William H. Parrett and Kathleen M. Budge are educators, researchers, and authors best known for examining a deceptively difficult question: Why do some high-poverty schools achieve strong results while others remain trapped in cycles of low expectations and disappointing outcomes?
Their answer is neither a miracle curriculum nor a shiny box of technology that arrives with seventeen charging cables and no instructions. Instead, their work emphasizes collective responsibility, equitable practices, caring relationships, purposeful leadership, and the persistent belief that every student is capable of meaningful academic success.
Through books, research, professional development, and direct work with schools, Parrett and Budge have helped educators understand how poverty influences learning without treating students from low-income families as problems to be fixed. Their approach asks schools to address barriers honestly while recognizing the intelligence, resilience, culture, and potential students already possess.
Who Are William Parrett and Kathleen Budge?
William H. Parrett
William “Bill” Parrett built a career around school improvement and educational opportunities for children and adolescents affected by poverty. He served as director of Boise State University’s Center for School Improvement and Policy Studies from 1996 through 2019 and later became director emeritus. Under his leadership, the center coordinated large-scale partnerships, funded initiatives, professional development programs, and technical assistance for schools.
Parrett earned a doctorate in secondary education from Indiana University. His consulting and speaking work has taken him to school districts, education agencies, and professional conferences across the United States and internationally. In 2021, Indiana University’s School of Education recognized him as a Distinguished Alumni Award recipient.
His career has consistently focused on students who have historically received fewer educational opportunities. Rather than viewing school improvement as a temporary project, Parrett treats it as a long-term effort involving leadership, resource allocation, professional learning, and the willingness to confront practices that quietly preserve inequity.
Kathleen M. Budge
Kathleen M. Budge brought approximately 26 years of experience as a teacher and administrator to her university research and leadership work. At Boise State University, she served in educational leadership roles and worked to connect academic research with the everyday realities of teachers, principals, and school communities.
Her scholarly interests have included poverty and education, rural schools, leadership development, school improvement, and the relationship between universities and the teaching profession. Budge has also presented at conferences, conducted professional learning programs, and consulted with education organizations in multiple states and countries.
That practitioner background matters. Her writing does not treat the classroom as a tidy laboratory where every student arrives well rested, every copier works, and meetings end five minutes early. It reflects the complexity of real schools, where educators must balance instructional goals with trauma, housing instability, limited resources, family responsibilities, and community conditions.
A Partnership Focused on Disrupting Poverty
William Parrett and Kathleen Budge became widely recognized through their joint study of high-poverty schools that were also producing strong or rapidly improving academic results. They examined what these schools did differently and looked for recurring patterns in leadership, culture, instruction, family engagement, and resource use.
Their central message is hopeful but demanding: Poverty creates serious barriers to learning, yet those barriers do not make low achievement inevitable. Schools cannot eliminate economic hardship by themselves, but they can prevent institutional habits, weak instruction, exclusionary policies, and lowered expectations from magnifying its effects.
This distinction keeps their argument from becoming either fatalistic or naïve. Claiming that poverty does not matter ignores evidence and lived experience. Claiming that schools can do nothing until society eliminates poverty gives institutions a very convenient permission slip to remain unchanged. Parrett and Budge occupy the more useful middle ground: understand the conditions, address what schools can influence, and advocate for broader change.
Avoiding the “Culture of Poverty” Trap
The authors reject stereotypes suggesting that people in poverty share one predictable set of values, behaviors, or attitudes. Low-income students and families are as diverse as any other population. Their experiences may be shaped by limited access to health care, books, transportation, stable housing, technology, or time, but economic circumstances do not define intelligence, motivation, character, or parental concern.
This asset-based perspective changes the questions educators ask. Instead of wondering why a family “does not care,” a school might examine whether work schedules, language differences, transportation problems, or negative past experiences make participation difficult. Instead of labeling a student unmotivated, a teacher might investigate whether the assignment feels relevant, whether instructions are clear, or whether the student has a quiet place to work.
Turning High-Poverty Schools Into High-Performing Schools
Parrett and Budge published the first edition of Turning High-Poverty Schools into High-Performing Schools in 2012. A substantially updated second edition appeared in 2020. The newer edition incorporated lessons from 12 additional high-poverty, high-performing schools and expanded its treatment of equity, trauma, social-emotional learning, and collective efficacy.
The book is built around a Framework for Collective Action. Rather than prescribing one rigid improvement program, the framework helps educators evaluate school culture, leadership practices, academic expectations, family relationships, community partnerships, and the use of time, personnel, and money.
Leadership Beyond the Principal’s Office
One of the framework’s strongest ideas is that sustainable improvement cannot depend on a heroic principal. A single energetic leader may begin the process, but long-term progress requires teachers, instructional coaches, counselors, support staff, and community partners to develop shared responsibility.
In the schools studied by Parrett and Budge, professional learning was not an occasional workshop served with coffee and optimistic sticky notes. It was woven into the improvement process. Educators examined student data, identified gaps, studied their own practices, tested new approaches, and learned together.
This produces collective efficacy: a faculty’s shared belief that coordinated action can improve student learning. That belief is not empty positivity. It grows when educators see credible evidence that their decisions and instruction are making a difference.
School Culture as an Improvement Strategy
Parrett and Budge argue that culture influences what adults believe is possible and what students experience every day. A school may have an excellent written mission while maintaining routines that communicate the opposite. Students notice when advanced courses are difficult to access, discipline is inconsistent, intervention arrives too late, or certain children are discussed mainly in terms of deficits.
A healthier culture pairs high expectations with meaningful support. Students are expected to complete challenging work, but they also receive clear instruction, useful feedback, additional time, tutoring, appropriate accommodations, and adults who refuse to disappear when learning becomes difficult.
Budgets Reveal Priorities
In their article “Tough Questions for Tough Times,” Parrett and Budge encouraged leaders to treat the school budget as a moral document. Every spending decision reveals what an organization values, whether leaders intend to make that statement or not.
For example, a district might say literacy is its top priority while cutting intervention staff, limiting library access, and purchasing a program teachers have not been trained to use. The budget has just delivered a more honest speech than the strategic plan.
The authors urge leaders to examine whether time, staff, funding, and professional learning are directed toward the students with the greatest needs. Equity does not mean giving every school identical resources. It means allocating support according to the barriers students must overcome.
Disrupting Poverty: Five Powerful Classroom Practices
In their 2018 book Disrupting Poverty: Five Powerful Classroom Practices, Kathleen Budge and William Parrett moved from a schoolwide improvement framework to practices educators can apply more directly in classrooms. The book incorporates research, authentic classroom experiences, and the voices of educators, including teachers who grew up in poverty.
1. Build Caring Relationships and Advocate for Students
Productive relationships are not a decorative extra added after the “real teaching” is finished. Students are more likely to participate, take academic risks, and ask for help when they believe their teachers know them and will respond fairly.
Caring also involves advocacy. An educator may need to help a student access tutoring, food assistance, counseling, health services, transportation, or an advanced academic opportunity. Warm feelings are pleasant; removing a barrier is better.
2. Maintain High Expectations With Support
High expectations become harmful when they are simply announced and students are left alone to meet them. Parrett and Budge connect rigorous expectations with clear communication, consistency, encouragement, scaffolding, and practical assistance.
A teacher using this approach does not simplify every assignment at the first sign of difficulty. The teacher identifies what is blocking progress, models the task, provides feedback, and gives students another route toward mastery.
3. Commit to Equity
Equity requires educators to examine who receives attention, challenging coursework, disciplinary consequences, leadership opportunities, and access to essential resources. It also requires the courage to change apparently neutral routines that repeatedly produce unequal results.
This can involve redesigning placement rules, reviewing discipline data, expanding access to devices or transportation, providing multilingual family communication, or scheduling intervention without forcing students to miss enriching courses.
4. Accept Professional Accountability for Learning
Professional accountability means taking responsibility for improving instruction when students are not learning. It does not mean pretending teachers control housing policy, health care, or the local labor market. It means refusing to use factors outside the classroom as an excuse for ignoring practices that can be improved inside it.
The relevant question changes from “What is wrong with these students?” to “What do we need to learn, adjust, or provide?” That shift may be uncomfortable, but discomfort is sometimes the sound of an assumption being renovated.
5. Develop the Courage and Will to Act
Schools often know more about their problems than their actions suggest. Data may reveal an opportunity gap for years while committees continue discussing the proper font for the improvement plan. Parrett and Budge emphasize action because knowledge without implementation does not change a student’s day.
Courage may mean challenging a deficit-based comment, changing an ineffective policy, reallocating funding, inviting family feedback, or admitting that a familiar instructional approach is not working. Will is what keeps the work moving after the first burst of enthusiasm fades.
Family and Community Engagement
Parrett and Budge describe trust as essential to effective family engagement. Families living with economic hardship may have demanding work schedules, limited transportation, language barriers, or previous experiences with schools that felt dismissive or judgmental. A poorly attended evening meeting therefore does not prove that parents are uninterested in education.
Schools can respond with flexible conference times, home visits, translated communication, community-based events, and partnerships with social-service or health organizations. These practices help educators learn about families instead of making assumptions from a distance.
In one example shared through their work, a home visit helped a teacher understand how an English-learning student’s progress was benefiting his entire family. The visit revealed strengths and connections that were almost invisible from inside the school building. Sometimes the most important educational data do not fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
Why Their Work Remains Relevant
The work of William Parrett and Kathleen Budge remains useful because it connects large ideaspoverty, opportunity, equity, and leadershipto decisions educators make every day. Their framework does not promise that a single teacher can solve economic inequality. It does show how schools can stop adding avoidable obstacles to students’ lives.
Their recommendations also extend beyond urban education. Budge’s interest in rural schools highlights how poverty may appear in communities where students face long transportation routes, limited broadband, shortages of specialized staff, and fewer nearby health or social services. The setting changes, but the need for relationships, rigorous instruction, collective leadership, and equitable resource allocation remains.
Critically, their work encourages schools to measure progress without reducing children to test scores. Academic outcomes matter, but so do belonging, attendance, safety, engagement, opportunity, and the ability to imagine a worthwhile future.
Experiences and Practical Lessons Inspired by Their Work
Note: The following examples are illustrative composites based on common school-improvement situations. They are not presented as personal experiences or as accounts of one specifically identified school.
Experience One: Replacing Assumptions With Evidence
Imagine a middle school where leaders are frustrated by low participation in family conferences. The familiar explanation is that parents do not value education. Applying the perspective of Parrett and Budge, the school pauses before turning that assumption into unofficial policy.
A small team speaks with families and discovers that many parents work evening shifts, several rely on public transportation, and some do not feel confident communicating in English. The school begins offering morning, virtual, and weekend conference options. Interpreters join selected sessions, and teachers make brief relationship-building calls before problems arise.
Participation increases, but the more important change is cultural. Staff members stop describing families as absent and begin recognizing the barriers built into the school’s original system. The experience demonstrates a central lesson from Parrett and Budge: Engagement improves when schools redesign access and earn trust.
Experience Two: Combining Rigor With Real Support
In another classroom, several students repeatedly fail long writing assignments. Lowering the standard would produce nicer grades without stronger writers. Repeating the same instructions with increased volume would merely create louder confusion.
The teacher maintains the original learning goal but changes the route. Students examine a model response, break the assignment into stages, discuss ideas before drafting, and receive feedback on one section at a time. The teacher also schedules short conferences and allows revision after targeted instruction.
Students are still responsible for producing a well-supported composition. What changes is the amount of instructional support connecting the expectation to success. This is the difference between demanding excellence and merely demanding.
Experience Three: Turning Data Into Collective Learning
Consider an elementary school where reading data show persistent gaps across classrooms. Leaders resist the temptation to blame individual teachers or purchase the first program wearing an impressive research-based label.
Teacher teams compare assessments, observe effective lessons, study evidence-based reading instruction, and plan common interventions. Students are monitored frequently, but the data are used to guide assistance rather than attach permanent labels. Teachers whose students make progress explain their methods, while colleagues receive coaching and time to practice.
The principal remains responsible for direction and resources, yet expertise becomes distributed across the faculty. Improvement no longer depends on one person knowing every answer. This reflects Parrett and Budge’s emphasis on leadership capacity, professional learning, and collective efficacy.
Experience Four: Treating Resources as an Equity Decision
A high school announces that students can attend after-school tutoring, but transportation leaves immediately after the final bell. Technically, support exists. Practically, it is available mainly to students who have a ride home.
Using an equity lens, leaders examine participation data and redirect part of the budget toward a late bus on selected days. They also create tutoring periods during the school day for students with family or work responsibilities. The change is not glamorous, but glamour has always been overrated in bus scheduling.
The experience illustrates why Parrett and Budge connect budgets, schedules, and staffing to moral priorities. Opportunity is not equitable merely because it appears in a brochure. Students must be able to use it.
Experience Five: Finding the Courage to Change Course
Finally, picture a school that has used the same disciplinary system for years. Data reveal that suspensions are concentrated among particular student groups and that students frequently lose instruction for relatively minor behavior.
Faculty members review the evidence, clarify expectations, strengthen classroom supports, and adopt restorative responses where appropriate. They monitor outcomes and revise the approach when implementation is inconsistent. This work requires honest discussion and patience; changing a handbook is faster than changing habits.
The larger lesson is that courage in education is often practical rather than theatrical. It appears when adults acknowledge a pattern, accept responsibility for what they can influence, and continue acting until students experience a measurable difference.
Conclusion
William Parrett and Kathleen Budge have helped reshape conversations about poverty and education by combining realism with agency. They acknowledge the serious effects of economic hardship while rejecting the idea that a student’s ZIP code determines academic potential.
Their research points toward a coherent approach: build caring relationships, maintain rigorous expectations with appropriate support, pursue equity, accept professional responsibility for learning, strengthen collective leadership, and act with courage. None of these practices is a magic trick. Together, however, they can create schools where opportunity is designed deliberately rather than distributed by luck.
The enduring value of their work lies in a simple challenge. Schools should examine not only what students bring through the door, but also what the institution places in their wayand then start moving the furniture.