Valley Interfaith and School Reform: Organizing for Power in South Texas

Chapter Five: THE CHALLENGES OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZING AND SCHOOL REFORM

  THE CHALLENGES OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZING AND SCHOOL REFORM In the last fifteen years Valley Interfaith helped effect a number of changes in the Lower Rio Grande Valley that have had a significant impact on community leadership, conditions in the colonias, and school reform. The Lower Valley remains a region of disproportionately high poverty, however, and even though improvements have been made in the colonias and in the schools that serve them, many challenges remain . While gangs might play a minimal role in the school cultures at Palmer, Alamo, and Sam Houston, they are still strong in the surrounding communities. Even when teachers pay home visits, their contacts are usually too fleeting to transform situations in which wives are abused by husbands or families are evicted due to their inability to pay the rent. School personnel—whether teachers, counselors, or principals —face a daunting uphill struggle when they endeavor to improve community conditions in addition to their regular instructional load so that children have a better chance of mastering their school’s curriculum. In spite of the challenges, however, it appears clear that the Alliance School initiative is slowly changing the culture of schooling in the Valley. In addition to the three schools described above, all of which helped initiate the Alliance School effort in the Lower Border, twenty other schools have joined to create new kinds of horizontal ties between schools and churches in the region. The complex ensemble of community organizing strategies taught by Valley Interfaith—from individual conversations to house meetings to neighborhood walks to accountability sessions—add an intriguing new piece to the mosaic of contemporary school reform and community development. By reconceptualizing the process of schooling and actualizing a specific model of civic engagement, the Alliance School network em- phasizes joint strategies of school reform and community improvement. Yet the contribution of the Alliance Schools is not merely conceptual. From  to  the schools that were Alliance Schools in the Valley at that time acquired more than , from funds allocated by the Texas Legislature to the broader network—and those funds were badly needed. At Palmer, Alamo, and Sam Houston, they were allocated for staff development, after-school programs, peer mediation, and parent education programs. The increasing allocation of funds from the legislature to Alliance Schools in the Valley would appear to make their work easier. At the same time, the new schools will also have to make sure that they do not allow the lure of money to detract from the labor entailed in home visits, house meetings, and other forms of community engagement.1 How successful can we really say the three schools that we have studied above have been? The answer is not at all straightforward. As measured by TAAS data, the portrait is an uneven one. Palmer began with high levels of achievement and has generally struggled to maintain those, while the rates of progress in the district, in the state, and among disadvantaged students at the state level have been higher. Alamo began with low scores and has made steady progress over the six years measured in this account. Sam Houston is the only one of the schools to have reached the highest levels of achievement and to warrant an exemplary rating by the Texas Education Agency in , but that accomplishment was short lived, as scores fell in the subsequent year. How much weight should be placed on these scores? Psychometricians are divided about the validity and reliability of high-stakes tests like the TAAS. On the one hand, numerous critics have pointed out what appear to be serious flaws in the TAAS. One analysis of the TAAS by mathematicians Paul Clopton, Wayne Bishop, and David Klein argued that Texas students could pass the TAAS math exit exam for high school graduation and still have difficulty with a test widely administered to twelve-year-olds in Japan. Another study by reading specialist Sandra Stotsky argued that in recent years the TAAS test designers have created easier questions for students. The results of three surveys that have been administered to teachers in Texas reveal that teachers consider the TAAS to be inimical in many ways to sound educational practices . Finally, Walter Haney, in a deposition for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund against the Texas Education Agency, noted that although the state of Texas holds all students to the same standards for high school graduation on the TAAS exit test, it has not       [3.145.131...