Community Action for School Reform

Chapter 6

Chapter 6 Creating the Southeast Education Task Force MOVING FROM RESEARCH TO PARTICIPATION The coordinating committee reconvened two weeks later to review the kickoff and to figure out what to do next. People congratulated themselves on a success . They had drawn a good turnout, including principals, and participants had talked earnestly and respectfully. Yet Ed Rutkowski noted that few came from outside of the schools. David Casey argued that the Task Force needed more staff to sustain participation and to follow through. Although the kickoff had endorsed an agenda, the core group struggled to define the parameters of action. Discussion focused on a scarcity of resources, though some of that talk may have been an effort to transform inner uncertainty about what to do into external constraints on doing anything. After the high of the kickoff, people talked hesitantly. Perhaps, some suggested, instead of trying to develop and sustain four work groups that would each study an issue and make proposals , they should just assign projects to ready volunteers. A month later, English opened the coordinating committee meeting with a design for a planning process that included four work groups, each completing something tangible between January and June, but each also identifying broader interventions that were needed, with findings and recommendations codified in a plan to be released by December 1996. English emphasized that groups should focus opportunistically on projects that were “doable . . . with a little bit of longevity.” Established by these accomplishments and armed with accompanying recommendations, the Task Force could then go to funders for staff to organize schools and community members and to implement the 73 proposals. Now the coordinating committee would invite kickoff attendees to join the Task Force and work groups. The committee scrambled to find four people to convene the groups in January, with the hope that each would lead the group over the following six months. As for staffing, I would work with the school-community relations group, and Debby Volk, my graduate assistant, would aid the safety group. We would do what we could with the resources and programs groups. At last the Southeast Education Task Force would take form. Participants in the work groups would constitute the general membership, and their convenors would join the core group as an expanded coordinating committee. DEVELOPING PARTICIPATION The Contingencies of Participation Presciently, English had asked about setting snow dates for the work group meetings, but the question got lost in the exigencies of finding convenors. In mid-January, Baltimore’s worst blizzard in years canceled the initial meetings of the four groups. When they finally met, school safety and school-community relations each drew fourteen people, resources got eight, and six showed up to discuss programs. Most participants were teachers, community activists, or coordinating committee members; few parents came. The snow was an omen of the odds against organizing. To begin with, leadership was uneven. The convenors of the programs, resources, and safety groups were coordinating committee members who agreed to call the groups together but had extensive commitments. They lacked the time to recruit participants, keep in touch with members between meetings, or put much into planning or implementing projects. A merchant who had young children volunteered to lead the school-community relations group but soon resigned to put more time into his business. The experience of the programs group highlighted a second challenge: getting good information. The group started out trying to compile an inventory of programs in the sixteen schools. They found it hard to obtain information from schools and difficult to conceptualize and categorize the functions of programs they had heard about.They foundered on the challenge of making any judgments about programs—whether they were good, whether one was better than another, or even whether in a crude quantitative way they met students ’ needs. Carolyn Boitnott, the convenor, became increasingly clear about the inadequacies of easily available information, while participation in the group dwindled. Her experience reflected a third challenge. 74 Participation Participants found that there were no simple problem definitions or answers in education, and that it would take a long time to develop the knowledge to make authoritative proposals. The prospect of spending months in a group without tangible results led a number of people, including some convenors , to other, more attractive opportunities. The groups encapsulated community organizing predicaments in education . Parents are busy being parents and have little time for meetings, even those serving...