Potentially disruptive

A growing body of literature from developing countries (Sawada & Ragatz, 2005; Naidoo & Kong, 2003; Bray, 2000; Jimenez and Sawada, 1998) suggests that community participation in schools can strengthen reforms by helping to improve, among other things, educational quality and equity. This dissertation explores the ways four Jamaican schools foster community participation, the factors that encourage or challenge community participation and the effects of community participation on the students, the schools, and the communities. It uses observations, in depth interviews, focus groups and document review, to inform qualitative case studies that provide a deep understanding of community participation. I found that community participation helps to improve the schools' effectiveness, but the participatory processes are predominantly geared towards supporting agendas that are set and controlled by the schools. A critical factor in determining whether and how communities participate in all the cases is the principal's leadership. The findings also suggest that one way community participation can enhance the effectiveness of schools is by facilitating the capacity building of school-community members. When this happens, it can also disrupt the cycle of failure that characterizes the schools and their immediate communities. In order to achieve this transformative change, community participation must be an empowering process that is effectively led, appropriately resourced, intentionally builds the capacity of school-community members to participate, and restructures power relations to allow for a greater degree of independent action on the part of community members. I argue that in unequal social contexts such as Jamaica, community participation can be transformative but could also further inequality if it is not effectively managed. The study suggests ways the findings can be applied in policy, practice and research in order to disrupt the failure that has characterized the traditional technical approaches to education reform.