range of substantial critiques of school closing proposals, their motivations, justifications, and expected results. I argue that the hearings did not fully constitute a public sphere by Habermasian criteria, nor a counterpublic by Fraser and Dawson criteria. In fact, the hearings had contradictory effects; one school successfully fought closure by both resisting and reifying neoliberal logic in education policymaking. Some data demonstrates that this school’s market-based argument resonated with state authorities, while other data indicates that this market-based argument coincided with the state’s own interest to defend its legitimacy in policymaking.

This article expands upon and problematizes the practice of community-engaged research (CES) through the lens of school closings. Rather than employ a one-dimensional view of CES that portrays university researchers and community partners as collaborating equally on all stages of the research, we suggest a broader, more flexible understanding that incorporates various contextual factors. Drawing on local examples, from New York City and Baltimore, and one national effort to resist school closings, we  present three forms of CES: participatory action research (PAR), in which university researchers and community partners collaboratively engaged in almost all aspects of the process; the engaged learner, in which the researcher documented a community organizing campaign with the full support of the campaign organizers; and a grassroots listening project implemented without university partners. In each case, participants had to navigate the thorny issues of power differentials, race and racism, ownership and voice, and presentation and representation. Difficulties notwithstanding, CES has made important contributions to both the literature on and practice of school closings. We conclude the article with a discussion of some of the lingering tensions that characterize community-engaged scholarship.

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