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Voices in Urban Education
Archives
Engaging Communities
VUE Number 13, Fall 2006
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Community Engagement: Mobilizing Constituents to Demand and Support Educational Improvement
By Norm Fruchter and Richard Gray
Norm Fruchter is director and Richard Gray is a principal associate of the Community Involvement Program at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Complete author bios
Audio Clip
LISTEN [22 minutes, 25 seconds]
Voices in Urban Education editor Robert Rothman has a conversation with Norm Fruchter and Don McAdams about engaging communities.
Community engagement is the active mobilization of organized groups around the common goal of improving education. Engaged communities can support and sustain reforms — and disengaged communities can jeopardize them.
Community engagement efforts in public education seek to identify, inform, and mobilize constituencies to improve and support their public schools and school systems. Because community and engagement are used so often and have so many differing meanings, we start by defining these terms. By community, we mean the range of organized constituencies in any geographically definable setting. Although community can include everyone who lives in a defined area, our definition focuses on constituencies, rather than individuals, and on those constituencies organized into groups and represented by group leadership. Engaging individuals who are not part of constituency groups requires intensive (and expensive) primary organizing strategies that transcend what most engagement efforts can mount. Therefore our definition of community engagement as a strategy depends on the existence of organized groups.
We define engagement in public education as the mobilization of constituencies organized as groups and the
meshing of constituency groups into an active relationship around a common mission, goal, or purpose — the improvement
of public education in a specific setting.1 Effective engagement depends
on defining goals that a variety of constituency groupings can affirm and forging relationships and structures
that build the capacity of those groups to pursue their common articulated purpose. Such engagement, ultimately,
results in a shared culture of action and mobilization in which participating groups are evaluated by what they do
rather than by what they say.
Community engagement strategies are usually a mix of demand and support components. The demand side involves a critique or indictment of a school or district's performance, challenges that specify how much more the school or district must do to improve their students' outcomes, and a set of proposals for how schools can meet those higher expectations that are bold, simple, and strategically compelling.2 The support side involves identifying,mobilizing, and bringing into alliance the leadership of the constituency groups whose backing is critical to the desired reform and who will support — with time, resources, and political capital — the school system's efforts to meet the challenge to produce better outcomes for the community's children. Effective community engagement efforts can transform traditional "seeking permission" relationships between parents, community groups, and schools to "negotiated partnerships" committed to building a shared agenda for higherquality education and student achievement. The issue of a more equitable distribution of power and resources across these entities is critical to achieving such a partnership.
A Continuum of Constituencies
We define the continuum of constituency groups critical to effective community engagement efforts as: elite sectors; political leadership; civic and cultural organizations; and grassroots groups. Many community engagement efforts begin by targeting the leadership of elite organizations — the city's corporate sector (leading industries, banks, insurance and real estate companies, utilities, and finance and law firms); the city's dominant media (newspapers, television and radio stations); and the city's leading nonprofit organizations (universities, hospitals, and large-scale service organizations and voluntary providers). The work of Clarence Stone and his colleagues (Stone et al. 2001) shows that such constituencies are a necessary component of sustained support for school reform. But Stone's findings also caution that restricting public engagement to such elite groups risks limiting the desired improvements to the relatively narrow parameters those elites find acceptable. Moreover, elite-driven reform often masks or fails to address the critical race, class, and power imbalances that contribute to undereducating poor children of color.
Improving urban schools and sustaining that improvement over time requires the engagement of grassroots groups which can challenge the power imbalances that have imposed and maintained these poorly performing schools across time.
Engagement efforts that target only elite sectors often downplay or marginalize the critical roles that can be played by intermediary sectors such as the city's political leadership and its civic and cultural infrastructure. Engaging such groups can add immeasurably to the capacity for outreach and communication and, ultimately, the effectiveness of the engagement effort. Including grassroots groups is particularly critical for community engagement efforts to improve local school systems, because such groups possess the latent political capacity necessary to challenge traditional race, class, and power dominance in many jurisdictions, especially urban settings. 3 The persistence of poor-quality schooling in urban communities of color, for example, is intimately related to the limited social capital and political power of the constituencies who inhabit these communities. Improving urban schools and sustaining that improvement over time requires the engagement of grassroots groups which can challenge the power imbalances that have imposed and maintained these poorly performing schools across time.
Therefore, in addition to the elite sectors described above, local political leadership, leading components of the civic and cultural infrastructure, and grassroots community groups need to be part of effective community engagement efforts. Teachers unions and youth groups are also important constituencies to be included.
Political Leadership
The need to build support for engagement efforts among local political leadership is obvious. Elected officials control the fiscal resources that fund school systems; they also dominate the legislative arenas that determine educational policy. (Note that elected officials include not only the members of state legislatures and city councils, but also the elected members of local school boards or committees, who determine the educational and fiscal policies of most school districts.)
Civic and Cultural Infrastructure
The need to engage leading elements of a jurisdiction's civic and cultural infrastructure may seem less obvious. But civic, service, and advocacy groups such as the League of Women Voters, the NAACP and the Urban League, ASPIRA and La Raza, the library association, the YMCA, the Boys and Girls clubs, citywide volunteer organizations that provide critical services to children and youth, as well as arts groups, museums, and other cultural organizations, are critical components of a successful engagement strategy. These groups' memberships often include key elements of the city's diverse constituencies, and their leadership is often committed to improving equity of resources and outcomes for disadvantaged students.
How communities engage each of these constituencies varies, depending on the political and social dynamic in each community. And different communities have had different levels of success in engaging all constituencies.
Grassroots Groups
Grassroots groups such as neighborhood-based housing and improvement associations, community development organizations, local service providers, and community-based organizing groups are also a critical component of engagement efforts aimed at systemic schooling improvement.4 We also include neighborhood-based religious institutions such as churches, synagogues, mosques, and others, along with their ancillary after-school, tutoring, and related adult and youth services. 5 School-based constituencies such as parent associations or other neighborhood groups predominantly organized at the school site and, often, mobilized by local school administrative or teacher leadership are also important. In many racially divided cities, these groups represent critical constituencies of color whom school systems have served very poorly for decades. The experience, energy, passion, and commitment these constituencies can mobilize is an invaluable component of any community engagement strategy.
Teachers Unions
The role of teachers unions in community engagement efforts to improve schooling is a particularly complex issue. In urban settings in which teachers unions are a strong political force, the teachers union is often part of the shadow governance of the district, and union contracts often include provisions that define instructional, personnel, or administrative policy. Such unions are often deeply implicated in the structures, policies, practices, and outcomes that community engagement efforts are trying to change. Yet, in many jurisdictions, unions are such powerful organizations that their support is critical to successful engagement campaigns, and their opposition can often truncate or diminish such efforts. If teachers unions cannot be persuaded to join the engagement initiative, early efforts should attempt to ensure that the union will not oppose the campaign.
Youth Organizations
Finally, youth organizations are critical components. Youth groups that work exclusively within schools, as well as neighborhood-based and citywide youth groups, are emerging as important actors working to improve both the in-school and non-school factors critical to the growth of youth capacity and potential. 6 In many urban settings, school systems composed predominantly of White educators and administrators are failing to provide effective education to poor students of color, who make up a large majority of many districts' student bodies. In those settings, the voices, the demands, and the organizations of young people are critical contributors to more effective public schooling, because their experience of the quality of the district's education and their ideas about alternatives are unique and irreplaceable.
Engagement in Practice
How communities engage each of these constituencies varies, depending on the political and social dynamic in each community. And different communities have had different levels of success in engaging all constituencies to support reforms. The Community Involvement Program (CIP), formerly at New York University and now a part of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, has been working for several years to develop community engagement initiatives to support the work of high school reform in several sites that are part of Carnegie Corporation of New York's Schools for a New Society (SNS) initiative, an effort to redesign high schools in seven cities. The experiences in several of the SNS sites suggest some of the complexity, difficulty, and critical necessity of these efforts.
Boston
In Boston, representatives of several of the city's community groups participated in the initial round of SNS proposal development but were subsequently marginalized. Boston SNS site leadership's traditional approach to community engagement focused more on "informing" the community rather than opening avenues for grassroots constituency groups to participate in shaping the reform and helping to create the kinds of schools they want for their children.
CIP helped to mobilize an array of grassroots groups and encourage them to articulate their interest in rejoining Boston SNS as players with a clear voice in project decision making. The groups, particularly the Boston Parent Organizing Network (BPON), decided that the Boston school system needed to create a cabinet-level position responsible for community engagement efforts. A district task force had come to the same conclusion, and the superintendent agreed to create a high-level post dedicated to community engagement. Once that position was effectively staffed, BPON and other community groups took a more active role in the SNS initiative. CIP worked with the Annenberg Institute to help the new deputy superintendent of community engagement become involved in the Boston High School Renewal efforts. CIP and the Institute also encouraged the site leadership to expand the base of groups involved in the reform process.
CIP staff met with several constituency organizations to assess what would encourage them to engage more intensively in the SNS process and helped facilitate discussions that produced a set of principles redefining the power relationship between community groups and the SNS Boston leadership. From those principles, a new grassroots coalition emerged, which will receive some SNS funds for community engagement work in the fall of 2006. Boston's Freedom House will coordinate the coalition and also join the site's reform leadership team.
Providence
The SNS high school reform initiative was structured as a partnership between participating urban school districts and external organizations that played the role of lead partner and fiscal agent in each district. In Providence, Rhode Island, the lead partner, a community-service organization, initially perceived its role as representing the spectrum of local community constituencies involved in schooling improvement and youth development.
In Providence, Rhode Island, the lead partner's definition of its role began to evolve as the organization became increasingly committed to maximizing community power in the initiative, rather than marginalizing community interests.
But the lead partner's definition of its role began to evolve as the organization became increasingly committed to maximizing community power in the initiative, rather than marginalizing community interests.With CIP's help, the lead partner mobilized previously excluded community groups to form the Providence Educational Excellence Coalition (PEEC). PEEC was very influenced by the example of CC9, the Community Collaborative to Improve District 9 schools (now CCB), the first organizing collaborative established with CIP support and coordination in New York City.
PEEC began by successfully advocating for the restructuring of one of the city's poorest-performing high schools and has subsequently monitored the implementation of the redesign and transformation process in that school. Committed to becoming a data-driven organization, PEEC has reviewed and analyzed school-system financing, student information and outcome databases, the improvement strategies of the state education department, and the nature of the Providence teachers union contract. PEEC members have spent considerable time in Providence schools, observing and learning from educators, students, and parents. PEEC members currently play critical roles on a range of implementation action teams at the restructuring high school.
Chattanooga
The Hamilton County reform began with the merger of the city (Chattanooga) and county school districts. A reform-minded superintendent, committed to improving outcomes, particularly for the merged system's African American students, led a successful change effort: across a ten-year span, almost all the system's indicators show considerable gain.
But several members of the County Commission, the elected body that funds the county school system, increasingly hampered the superintendent's efforts. These opponents of reform consistently rejected the budget increases the superintendent's initiatives required and also argued that the superintendent's reforms were targeted to the city's predominantly African American schools at the expense of the county's predominantly White schools.
When the superintendent publicly criticized opposition commissioners for failing to fund the school system adequately,
a classic modernization conflict (with a racial substructure) erupted. The superintendent and his supporters,
including the Public Education Foundation, the very active and sophisticated local education fund, argued that the
county's economic development needs required building a knowledge-based economy and that an improved school
system was integral to that effort. The opposition commissioners argued that the current school system was effectively
serving the county's children, that the reforms were unnecessary because many students did not need college
preparation to thrive and prosper, and that the superintendent was squandering the system's existing resources.
In this highly polarized conflict, key voices were absent. The city and county's corporate sector, which generally shared the superintendent's commitment to improving student outcomes, were mostly silent. Many of Chattanooga's African American constituencies, critical of the school system's past poor performance and unsure about how much to trust the superintendent's commitments, were also not significantly involved. The failure to engage these two crucial constituencies made the superintendent increasingly vulnerable to opponents' attacks, which focused on him as a symbol of ineffectiveness, rather than on the issue of improving the school system's outcomes.
As the conflict escalated, the superintendent mobilized his supporters, including a countywide parents' association the school district had helped to organize. In a bitter finale, the superintendent, buttressed by three years of large test-score increases, won a very close vote for a school budget increase from the County Commission. But the fight was so bruising that the superintendent decided to retire, to defuse the conflict and create the possibility for a more supportive realignment under a new leader. In the ensuing selection process, the county's corporate community mobilized to ensure that the school system's reform direction continued. Corporate leaders took charge of the superintendent search committee and refused to nominate the educator supported by the opponents of reform. The school board then appointed one of the search committee's finalists, an African American deputy superintendent with considerable urban experience, by an almost unanimous vote. In the subsequent election for county commissioners, the corporate sector and a broad array of civic groups helped defeat key reform opponents, and the composition of the new County Commission is now far more favorable.
The Role of Community Engagement
These three examples suggest the critical roles that community engagement can play in supporting and sustaining reform efforts, as well as the vulnerability of those reforms in the absence of such efforts. Boston's high school reform shows the cost of inadequate engagement. The reform was essentially an elite-led effort involving key school reform intermediaries and the city's corporate sector. The absence of any significant community engagement efforts resulted in the non-involvement of key constituency groups, particularly those representing the city's African American and Latino communities. When the long-serving reform superintendent announced his retirement, those groups mobilized to articulate their concerns about the school system's failure to effectively serve their students. They published a report that critiqued the system's efforts and presented a set of improvement demands. The report was very critical of the implementation of High School Renewal, the SNS initiative in Boston Schools (Citizen Commission 2006).
Effective engagement can help build enduring constituency support for school improvement and reform, a particularly important asset in a fluid political terrain in which superintendents and school board members are too often transient.
In Providence, the lead partner's change in role perception led to the creation of a new coalition representing grassroots constituencies previously excluded from participation in the SNS reform. The coalition effectively supported the state education commissioner's recommendation for closing and restructuring a poorly performing Providence high school and is helping to monitor and support the transformation process.
In Chattanooga/Hamilton County, the failure to mount effective community engagement efforts isolated the superintendent and ultimately led to his decision to retire. Ironically, that retirement galvanized both the corporate sector and key civic and grassroots constituencies and contributed to a reawakening of political will that transformed the legislative landscape, producing new support for reform.
As these cases show, public engagement for schooling improvement can fulfill a variety of critical needs. Such engagement can tap the ideas, energy, and experience of parents, citizens, and community constituencies committed to improving local school and school-system performance. Effective engagement can help build enduring constituency support for school improvement and reform, a particularly important asset in a fluid political terrain in which superintendents and school board members are too often transient. Engagement can strengthen the legitimacy and the need for school reform, as varieties of constituencies mobilize to articulate, fight for, and support the reform efforts.
Finally, building community engagement for school reform can contribute to the expansion and intensification of public participation in public education. Expanding the public's role in ensuring a high quality of education for succeeding generations will strengthen our nation's potential for consistent and effective democratic action.
FOOTNOTES
1 For a complementary definition, consider how the Public Education Network's theory of action articulated the goal of public engagement for education in 2001: "to create public demand for good public schools. . . we envision communities with a substantive education agenda making real changes in students' achievement.We envision a strong community voice outside the schools — with its own power and constituency — that argues for improvement and helps guide changes.We envision robust community organizations that always are in the process of building new leadership and sustaining involvement." (PEN 2001, p. 11)
2 By strategically compelling, we mean that the solution embodies a persuasive theory of change which argues that if the campaign's remedy is implemented, student achievement will significantly improve.
3 The Public Education Network developed a theory of action for public engagement that identified three complementary categories — policymakers, organized groups, and the public at large (see Turnbull 2006).
4 These local groups are often, but not always, affiliated with national organizing networks such as the Industrial Areas Foundation, the PICO National Network, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
5 We include religious organizations because their membership is usually local and relatively stable and often has close contact with and experience of the quality of education the city's high schools provide. Members of neighborhood groups and religious institutions are also the most likely to send their children to local schools.
6 We identify youth as crucial to engagement efforts not only because their "voice" includes their direct experience of the strengths and limitations of their schooling, but also for the power, authenticity, and idealism at the core of their vision and their organizing efforts.
REFERENCES
Citizen Commission on Academic Success for Boston Children. 2006. Transforming the Boston Public Schools: A Roadmap for the New Superintendent. Boston: Citizen Commission.
Public Education Network. 2001. Theory of Action: Public Engagement for Sustained Reform. Washington, DC: PEN.
Stone, C. N., J. R. Henig, B.D. Jones, and C. Pierannunzi. 2001. Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
Turnbull, B. J. 2006. Citizen Mobilization and Community Institutions: The Public Education Network's Policy Initiatives. Washington, DC: Policy Studies Associates.
Archives
Engaging Communities
VUE Number 13, Fall 2006
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Community Engagement: Mobilizing Constituents to Demand and Support Educational Improvement
By Norm Fruchter and Richard Gray
Norm Fruchter is director and Richard Gray is a principal associate of the Community Involvement Program at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Complete author bios
Audio Clip
LISTEN [22 minutes, 25 seconds]
Voices in Urban Education editor Robert Rothman has a conversation with Norm Fruchter and Don McAdams about engaging communities.
Community engagement is the active mobilization of organized groups around the common goal of improving education. Engaged communities can support and sustain reforms — and disengaged communities can jeopardize them.
Community engagement efforts in public education seek to identify, inform, and mobilize constituencies to improve and support their public schools and school systems. Because community and engagement are used so often and have so many differing meanings, we start by defining these terms. By community, we mean the range of organized constituencies in any geographically definable setting. Although community can include everyone who lives in a defined area, our definition focuses on constituencies, rather than individuals, and on those constituencies organized into groups and represented by group leadership. Engaging individuals who are not part of constituency groups requires intensive (and expensive) primary organizing strategies that transcend what most engagement efforts can mount. Therefore our definition of community engagement as a strategy depends on the existence of organized groups.
We define engagement in public education as the mobilization of constituencies organized as groups and the
meshing of constituency groups into an active relationship around a common mission, goal, or purpose — the improvement
of public education in a specific setting.1 Effective engagement depends
on defining goals that a variety of constituency groupings can affirm and forging relationships and structures
that build the capacity of those groups to pursue their common articulated purpose. Such engagement, ultimately,
results in a shared culture of action and mobilization in which participating groups are evaluated by what they do
rather than by what they say.
Community engagement strategies are usually a mix of demand and support components. The demand side involves a critique or indictment of a school or district's performance, challenges that specify how much more the school or district must do to improve their students' outcomes, and a set of proposals for how schools can meet those higher expectations that are bold, simple, and strategically compelling.2 The support side involves identifying,mobilizing, and bringing into alliance the leadership of the constituency groups whose backing is critical to the desired reform and who will support — with time, resources, and political capital — the school system's efforts to meet the challenge to produce better outcomes for the community's children. Effective community engagement efforts can transform traditional "seeking permission" relationships between parents, community groups, and schools to "negotiated partnerships" committed to building a shared agenda for higherquality education and student achievement. The issue of a more equitable distribution of power and resources across these entities is critical to achieving such a partnership.
A Continuum of Constituencies
We define the continuum of constituency groups critical to effective community engagement efforts as: elite sectors; political leadership; civic and cultural organizations; and grassroots groups. Many community engagement efforts begin by targeting the leadership of elite organizations — the city's corporate sector (leading industries, banks, insurance and real estate companies, utilities, and finance and law firms); the city's dominant media (newspapers, television and radio stations); and the city's leading nonprofit organizations (universities, hospitals, and large-scale service organizations and voluntary providers). The work of Clarence Stone and his colleagues (Stone et al. 2001) shows that such constituencies are a necessary component of sustained support for school reform. But Stone's findings also caution that restricting public engagement to such elite groups risks limiting the desired improvements to the relatively narrow parameters those elites find acceptable. Moreover, elite-driven reform often masks or fails to address the critical race, class, and power imbalances that contribute to undereducating poor children of color.
Improving urban schools and sustaining that improvement over time requires the engagement of grassroots groups which can challenge the power imbalances that have imposed and maintained these poorly performing schools across time.
Engagement efforts that target only elite sectors often downplay or marginalize the critical roles that can be played by intermediary sectors such as the city's political leadership and its civic and cultural infrastructure. Engaging such groups can add immeasurably to the capacity for outreach and communication and, ultimately, the effectiveness of the engagement effort. Including grassroots groups is particularly critical for community engagement efforts to improve local school systems, because such groups possess the latent political capacity necessary to challenge traditional race, class, and power dominance in many jurisdictions, especially urban settings. 3 The persistence of poor-quality schooling in urban communities of color, for example, is intimately related to the limited social capital and political power of the constituencies who inhabit these communities. Improving urban schools and sustaining that improvement over time requires the engagement of grassroots groups which can challenge the power imbalances that have imposed and maintained these poorly performing schools across time.
Therefore, in addition to the elite sectors described above, local political leadership, leading components of the civic and cultural infrastructure, and grassroots community groups need to be part of effective community engagement efforts. Teachers unions and youth groups are also important constituencies to be included.
Political Leadership
The need to build support for engagement efforts among local political leadership is obvious. Elected officials control the fiscal resources that fund school systems; they also dominate the legislative arenas that determine educational policy. (Note that elected officials include not only the members of state legislatures and city councils, but also the elected members of local school boards or committees, who determine the educational and fiscal policies of most school districts.)
Civic and Cultural Infrastructure
The need to engage leading elements of a jurisdiction's civic and cultural infrastructure may seem less obvious. But civic, service, and advocacy groups such as the League of Women Voters, the NAACP and the Urban League, ASPIRA and La Raza, the library association, the YMCA, the Boys and Girls clubs, citywide volunteer organizations that provide critical services to children and youth, as well as arts groups, museums, and other cultural organizations, are critical components of a successful engagement strategy. These groups' memberships often include key elements of the city's diverse constituencies, and their leadership is often committed to improving equity of resources and outcomes for disadvantaged students.
How communities engage each of these constituencies varies, depending on the political and social dynamic in each community. And different communities have had different levels of success in engaging all constituencies.
Grassroots Groups
Grassroots groups such as neighborhood-based housing and improvement associations, community development organizations, local service providers, and community-based organizing groups are also a critical component of engagement efforts aimed at systemic schooling improvement.4 We also include neighborhood-based religious institutions such as churches, synagogues, mosques, and others, along with their ancillary after-school, tutoring, and related adult and youth services. 5 School-based constituencies such as parent associations or other neighborhood groups predominantly organized at the school site and, often, mobilized by local school administrative or teacher leadership are also important. In many racially divided cities, these groups represent critical constituencies of color whom school systems have served very poorly for decades. The experience, energy, passion, and commitment these constituencies can mobilize is an invaluable component of any community engagement strategy.
Teachers Unions
The role of teachers unions in community engagement efforts to improve schooling is a particularly complex issue. In urban settings in which teachers unions are a strong political force, the teachers union is often part of the shadow governance of the district, and union contracts often include provisions that define instructional, personnel, or administrative policy. Such unions are often deeply implicated in the structures, policies, practices, and outcomes that community engagement efforts are trying to change. Yet, in many jurisdictions, unions are such powerful organizations that their support is critical to successful engagement campaigns, and their opposition can often truncate or diminish such efforts. If teachers unions cannot be persuaded to join the engagement initiative, early efforts should attempt to ensure that the union will not oppose the campaign.
Youth Organizations
Finally, youth organizations are critical components. Youth groups that work exclusively within schools, as well as neighborhood-based and citywide youth groups, are emerging as important actors working to improve both the in-school and non-school factors critical to the growth of youth capacity and potential. 6 In many urban settings, school systems composed predominantly of White educators and administrators are failing to provide effective education to poor students of color, who make up a large majority of many districts' student bodies. In those settings, the voices, the demands, and the organizations of young people are critical contributors to more effective public schooling, because their experience of the quality of the district's education and their ideas about alternatives are unique and irreplaceable.
Engagement in Practice
How communities engage each of these constituencies varies, depending on the political and social dynamic in each community. And different communities have had different levels of success in engaging all constituencies to support reforms. The Community Involvement Program (CIP), formerly at New York University and now a part of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, has been working for several years to develop community engagement initiatives to support the work of high school reform in several sites that are part of Carnegie Corporation of New York's Schools for a New Society (SNS) initiative, an effort to redesign high schools in seven cities. The experiences in several of the SNS sites suggest some of the complexity, difficulty, and critical necessity of these efforts.
Boston
In Boston, representatives of several of the city's community groups participated in the initial round of SNS proposal development but were subsequently marginalized. Boston SNS site leadership's traditional approach to community engagement focused more on "informing" the community rather than opening avenues for grassroots constituency groups to participate in shaping the reform and helping to create the kinds of schools they want for their children.
CIP helped to mobilize an array of grassroots groups and encourage them to articulate their interest in rejoining Boston SNS as players with a clear voice in project decision making. The groups, particularly the Boston Parent Organizing Network (BPON), decided that the Boston school system needed to create a cabinet-level position responsible for community engagement efforts. A district task force had come to the same conclusion, and the superintendent agreed to create a high-level post dedicated to community engagement. Once that position was effectively staffed, BPON and other community groups took a more active role in the SNS initiative. CIP worked with the Annenberg Institute to help the new deputy superintendent of community engagement become involved in the Boston High School Renewal efforts. CIP and the Institute also encouraged the site leadership to expand the base of groups involved in the reform process.
CIP staff met with several constituency organizations to assess what would encourage them to engage more intensively in the SNS process and helped facilitate discussions that produced a set of principles redefining the power relationship between community groups and the SNS Boston leadership. From those principles, a new grassroots coalition emerged, which will receive some SNS funds for community engagement work in the fall of 2006. Boston's Freedom House will coordinate the coalition and also join the site's reform leadership team.
Providence
The SNS high school reform initiative was structured as a partnership between participating urban school districts and external organizations that played the role of lead partner and fiscal agent in each district. In Providence, Rhode Island, the lead partner, a community-service organization, initially perceived its role as representing the spectrum of local community constituencies involved in schooling improvement and youth development.
In Providence, Rhode Island, the lead partner's definition of its role began to evolve as the organization became increasingly committed to maximizing community power in the initiative, rather than marginalizing community interests.
But the lead partner's definition of its role began to evolve as the organization became increasingly committed to maximizing community power in the initiative, rather than marginalizing community interests.With CIP's help, the lead partner mobilized previously excluded community groups to form the Providence Educational Excellence Coalition (PEEC). PEEC was very influenced by the example of CC9, the Community Collaborative to Improve District 9 schools (now CCB), the first organizing collaborative established with CIP support and coordination in New York City.
PEEC began by successfully advocating for the restructuring of one of the city's poorest-performing high schools and has subsequently monitored the implementation of the redesign and transformation process in that school. Committed to becoming a data-driven organization, PEEC has reviewed and analyzed school-system financing, student information and outcome databases, the improvement strategies of the state education department, and the nature of the Providence teachers union contract. PEEC members have spent considerable time in Providence schools, observing and learning from educators, students, and parents. PEEC members currently play critical roles on a range of implementation action teams at the restructuring high school.
Chattanooga
The Hamilton County reform began with the merger of the city (Chattanooga) and county school districts. A reform-minded superintendent, committed to improving outcomes, particularly for the merged system's African American students, led a successful change effort: across a ten-year span, almost all the system's indicators show considerable gain.
But several members of the County Commission, the elected body that funds the county school system, increasingly hampered the superintendent's efforts. These opponents of reform consistently rejected the budget increases the superintendent's initiatives required and also argued that the superintendent's reforms were targeted to the city's predominantly African American schools at the expense of the county's predominantly White schools.
When the superintendent publicly criticized opposition commissioners for failing to fund the school system adequately,
a classic modernization conflict (with a racial substructure) erupted. The superintendent and his supporters,
including the Public Education Foundation, the very active and sophisticated local education fund, argued that the
county's economic development needs required building a knowledge-based economy and that an improved school
system was integral to that effort. The opposition commissioners argued that the current school system was effectively
serving the county's children, that the reforms were unnecessary because many students did not need college
preparation to thrive and prosper, and that the superintendent was squandering the system's existing resources.
In this highly polarized conflict, key voices were absent. The city and county's corporate sector, which generally shared the superintendent's commitment to improving student outcomes, were mostly silent. Many of Chattanooga's African American constituencies, critical of the school system's past poor performance and unsure about how much to trust the superintendent's commitments, were also not significantly involved. The failure to engage these two crucial constituencies made the superintendent increasingly vulnerable to opponents' attacks, which focused on him as a symbol of ineffectiveness, rather than on the issue of improving the school system's outcomes.
As the conflict escalated, the superintendent mobilized his supporters, including a countywide parents' association the school district had helped to organize. In a bitter finale, the superintendent, buttressed by three years of large test-score increases, won a very close vote for a school budget increase from the County Commission. But the fight was so bruising that the superintendent decided to retire, to defuse the conflict and create the possibility for a more supportive realignment under a new leader. In the ensuing selection process, the county's corporate community mobilized to ensure that the school system's reform direction continued. Corporate leaders took charge of the superintendent search committee and refused to nominate the educator supported by the opponents of reform. The school board then appointed one of the search committee's finalists, an African American deputy superintendent with considerable urban experience, by an almost unanimous vote. In the subsequent election for county commissioners, the corporate sector and a broad array of civic groups helped defeat key reform opponents, and the composition of the new County Commission is now far more favorable.
The Role of Community Engagement
These three examples suggest the critical roles that community engagement can play in supporting and sustaining reform efforts, as well as the vulnerability of those reforms in the absence of such efforts. Boston's high school reform shows the cost of inadequate engagement. The reform was essentially an elite-led effort involving key school reform intermediaries and the city's corporate sector. The absence of any significant community engagement efforts resulted in the non-involvement of key constituency groups, particularly those representing the city's African American and Latino communities. When the long-serving reform superintendent announced his retirement, those groups mobilized to articulate their concerns about the school system's failure to effectively serve their students. They published a report that critiqued the system's efforts and presented a set of improvement demands. The report was very critical of the implementation of High School Renewal, the SNS initiative in Boston Schools (Citizen Commission 2006).
Effective engagement can help build enduring constituency support for school improvement and reform, a particularly important asset in a fluid political terrain in which superintendents and school board members are too often transient.
In Providence, the lead partner's change in role perception led to the creation of a new coalition representing grassroots constituencies previously excluded from participation in the SNS reform. The coalition effectively supported the state education commissioner's recommendation for closing and restructuring a poorly performing Providence high school and is helping to monitor and support the transformation process.
In Chattanooga/Hamilton County, the failure to mount effective community engagement efforts isolated the superintendent and ultimately led to his decision to retire. Ironically, that retirement galvanized both the corporate sector and key civic and grassroots constituencies and contributed to a reawakening of political will that transformed the legislative landscape, producing new support for reform.
As these cases show, public engagement for schooling improvement can fulfill a variety of critical needs. Such engagement can tap the ideas, energy, and experience of parents, citizens, and community constituencies committed to improving local school and school-system performance. Effective engagement can help build enduring constituency support for school improvement and reform, a particularly important asset in a fluid political terrain in which superintendents and school board members are too often transient. Engagement can strengthen the legitimacy and the need for school reform, as varieties of constituencies mobilize to articulate, fight for, and support the reform efforts.
Finally, building community engagement for school reform can contribute to the expansion and intensification of public participation in public education. Expanding the public's role in ensuring a high quality of education for succeeding generations will strengthen our nation's potential for consistent and effective democratic action.
FOOTNOTES
1 For a complementary definition, consider how the Public Education Network's theory of action articulated the goal of public engagement for education in 2001: "to create public demand for good public schools. . . we envision communities with a substantive education agenda making real changes in students' achievement.We envision a strong community voice outside the schools — with its own power and constituency — that argues for improvement and helps guide changes.We envision robust community organizations that always are in the process of building new leadership and sustaining involvement." (PEN 2001, p. 11)
2 By strategically compelling, we mean that the solution embodies a persuasive theory of change which argues that if the campaign's remedy is implemented, student achievement will significantly improve.
3 The Public Education Network developed a theory of action for public engagement that identified three complementary categories — policymakers, organized groups, and the public at large (see Turnbull 2006).
4 These local groups are often, but not always, affiliated with national organizing networks such as the Industrial Areas Foundation, the PICO National Network, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
5 We include religious organizations because their membership is usually local and relatively stable and often has close contact with and experience of the quality of education the city's high schools provide. Members of neighborhood groups and religious institutions are also the most likely to send their children to local schools.
6 We identify youth as crucial to engagement efforts not only because their "voice" includes their direct experience of the strengths and limitations of their schooling, but also for the power, authenticity, and idealism at the core of their vision and their organizing efforts.
REFERENCES
Citizen Commission on Academic Success for Boston Children. 2006. Transforming the Boston Public Schools: A Roadmap for the New Superintendent. Boston: Citizen Commission.
Public Education Network. 2001. Theory of Action: Public Engagement for Sustained Reform. Washington, DC: PEN.
Stone, C. N., J. R. Henig, B.D. Jones, and C. Pierannunzi. 2001. Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
Turnbull, B. J. 2006. Citizen Mobilization and Community Institutions: The Public Education Network's Policy Initiatives. Washington, DC: Policy Studies Associates.
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