Beyond Schools:Community-Based Learning Opportunities and Supplemental Education
"The Carriage House"
Justine
Research Perspective | Advocate Perspective
Education stakeholders increasingly recognize that schools alone cannot achieve equity or excellence at scale. Students are in school for only six hours a day; the activities and people they are exposed to outside of school make a huge difference in how well they can learn. But opportunities for student learning and development outside of school are distributed inequitably, like those inside of school. As a result, the task of achieving equity and excellence at scale is doubly hard and will require concerted efforts by institutions outside of schools as well as schools themselves.
The Institute has advanced the notion of smart educational systems (SES) as a way of presenting the necessary array of partners. In an SES, school reform efforts involve cross-sector partnerships characterized by differently negotiated relationships that shift power and access among the players and draw on expanded notions of evidence for excellence. This "new old" idea is linked to such concepts as the full-service schools of the 1980s and the youth development and neighborhood initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s.
Advocates of community-based learning and supplemental education define equity by considering how to compensate for differing inputs or starting circumstances through a unique, community-based package of resources beyond the public school system. Key questions for pursuing this strategy for equity are:
- What would it take to create an equitable and excellent system of out-of-school learning opportunities for large numbers of students?
- What collection of resources could or should be marshaled to support low-income communities in creating out-of-school learning opportunities?
- What responsibility do municipal actors have to the community for maintaining supplemental education systems?
More about smart education systems.
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Research Perspective:
An Interview with Edmund W. Gordon
Edmund W. Gordon
The problem supplemental education seeks to remedy has to do with the underproductivity of schools with subpopulations and the underproductivity of those populations themselves. My concern is to find out why low-income and people of color function so much less well in school than the high-status people. Clearly, the quality of schools available to these two populations differs, but it isn't clear that they differ enough to account for the difference in these people's achievement. So I began trying to see what other factors could be involved and it was clear to me that you have students who come from more privileged backgrounds, who are exposed to experiences both in school and out of school that are different from those students who come from lower-status backgrounds. Education, I realized, is about far more than academic achievement.
Read a transcript of the interview:
Supplementary Education:
Educating and Developing the Whole Child
[PDF: 11 pages]
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Advocate Perspective
In the wake of hurricane Katrina, the students from Chalmette and Douglass high schools have both suffered devastating losses to their communities. The good thing is that all of us who care about New Orleans and the surrounding parishes have the opportunity to learn from the Students at the Center community. We can make our school system reflect true equality and community cooperation that could generate significant economic and technological growth as well as great self-reliance and sufficiency. If we are serious about creating a better New Orleans and we understand that a better school system is an important factor in that, then we know what we have to do. There is only one way to eliminate low-performing schools for good: get rid of those schools that separate and destroy the potential of community.
Read the essay: Honoring Community [PDF: 5 pages]
