Community Action for School Reform

Notes

Notes NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. The following data were reported in Anyon (1997) and Olson and Jerald (1998). The data come from the 1990 Census and from various surveys in the 1990s. 2. This framework draws on Meyer’s and Rowan’s (1983; also see Meyer 1977) distinction between technical and institutional functions of education, discussed in later chapters. NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. People also participate for the social contact, but because community organizations make extraordinary time demands, those who take part usually expect action to result. NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. The population dropped to 632,000 by the 2000 Census. 2. This analysis draws on Crenson (2000). 3. African Americans comprised 63 percent of Baltimore’s population in 2000. 4. This section draws on Berkowitz (1997), Bowler (1991), and Orr (1999). 5. I have described this culture as “good-hearted home ownership” (Baum 1997). It is a specimen of what Gans (1988) has characterized as “middle-American individualism .” 6. These data come from the Baltimore City Department of Planning (1992a, 1992b) and the Southeast Planning Council (1993). 7. On SECO, see Cassidy (1979), Clay and Hollister (1983), Crenson (1983), 273 Cunningham and Kotler (1983), Giloth (1993, 1994), Kuttner (1976), and Truelove (1977a, 1977b). NOTES TO CHAPTER 10 1.The federal government gave smaller grants and lesser policy concessions to several dozen Enterprise Communities—applicants that failed to win Empowerment Zone designation. NOTES TO CHAPTER 14 1. Alternatively, when partnerships falter, partners may unrealistically vilify one another. In either case, realism is easily displaced by imagination (Sarason 1972). 2. The funding allocation was a Planning Program decision, not a USDE requirement . 3. The Urban Community Service Program gave $1 million for five years, but the effort to support five projects allowed only four years’ work on each. The Community Outreach Partnership Program supports many more university-community partnerships but gives them only $500,000 over three years. NOTES TO CHAPTER 15 1. Saul Alinsky, a pioneering American community organizer, considered the organization of 3 percent of a community’s members a success. 2. During the 2000–2001 school year, Baltimore mobility rates (proportions of students entering or withdrawing during the year) were 44 percent in elementary schools, 47 percent in middle schools, and 50 percent in high schools (Maryland State Department of Education 2001). 3. Few children in Baltimore’s elite neighborhoods attend public schools. In Homeland, 16 percent of children attended public schools in 1990. In Roland Park, with one of the city’s best elementary schools, 18 percent attended public schools. In economically mixed census tracts including Guilford, the number was 28 percent. In Southeast Baltimore, in contrast, 82 percent of children attended public schools, with most others in Catholic schools (Baltimore City Department of Planning 1992a). 4. In 1998, 89 percent of American children in elementary or secondary school were in public schools. This figure has fluctuated only slightly since World War II (National Center for Education Statistics 2001, table 3). 274 Notes 5. Surveys consistently find that the closer people are to the public schools, the more favorably they evaluate them. When the October 2000 Gallup Poll asked parents of public school students to grade their oldest (or only) child’s school, 70 percent gave it an A or a B. When asked to evaluate the community’s schools, 56 percent of parents gave an A or a B, in contrast to only 44 percent of adults without children currently in school. When asked to evaluate the nation’s schools, only 22 percent of public school parents gave an A or a B, and only 19 percent of nonparents did so. Asked whether improvements lay in reforming the system or in finding an alternative system, similar proportions of parents (60 percent) and nonparents (59 percent) favored reform (Rose and Gallup 2000). Although parents’ assessments of their children’s schools are high, only slightly more than half give their community’s schools an A or a B, hardly a strong endorsement . Moreover, those without children in public schools, comprising a majority of voters and taxpayers, regard the public schools quite poorly (in fact, declining from 26 percent As and Bs in 1999 to 19 percent in 2000). 6. In Baltimore, for example, in only 40 percent of 180 schools was the fall 1995, principal still leading the school in fall 1999. NOTES TO CHAPTER 16 1. Two common bureaucratic arrangements that hinder...