Reinterpreting Urban School Reform: Have Urban Schools Failed, or Has the Reform Movement Failed Urban Schools?

10. Joint Ventures Between Public Schools and City Government: Implications for Community Development

229 Chapter 10 Joint Ventures Between Public Schools and City Government: Implications for Community Development Louis F. Mirón School districts located in major urban centers throughout the United States appear to suffer from chronic underachievement. Although schools are expected to serve multiple functions ranging from implementing a curriculum aligned with state frameworks to providing after school care, they nonetheless elicit criticism when students do poorly on standardized achievement tests. Society holds schools and school districts accountable for academic achievement while also tending to blame principals and teachers for a variety of social ills when performance lags. These ills include unemployment, violent crime, and the lack of moral values owing to a curriculum and academic standards that are widely perceived as lacking discipline and high expectations. Implicitly, the wider society seems to extend the perceived failure in academic achievement with the public school sector to rampant social problems in the inner cities (Mirón 1996). It is small wonder, then, that the mayors of large urban school districts have increasingly joined the national chorus for educational reform. For instance, the 1998 meeting of the Council of Great City Schools, as well as that of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, featured workshops and keynote addresses on the role of urban mayors in promoting reform. Historically mayors in cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago have maintained a firm, albeit sometimes implicit, grip over education governance and policies by virtue of their abilities to appoint members of the local school board or school finance committees. Moreover, the politics of local economic and community development, as Paul Peterson (1976) theorized in City Limits,1 virtually necessitated in cities like Chicago a close linkage between ward-based community politics and educational policy. Both of these political processes were often controlled by mayors. This paper examines the dynamics of mayoral involvement in urban education through a case study of “joint ventures.” Joint ventures are formal collaborative relationships between institutions of government, for example school districts and cities. Historically they have operated under the auspices of the provisions of Home Rule, which was granted to many cities by their state constitutions. Informally joint ventures can consist of partnership arrangements among individuals engaged in activities such as mutual planning, facility sharing (public libraries and parks), and joint oversight committees. Two cases will be presented, New Orleans, a city that in 1995 institutionalized joint ventures in its City Charter,2 and Santa Ana, California, a city where the mayor took the symbolic initiative to name the city the “Education City.” The latter symbolized an effort to link the economic progress of that city with the success of its public schools. The chapter focuses on the actual, as contrasted to the espoused, degree and quality of cooperation as manifested in the extant joint ventures. An analysis of multiple sources of data including interviews with mayors and superintendents (or their staff), public documents, and promotional materials will be presented. However, before beginning the analysis I will present a conceptual framework that seeks to merge political, organizational, and procedural dimensions of joint ventures. New Institutional Configurations In general terms joint ventures may be viewed as mutual responses by the various institutions of government to perceived isomorphism . That is, as society at large, and in particular those interest groups and institutions (taxpayer associations, the news media) that pride themselves as watchdogs of government bemoan the “fleecing of America,” there is pressure for governmental agencies— including public education—to work together. The public holds a wide image of an inefficient government that does not cooperate among all of its sectors. As students of contemporary educational reform and governance have widely noted, public schools and school systems are notorious for their organizational isolation (Stone 1996). The unstated theoretical assumption is that, however powerful, governmental organizations are incapable of controlling the global demands of their environment. Borrowing from the works of Stone (1993, 1996), Emery and Trist (1965) and others, Howell Baum 230 Louis F. Mirón (1998) has proposed a conceptual framework for studying collaborative institutional relationships. Baum conceptualizes an interorganizational domain model “wherein organizations [are] becoming interdependent, and actions by one would set others into motion, in turn affecting still others in ways that no single entity could control .” (1998, 3) These “interorganizational domains” provide the environmental contexts that engulf seeming autonomous organizations . Turbulence, uncertainty, and complexity mark their theoretical and normative contours. The unintended consequences of the newly rationalized...