Participatory Budgeting
The Implementation Challenge:
Participatory Budgeting, Process Design, and Student Voice
This paper explores the practice of participatory budgeting in schools through an investigation of the relationship between participatory budgeting and the school context, with an emphasis on mass public education in the United States. It uses as a referent the participatory budgeting process adopted by an urban school district. First, it examines the roots (sociohistorical and philosophical), benefits, and implementation structures in the context of cities. Second, it presents the ‘scheme of implementation’ framework as a lens through which to examine the empowerment dimension of participatory budgeting. Third, it explores the institutional values of and demands placed upon public schools and makes a distinction between program adoption and adaptation. Fourth, it describes the field of educational research and practice known as student voice and juxtaposes its values and goals to that of participatory budgeting. Finally, the essay describes how the empirical findings from student voice support the claims of participatory budgeting for schools and offers a discourse it can align with in order to facilitate wider and deeper implementation. The essay argues that as municipalities and schools are fundamentally different in their core missions, participatory budgeting cannot simply be transposed into this new context but school participatory budgeting needs to reconceptualize participatory budgeting in an educational context.
Participatory Budgeting
Stories of School Participatory Budgeting:
An Analytic Autoethnography of Research and Practice
This article is an analytic autoethnography that tells the story of researching and implementing school participatory budgeting in a large urban secondary school district in the Southwestern United States. Over the course of two years, the author was a classroom social studies teacher within the Southwest Secondary School District (SSSD). In the first year of participatory budgeting in the district he researched the participatory budgeting process on the first five campuses to implement the process while also working as a teacher. In the second year of the process, SSSD expanded to 10 campuses, one of which was the author’s home campus. He served as both the teacher overseeing the process (site sponsor) and classroom teacher, while also analyzing and writing the findings of the research study of the pilot year. This article is a narrative construction of his coming into the field of participatory budgeting, researching the process, and then his work integrating school participatory budgeting into the formal civics curriculum and the research project conducted as part of the course.
Participatory Budgeting
School Participatory Budgeting for Students:
The Case of SSSD
Background: School participatory budgeting has only recently emerged in the United States. Research on youth participation in the context of participatory budgeting is scant in the United States, and the research literature in the English language internationally is primarily concerned with youth experience in municipal participatory budgeting processes. As this case is the first of its kind in the U.S., it is a rare opportunity to learn about the experiences in a process found to have a positive impact on civic learning. Such an opportunity includes a deeper investigation of the context and experience in which such learning takes place.
Purpose: This case study of students from the student steering committees (SSCs) of five campuses examines their experiences with regards to the accomplishments and challenges they faced in the pilot year of the process.
Setting: The study context was the pilot year of school participatory budgeting in a large urban secondary school district in the Southwestern United States. Students established steering committees on each campus to implement the process amongst their peers beginning with idea collection, onwards to proposal development, and culminating in the finale of voting day.
Research Design: The study used a qualitative case study design, focusing primarily on focus group interviews conducted with each SSC at the end of the pilot year of school participatory budgeting during the 2016-2017 academic year. The design also incorporated observational field notes and additional document sources to corroborate findings from analysis of the focus group interview data.
Findings: Coding and analyses revealed several themes of student experience with the participatory budgeting process across all five campuses in the district: participation, relationship, governance, and communication. Students reported a capacity and desire to engage in more rigorous inquiry surrounding the process. Moreover, they felt a greater sense of belonging after taking an active role at school and that a sense of belonging makes it legitimate to contribute.
Conclusions: This case study presents students’ perspectives on the first-time school participatory budgeting across a school district. It suggests that students’ participation has a relationship to how the process is carried out during idea collection and proposal development. The student steering committees (SSC) benefit from engaging the general student body on multiple occasions to provide updates and help guide non-SSC members through the proposal development process. Finally, a formal student-led evaluation process at either the campus or district level might benefit participation and student positionality over time. Although, this case is instructive, it is that of a nascent process that had no prior experience to draw upon. Therefore, the findings are particular to a very specific moment in time for school participatory budgeting in the United States.
Participatory Budgeting
School Participatory Budgeting for Teachers and Administrators:
The Case of SSSD
Background: Though participatory budgeting has existed for almost 30 years, it has only recently come to the United States. And, only more recently has it been implemented in schools. There is a substantial research literature on the experience of participants in participatory budgeting, but none on the perspectives of the adults who most directly worked with students to carry it out. As these adults played an indispensable role in implementing the process, there is value in better understanding the impressions as well as the roles and responsibilities of these individuals.
Purpose: This is a case study of five pairs of adults working with students to implement school participatory budgeting for the first time on five campuses. It examined the perspectives of the teacher (site sponsor) and administrator (principal or assistant principal) on the process, and specifically the accomplishments and challenges of the pilot year.
Setting: The study context was the pilot year of school participatory budgeting in a large urban secondary school district in the Southwestern United States in which one teacher and one administrator from each of five campuses was asked to support the campus student steering committee (SSC) to implement the process.
Research Design: The study used a qualitative case study design. It focused primarily on on data from semi-structured interviews with the 10 adults who provided critical support for the pilot year of school participatory budgeting during the 2016-2017 academic year.
Findings: Analyses and thematic coding of interview data provided an expanded understanding of the accomplishments and challenges of the process and the many unexplored issues experienced and observed by this group with immediate responsibility for helping SSCs successfully carry out the school participatory budgeting cycle. Participants responded to interview questions on the accomplishments, challenges, and their recommendations for the future. Five themes emerged from analysis of interview data: (a) roles and responsibilities, (b) partnerships, (c) visions of success, (d) engagement with participatory budgeting, and (e) positioning participatory budgeting. Adults’ expression of accomplishments and success were student-centered, which raised an important consideration of the use of school participatory budgeting as a policy instrument rather than a device.
Conclusions: This case of adults’ perspectives on school participatory budgeting is unique. Although this case is instructive, the findings are to be interpreted within the context of a school district that implemented participatory budgeting for the very first time. The findings, which highlight the important role and function of adults (teachers and administrators) in the implementation of participatory budgeting in a school district, point to important considerations for the design of future research and participatory budgeting processes.