The opportunity to engage: How race, class, and institutions structure access to educational deliberation

Educators have long discussed the value of community engagement in schoolin g, especially in troubled urban systems. However most attention has focused on either the consequences of engagement or the willingness of groups or i ndividuals to take existing opportunities for participation. The questions of whether and why there may be systematic variation in how open school sys tems are to community involvement have been largely overlooked. Using the C ouncil of Urban Boards of Education's 1992 survey and U.S, census data, the authors examined these questions using a sample of 57 urban school distric ts. It was found that urban communities with larger percentages of African American students provide increased avenues for participation, whereas poor er districts and those in the South offer fewer avenues. These findings,tgs have important implications for educational equity and the promise of comm unity participation in school governance.