Community Action for School Reform

Preface

Preface This book chronicles a journey. In 1994, a few Southeast Baltimore community activists and I decided to see what a community group could do to improve schools. And there is no other way to say it: we had next to no idea what we would do. Nine years later, the Southeast Education Task Force has organized parents, developed and begun implementing a community plan on education, helped an overcrowded school get an addition, influenced the Empowerment Zone’s education initiative, aided an elementary school in becoming a full-service community school, lobbied successfully for a new K–8 school, and much else. At least as important as these specifics, the Task Force has convinced ordinary citizens that they can do something about education, and it has established the principle that parents and other community members should participate in the school system. The handful of activists who set this in motion met the two challenges of community action. One is to attach individuals and organizations to create a network capable of acting. The other is to develop and use tested knowledge in deciding what to do and doing it. They spent their first two years mostly talking, trying to learn enough about education, the school system, and their own capacities to act. They identified other community members, some education activists, and a few in the school system who were interested in going ahead. They took tentative first steps, learned richly from the results, and continued moving. They elaborated a university-community partnership and developed some community-school partnerships. One might be struck by the informality and looseness of their efforts, particularly at the start. These were not education reformers implementing a clearly articulated model of school improvement. Yet that is one of this book’s central points. Most school reform, like most schooling, is a top-down affair, the province of professionals. Ordinary people, though the constituency, clients, and intended beneficiaries of schooling, are assumed to know little that matters for setting directions, deciding on strategies, or evaluating results. Yet there are strong arguments for community involvement in education. First, it ix is a democratic right. Second, research shows that parental involvement contributes to academic achievement. And, third, community activism is necessary to prod schools to change and to implement change. There are few models of a community approach to school improvement, particularly in the cities, to complement other efforts. The Southeast Education Task Force has experimented with creating one that works. Readers should examine this book in that spirit. Those looking for blockbuster success in changing a school system or even a school will be disappointed. However, the truth be told, they will find few examples of that anywhere. That, too, is one of this book’s central points. School systems are complex and open to their environments. Professional ideologies, bureaucratic politics, and garden-variety organizational dynamics influence what goes on in classrooms. Moreover, children’s learning, as we all know, has to do with both what goes on in classrooms and what goes on in homes and on the streets. The school is always in the community, and the community is always in the school. This book looks at how organizational dynamics and family and community life influence schooling, how both often constrain change, and how, to get to the bottom line, educational improvement depends on organizational change and social reform. The stories realistically describe the organizational and community interests, uncertainties, ambiguities, and anxieties that any reform must come to terms with. Case studies often suppress these discouraging details, but there is no way around them. For reformers who spend most of their time in schools, this book shines useful light on urban communities. In many educators’ cognitive maps, the community is terra incognita, more likely sinister than friendly, amorphous, populated by undifferentiated families or else by a few families and local businesses somehow situated amid broad empty spaces. This book shows what community members look and sound like and how they act when they try to work with schools to improve them. Another of this book’s main points is that these community members want to work with schools to help them educate children. Community activism disrupts schooling’s normal routines (though many of these, as educators recognize, do not accomplish much), but it offers resources and, yes, knowledge for stronger, collaborative action. One need not romanticize community action or exaggerate its accomplishments to appreciate its potential. This book’s lessons might be summarized in three statements...