Community Action for School Reform

Chapter 18

Chapter 18 Can Community Action Reform Schools or Improve Education? The Southeast Education Task Force’s community approach to reforming schools offers several lessons. First, it can be examined as a model for a new type of entity—a grassroots organization to link parents and other community members to neighborhood schools and the system administration to improve education. Second, as such, the Task Force helps understand what a community -based organization, whose members are not professional educators, can do in the education field. Third, the organization’s efforts to influence the school system shed light on the system’s operations and its relations with parents and community members. Fourth, the Task Force illuminates dynamics and predicaments typical of many voluntary associations and nonprofit organizations . Finally, this effort, though not as broad as many comprehensive community initiatives, offers lessons about how they should be designed and what they may accomplish. We already have explored many of these issues. In this final chapter we draw conclusions regarding the role of community action in reforming schools and improving education. CAN COMMUNITY ACTION REFORM SCHOOLS? “School reform” refers to changes in school policies or practices that have two characteristics. They alter a school in a way that significantly improves children ’s learning, and they endure, institutionalized in the school as a social system. Clearly, “significantly improves” is a matter of expectation and interpretation . And because no change is permanent, institutionalization is a matter of degree and time, best judged retrospectively. 257 In fact, though people talk glibly of “school reform” and many would-be reformers simply assume that their designs satisfy these conditions, few give careful attention to whether, first, a specific proposed change stands a reasonable chance of being implemented as intended; whether, if that were possible, it could stay in place; and whether, if it did, the school would educate students better. Instead, the difficulty of implementing changes of any significance often leads proponents to focus on incremental progress in establishing programmatic details and to displace expectations of benefits for children onto ever-distant future completion. In considering Task Force lessons, we can draw conclusions more easily about possibilities for community action to influence schools than about consequent effects on children, because the latter is largely outside of community control. Recognizing the importance of those questions, we focus on whether community action can significantly affect school policies or practices. Influencing Schools The Task Force made no effort to influence curriculum and pedagogy. In the consultation on student discipline, it got university faculty to help school staff change policies and practices, but this activity had little impact on the school. More strategic, longer-term effort with schools ready to change would have greater effect. Community members can help identify schools that are attuned to students’ family and community circumstances and seem prepared to innovate , but it is impractical for a community organization to maintain a pool of educational consultants. The Task Force has tried to change practices regarding children whose troubled family conditions hinder their learning, through the development of a full-service community school. This project adds resources that enable staff to change their responses to behavioral problems by choosing therapeutic interventions instead of, or in addition to, punitive ones. Unlike the discipline consultation, this initiative does not question basic policies and practices, and staff accept these innovations because they do not interfere with core practices. Yet that condition also sets limits to initiatives such as this. For example, conditions to which new health and social services respond might also be improved by changes in curriculum or pedagogy, staff-student relations, or discipline policies, but they lie outside of the full-service program. Thus one lesson is that community organizations may influence schools when interventions leave basic academic policies and practices untouched. Whether changes under these conditions can be significant depends on specifics. There is an important second lesson here. Professional educators value community assistance when it addresses “community” problems—out258 Lessons and Conclusions side influences that hinder teaching and that most teachers feel they understand poorly. Whether such action is possible points to a third lesson, framed by contrasts between the discipline consultation and the full-service community school. A community organization’s chances of influencing a school depend greatly on a principal’s interest in having the school influenced. The full-service project points to the area where a community organization can most easily influence a school—relations...