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]