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This article examines a grassroots parent organizing effort in a large, highpoverty, urban school district. Drawing from ethnographic field research at a community-based popular education organization, the study describes how parent organizers worked to educate and mobilize Latina/o immigrant parents on issues of educational justice and equity. It identifies three pillars of their approach-a social theory, a theory of change, and a theory of knowledgeand argues that these were not reducible to a set of practices or methods; rather, they constituted a coherent paradigm of educational justice. This paradigm differs in significant ways from the neoliberal justice paradigm that currently dominates education reform and policy. By examining points of tension between these two competing paradigms, this article seeks to accomplish two aims. First, it aims to deepen our understanding of how underlying paradigms of educational justice shape the work of educating, organizing, and reforming schools. Second, it aims to expose the cultural specificity, or nonuniversality, of the neoliberal paradigm in order to challenge its hegemonic status in education reform and policy.

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork at a community-based organization (CBO) engaged in parent organizing for urban school reform, this paper examines how organizers engaged with the imperatives of neoliberal reform and the broader neoliberal policy context. It highlights organizers' agency but also shows how hegemonic discourse constrained their agency. It argues CBO involvement can contribute to educational neoliberalization and to neoliberal notions of democracy that, paradoxically, employ processes of symbolic inclusion and material exclusion (Miraftab 2004). [parent organizing, grassroots organizations, neoliberalism, democracy, school reform] Education scholars are rallying around grassroots community organizing as the latest answer to persistent structural inequality in schools. A growing body of research literature on what is typically called "community organizing for school reform" (Mediratta et al. 2009) bolsters the case for this approach and documents successful campaigns in which low-income parents or youth, working through nonprofit community-based organizations (CBOs), mobilized for and won specific reforms at the school, district, or even state level (e.g.Warren and Mapp 2011). Community organizing holds a certain romantic appeal among educational scholars, activists, and reformers from the Left as well as the neo/liberal mainstream, who position it as an empowering, democratic, and "bottom-up" approach to school change in contrast to dominant, top-down, technocratic approaches (Warren 2014). I share many scholars' enthusiasm for grassroots organizing in education, and this enthusiasm led me to undertake the research featured in this article. However, with its focus on documenting successful campaigns, much of the literature on educationbased organizing glosses over the ideological contradictions, tensions, and dilemmas inherent in this work. As well, this literature tends to take for granted rather than problematize the neoliberal policy context that is the terrain on which organizing work is carried out. It rarely interrogates how people working within and through CBOs engage with the hegemonic discourse and imperatives of neoliberal education reform, and with what effects.This article contributes such an analysis by focusing on ideological contradictions, tensions, and dilemmas that emerged as one CBO, Alianza, worked to organize Latina/o immigrant parents in a large, high-poverty, racially and linguistically diverse, urban school district. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork at Alianza, a self-defined Freire-based popular education organization, I explore how its educator-organizers negotiated tensions between the values of popular education and the imperatives of neoliberal education reform. Popular education is a theory and practice of education for social change, often associated with the work of Paulo Freire who popularized many of its key concepts (e.g., Freire 1999). Popular education aims to cultivate critical consciousness, collective empowerment, and political action among...

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This article presents an exploration of the work of family engagement in a racially- and linguistically-diverse, high-poverty, urban school district in a state of continuous neoliberal reform. Drawing from qualitative research methods, it is argued that family engagement is being reshaped by the imperatives of educational neoliberalization while, at the same time, remaining out of touch with the needs and concerns of families who are racially stigmatized, linguistically diverse, and experiencing extreme economic insecurity. It is further argued that school personnel charged with family engagement carry out exploited, invisible, and emotional tasks that increase in quantity and intensity as the social safety net declines under neoliberalism. Applying an intersectional gender analysis of emotional labor and the re-privatization of social reproduction offers an illustration of how family engagement in neoliberal schools both exploits and reinforces hierarchies of race–class–gender while obscuring these processes through neoliberal discourses of individual responsibilization.