School as Community: From Promise to Practice

1. The Complexity and Coherence of Educational Communities: An Analysis of the Images that Reflect and Influence Scholarship and Practice

CHAPTER 1 The Complexity and Coherence of Educational Communities: An Analysis of the Images that Reflect and Influence Scholarship and Practice Lynn G. Beck THE QUEST FOR COMMUNITY AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF METAPHORICAL ANALYSIS Schools in the United States began as integral—even organizing—institutions within local communities (Cremin, 1988; Tyack, 1974). Typically supporting local values and manifesting relationship patterns congruent of surrounding neighborhoods, such institutions were both extensions and reflections of their environs. As Tyack (1974) notes, “School and community were organically related in a tightly knit group in which people met face to face and knew each other’s affairs” (p. 17). Under such conditions, the idea of the school as community was something of a “given.” Its scope, however, expanded during the 1800s as idealistic reformers such as Horace Mann set out to create a common school system that could serve as a rallying point for the maintenance of a strong national community. The belief that educational institutions should promote and embody prevailing values, customs, and social and political structures persisted with little change until the early 1900s (Tyack & Hansot, 1982). At that time, pressures and promises emanating from technological and industrial developments, from the influx of person to urban areas, and from World War I and later the depression, coupled with strong national commitments to efficiency and productivity and faith in scientific management models led to the development of educational systems modeled after “machines and factories ” (Tyack, 1974, p. 41). In such settings the focus was on preparing workers for the many businesses and industries across the country. 23 During the late 1800s and early 1900s, John Dewey (1990) was one of a small number of scholars arguing against the movement to create educational “factories” capable of mass producing children well trained for work in the “real” world and contending, instead, that each classroom “be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons” (p. 14). Insisting that a democratic society was composed of “people held together because they are working along common lines, in a common spirit, with reference to common aims” (p. 14), Dewey averred that schools must discover ways to allow for “a growing interchange of thought and growing unity of sympathetic feeling . . . [revolving around] common and productive activity” (p. 14). As Jackson (1990) and Lagerman (1989) note, Dewey’s vision has been relatively uninfluential throughout much of the twentieth century. Recent years have witnessed something of a resurgence of interest in Dewey. Concomitantly, there has also been a strong resurgence in the concept of community as it relates to educational endeavors. Some thinkers (e.g., Bellah et al., 1985; Keniston, 1965; Nisbit, 1990) see the creation of strong communities in schools and other institutions as an antidote to the loneliness and alienation that have become so characteristic of modern life. Others (e.g., Chubb & Moe, 1990; Murphy, 1996 ) see a shift to community-controlled schools as a way to foil the “trend toward administrative bloat” (William Bennett, quoted in Hanushek, 1994, p. 37) that afflicts and paralyzes many schools today. Still others (e.g., Edmonds, 1979, 1986; Hallinger & Murphy, 1986; Lightfoot, 1983; Rutter et al., 1979) are motivated to promote educational communities by the growing body of research linking higher levels of student achievement with school cultures “characterized by opportunities for collaboration among teachers, cohesion in the student culture, and positive interactions between students and teachers (Bryk & Driscoll, 1988, p. 2). Whatever the reason, the mid- to late 1980s and 1990s have born witness to a growing body of theoretical and empirical work concerned with understanding schools that function as communities; discovering ways to foster this phenomenon in those that do not; and exploring strategies, policies, and programs to connect educational organizations with their environments. As scholarship on educational community has proliferated, so too have questions about this phenomenon. Many of these questions grow out of what Oldenquist (1991) terms the promiscuous (p. 95) use of the word community to describe a wide variety of social arrangements. Like Frank G. Kirkpatrick (1986), we find ourselves “confused” by the “enormous flexibility” in our use of this term. The project described in this chapter was prompted by a suspicion that the fact that we use the word community to describe a host of social situations may not be reflective of intellectual or linguistic laziness. Rather, our frequent 24 Beck and even “promiscuous” use...