Community Action for School Reform

Chapter 16

Chapter 16 Building Networks in Turbulent Fields Tension between Attachment and Knowledge School reform, as any action in a turbulent field, depends on creating a network that collectively has the capacity to control the environment and the intelligence to bring about results. The Southeast Education Task Force is an effort to design such attachments and knowledge. The past two chapters have described the difficulties of these efforts. Community organizations are insubstantial and fragile. They do not attract the attention of universities or school systems; they have little evident to offer and no power to compel participation. School systems are self-absorbed and defensive. They avoid contacts and shun community organizations. And yet the Task Force managed to develop connections that contributed to educational improvement. This chapter examines the difficulties and possibilities of what can be called “organizing practice”: efforts to organize people in attachments and ideas in knowledge so that efficacious collective action is possible in a turbulent environment.The analysis focuses on how the tenuousness of attachments puts knowledge in jeopardy. THE TURBULENT URBAN EDUCATION FIELD Turbulent Environments The essence of turbulent environments is that entities sharing a field are so large and numerous that action by one sets several others reverberating, with the result that no one can control the field or succeed at much by itself. 225 Because entities cross traditional geographic, political, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries, problems that arise belong to no one alone—and may belong to no one at all. Solving problems depends on creating networks whose members can design and agree on new roles, relationships, procedures, and directions (Gray 1989; Schön and Rein 1994). Unlike the formal institutions that send participants , networks are loosely bounded and structured, with fluid, negotiable membership, responsibility, authority, and accountability. Because problems do not match organizational boundaries, the crucial links in these networks are individuals who have distinct skill, knowledge, and personal security, as well as time and other resources, that enable them to connect organizations, communities , and institutions (Sarason and Lorentz 1998). Actually, “organizations,” “communities,” and “institutions” misleadingly imply coherence and unity. For example, these entities may have powerful informal structures that bear little resemblance to formal descriptions. More than that, they frequently are not single bodies. Many are themselves networks , of “divisions,” “subcommunities,” “departments,” “groups,” and the like. Relations among these components may be stable, but they need not be. Moreover, the units may act autonomously, often connecting more with “outsiders ” than those “inside.” These conditions have two implications for solving problems. One is that work may require creating, or at least strengthening, the entities that themselves become participants in an “interorganizational” network. Community organization is a prototypical example, where an organizer must fashion a “community” that can act. The same may be said with regard to school systems . The second implication is that the components of a network spanning a turbulent field often are subunits (including individual members) of entities that are formal members. The Education Field In the case of the Southeast Education Task Force, the education field can be described as having six main components: the community (which includes people who live, send their children to school, work, or do business in Southeast Baltimore, as well as organizations that are located or operate there); the Task Force; the University of Maryland; funders; sixteen schools; and the Baltimore City Public School system, represented most concretely by its central administration but encompassing the sixteen schools. These components, in turn, include other actors. The distinction between the schools and the school system, though partly arbitrary, recognizes that schools have some autonomy to act independently of the central administration. 226 Tensions between Attachment and Knowledge Urban education fields include a school system and schools, by definition. From the perspective of most local school systems, the community is not an actor, at least not one with whom they intentionally interact. Community organizations concerned with education are rare. Similarly, few universities take a role in the urban education field more active than preparing teachers or administrators to join the school system or providing some professional development for staff. Hence, it is unusual to find a university and community organization working together on education. Thus the education field portrayed here may be unrepresentative of American cities, but it shows the challenges and possibilities of developing denser urban education fields. Truncated Membership One might object that this field, whatever can be said about difficulties organizing it, is not...