Community Action for School Reform

Chapter 13

Chapter 13 Money Matters The Costs of Participation, Research, and Action Much of what the Task Force did would have been impossible without money. Community members must lead an organization, but they lack the skills, time, and resources to maintain one and to take extended action on their own. They must persuade others to give them money for these purposes. We look here at money in the life of the Task Force: what it needed money for, what money was available for, and how the availability of money affected its work. GETTING STARTED: RESEARCHING THE FIELD The Southeast Education Task Force was an unusual idea. Few community organizations were active in education, and fewer still took education as their sole domain. The public character of American education means that a professional bureaucracy has a virtual monopoly on schooling and that little education funding is available to nongovernmental organizations. The Task Force did not start, however, as an idea in search of funding. It began opportunistically: the U. S. Department of Education was giving universities grants for partnerships with community organizations, and the University of Maryland included the Southeast Planning Council’s “study-action group for schools” in a five-project proposal. Federal funders provided $200,000 over four years for creating an organization, conducting research to produce a plan, and implementing the plan. The Task Force consisted of community volunteers, with Bobby English taking leadership. She put in the most time—sometimes two days a week. She 181 offered the Julie Community Center, which she directed, as the Task Force office and meeting place. Besides acting as what could be considered the board chair, English carried out many staff activities, contributing Julie Center supplies and materials to the work. Later on, others, such as Ken Strong at SECO and Ed Rutkowski at the Patterson Park Community Development Corporation , would do similarly. However, the federal grant funded the main initial staffing. A graduate student worked twenty hours a week, and I averaged nearly two days a week. From time to time, the Urban Studies and Planning Program contributed a second graduate student, as a match for the grant, for ten or twenty hours a week. The grant assumed that because many parents already were active in education , little organizing was necessary, and research and planning would dominate the first year. Activists would lead, and the university would assist by researching questions and formulating issues. In fact, much of the core group’s activity the first year was research, and it was labor intensive. Members engaged in self-education, meeting frequently to identify and understand issues, to think about priorities, and to design a process for taking action. English managed the 160 school interviews, which produced a wealth of narrative material. Analysis of published school and student data was exceptionally straightforward. However, there were few education activists, and the university contingent tried to cultivate participants, in addition to meeting potential allies or resources. Its time also went into normal staffing responsibilities—arranging meetings, preparing documents, recording minutes, developing databases, circulating materials, and debriefing. Establishing an organization, nurturing commitments to it and to an agenda, and identifying resources competed with research for attention and time. The fruits of the first year’s efforts, in finding volunteers for work groups, which also needed staffing, compounded tensions between organizing and research. Much of the time for research went into analyzing data that the system started to provide. After organizational maintenance, little time was left for organizing or extending the Task Force network. The Task Force needed additional staff for two purposes: to recruit participants, particularly parents, and to extend research to in-depth study of neighborhood schools and substantive examination of educational programs and policy issues. We look first at efforts to increase participation. ORGANIZING PARTICIPANTS The CPHA grants for parent organizing in mid-1996 enabled the Task Force to extend its network toward parents and toward schools. SECO’s addition of 182 Money an organizer, first through the grant turned over by CPHA and later with a grant of its own, increased network building. By the following fall, however, two considerations led the Task Force to consider getting its own funding for organizing. First, it wanted to increase parent organizing and direct it more closely than the CPHA arrangement allowed. Second, the university grant would end in little over a year, and the Task Force would need staff who could do more...