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Engaging Communities
VUE Number 13, Fall 2006
An interview with Norm Fruchter and Don McAdams  Audio Clip
Voices in Urban Education editor Robert Rothman has a conversation with Norm Fruchter and Don McAdams about engaging communities.
Click on the  on the bar below to start the audio.
TEXT VERSION:
RR: Why don't we start by giving your definition of community engagement. What does engagement mean, and what is it supposed to accomplish?
DMcA: I'll start and say that I like Norm's definition of community engagement. I don't know if that's actually the word that I used in my article; I referred to building civic capacity, which is Clarence Stone's phrase. There has been an office of community engagement in the Houston Independent School District for at least ten years, and I've always understood it to mean the district reaching out in a very active way to engage community groups at every level to build their involvement in school districts. There the focus was quite specific: the district trying to build partnerships; under that heading was parental involvement. I've understood it pretty much the way Norm defines it. His definition is sharp and clear and I like it a lot.
NF: I wish I remember what it was!
DMcA: Well, you define the community in a very specific way as including groups represented by leadership, as a practical matter, referencing the cost of trying to reach people individually. Then you talk about engagement as the mobilization of these groups. And you define engagement as an active relationship around a common mission, goal, or purpose.
NF: I agree with that.
RR: Don describes it as the district reaching out to the se groups. Is that the way it should work in all cases?
NF: It depends on where you're located. When I was on a school board for ten years, I thought about engagement in terms of what the district needed to do either to take on new initiatives that were larger than it could manage by itself or to build support. So I thought about it as reaching out, and trying to involve a bunch of constituencies in something that hopefully everybody wanted to do, or at least the district wanted to do and wanted to persuade them to get involved with.
When you're not, as I am now, part of a district, and you want to influence a district or even, as in Wake County or Mobile or some of the PEFs that want to help improve the district but they want to build a big tent of which the district is one tent pole of, then you're not reaching out from the district, you're doing something that hopefully the district will get involved in. But it's much bigger than the district.
DMcA: I think that Norm has added an additional layer to my piece. From my point of view, I'm writing as Norm was thinking when he was a school board member, the responsibility of school board to try to reach out and bring people together and build a coalition, and build understanding and support for what the district is trying to do. But clearly, in some places, the school district isn't trying to do anything. Is there room for other organizations to take the lead in reaching out and engaging the community around reforming and improving public education? Norm, in your paper, you point out examples of other organizations doing that and doing so effectively.
It reminds me of Paul Hill's point that there needs to be some sort of larger, more enduring watchdog, if you will, that's watching school districts, because school boards come and go just like any other center of power, whether it's city council or mayor or anybody else.
NF: I think that's right. Also, just watching Wake County and Mobile, what a centrally situated organization that's got a lot of constituency representation on its board can do is build a tent that is in some ways bigger than what the school district can do from its own capacity of reaching out. That varies district by district. Some districts and some school boards are a hell of a lot better at that than others. But I've been struck by the way the PEF in both those situations was able to build a continuum of constituencies, from the business and corporate sector right on down to the civic infrastructure and grassroots groups as well. That's a hard thing to do.
RR: How do these efforts get sustained? Don, you point out that people have other jobs besides worrying about the schools.
DMcA: I think sustainability really is the core issue. You can find around the country examples of districts that for five or six or eight years have had a fairly nice run. I don't think any district has come close to narrowing the achievement gap the way we need it to be done, but you can find examples in Long Beach, and in Houston, and in other places--Norfolk--where there's been a nice run. But where you have sustainability over successive superintendencies, over gradually renewing boards, that's very difficult to find.
That sustainability issue is really one that's concerning me a lot lately. We're working with a number of school districts that we think are making some good progress but we're worried about what happens when this current leadership team leaves. And, of course, they always do, because as some wise person pointed out to me once, we are all transitional. I don't know how to do that.
Let's take Portland. The Portland Schools Foundation, Cynthia Guyer, has been a very effective leader, and has brought together a diverse, wide group of constituencies, and has provided an overarching stability through changing school boards and changing superintendencies. I don't know: What happens when Cynthia Guyer leaves the Portland Schools Foundation?
NF: She's resigned.
DMcA: She did? When?
NF: I think last week.
DMcA: No kidding! I didn't know that. Well, there goes my point. What will happen now in Portland?
Where do you find communities that are self-sustaining and are not dependent on some core of leaders?
NF: I think you're right. It's always transitional and it always takes a long time to build, and it lasts for a certain amount of time, and because people move and people change and the politics of the coalition changes, there's a down period. Then if you're lucky you can find new forces and new folks that can build it up again, but I think it's always cyclical. And what you hope for is the longest run that you can get.
DMcA: It doesn't seem to me that we have figured out how to institutionalize this. I guess democracy is always needing to be renewed.
RR: You use the phrase "civic capacity." That implies that if there's a base of knowledge and ability among citizens, that it might not be so dependent on leaders. Is that the case?
DMcA: I think so. Let me give you an analogy. Let's take a university that has a tradition of a strong basketball program, like the University of North Carolina, or Duke, or Kansas. So they get a great coach, and a great run, and the coach leaves and they may have two or three down years, or even four or five down years, because they don't get the right coach or whatever. But you'll notice that, if you look at these schools over the decades, they continue, they persist as basketball powerhouses--or Notre Dame in football; football powerhouses.
So it is possible for institutions to create, in this case we'd call it, "sports capacity." But it doesn't seem to be dependent on any individual or even any small group or core leadership of individuals. It is so much a part of the culture of Duke to have a strong basketball program or Notre Dame to have a strong football program, that if there isn't one there, somehow it rises out of the pores of the extended Notre Dame family to have one. How do we get that same institutionalized commitment to high quality public schools that sort of transcends the current leadership?
NF: I've been watching the evolution of civic and corporate leadership in the reconstitution of Chattanooga as a city and the revitalization of its downtown core. Slowly and gradually, after about thirty years of that work, [there is a] realization and the acceptance of the civic leadership that they've got to tackle the school system and contribute to its improvement; that took a long time. Now there is a civic and corporate core that's committed to doing that and to staying the course. But I'm not sure how long the course is.
I think there's always a series of constituencies in any urban setting (my experience is only urban; I've got no sense how you do this on a statewide level or even how you do it in suburban or rural areas). In urban areas, there's usually a corporate core, a whole civic sector, and grassroots leadership that's mobilizable, but in my experience, the organizations that decide to take the lead in putting that big-tent coalition together and focusing it on school improvement have to be both very sophisticated and fairly confident in order to do that, and they don't come along all that often. There are many more PEFs across the country than can play that role in their sector.
DMcA: That's true. Most of them do not have the success of the handful that we have mentioned. They're peripheral.
NF: Sometimes it's a large social-service or youth-serving organization that decides to take on that role and actually has the capacity to do it. Doing that requires staff depth, a fair amount of funding support, a board that really wants to have the organization play that role, and very sophisticated executive leadership in order to do it.
DMcA: There's an organization in Houston with remarkable staying power. It's not hugely powerful, but it is influential, and it has remarkable staying power. It's called the Metropolitan Organization. It's a loose coalition of religious groups. So it's a lot of churches and other grassroots community organizations, and the institutions that are the constituent parts of the Metropolitan Organization are themselves very stable. Because they're organizations like churches and the YMCA and so forth.
NF: Is this an Industrial Areas Foundation?
DMcA: No, it's just called TMO, the Metropolitan Organization. It's been around twenty or thirty years--maybe more. It's a player at every board election. It's a player at every state rep election. They interview and endorse candidates, they raise money, they put volunteers into schools. They're not hugely influential but they are significant, and in Houston they are the longest-lived player in what we might call community leadership. But, again, their constituent parts are very stable organizations.
NF: There's a collaborative in El Paso that is anchored by the university there, and the university president, that's built a big-tent coalition that has focused on improving teacher quality. That's an interesting one. They've been stable for a long time.
DMcA: They have indeed. One of the groups that has the potential to be stable are chambers of commerce, because there's always going to be a chamber of commerce in Houston. In Houston, the Greater Houston Partnership, as it's called here, has had an education workforce committee that has been fairly influential for at least twenty years. But again it depends on the leadership. There are periods when Rob Mosbacher was chair, when it was very effective, very influential. Not so much now.
This is really hard work. And in some ways this is the cutting edge where I fall off the edge. I may be wrong, but I have all sorts of views on what school boards should do and what school districts should do, but how to get communities engaged and sustaining that engagement over time, I'm still thrashing that about.
RR: I get the sense that there's more interest, or at least more rhetorical support, for the idea. Is that accurate, from your perspective? At least, are more people willing to try it and work at it?
NF: There's certainly more rhetorical interest in at least exploring what it means. If Don and I and a couple of other people just sat down and talked about what's going on around the country, I think we can point to examples of where organizations are giving this a try than we could have ten years ago.
DMcA: I agree with that.
NF: I can't tell whether we're at the top of the curve or whether the curve is still going up. My hope is that it's still going up.
DMcA: This is an issue that I didn't hear talked about ten or fifteen years ago much. I'm sure it was, and I was just out of the loop, but there is a lot of interest. Maybe it's only rhetorical interest, and I don't know how effective or how sustainable these initiatives are, but I think there is a lot of talk about it, anyway.
We have come to recognize that these big urban districts are like ocean liners and they're not going to turn quickly. We can not fall back on this "knight in shining armor on a white horse and saving our city or public schools." I think there are school boards who still think that, and ten years ago a lot of school boards thought that, even some civic leaders: if we just get the right superintendent in here. But I think there's pretty broad awareness today that this is not the solution. Obviously we need strong superintendents and we need strong boards, but the work of transforming these districts is the work of several successive superintendents and gradually transitioning boards. And it has to be institutional; it isn't just charismatic leadership. I don't think there are many people today who think that charismatic leadership is the solution to improving urban education.
NF: I agree with that.
There are a couple groups out of Ohio that are aimed specifically trying to build the capacity of cities to actually do community engagement, not just around education but around a range of issues.
Knowledge Works.
NF: Yes. And the Harwood Institute that works with Knowledge Works. And the Kettering Foundation has been pushing this for a long time.
DMcA: That's right. David Matthews, I recall, wrote the book Is There a Public for Public Schools?
NF: And for a while Kettering and somebody else funded Public Agenda to do some work around public engagement in a number of cities.
So I do think there is more interest and more attention because, I think Don is right, I think people realize, especially when you're trying to do something like improve the provision of and resources for early childhood education, let's say, or you're trying to improve after-school programs in the district and the relationship of them to the district or you're trying to launch a city-wide literacy program, I think people understand that the district can't do that alone.
DMcA: In the work we're doing with school districts, funded by the Broad Foundation, we've been working intensively with several of them for a couple of years and we're getting to the end of our engagement with them--this is why we're refocused on the sustainability issue--the Broad Foundation is requiring the district to maybe pay half of it, which has minimal intervention but requires the district, if they're going to continue to get the funding, to have an active outreach and sustainability program. We're trying to figure out what we want a district to do to qualify for this continued stream of funding. We'll know more in about three months.
NF: It's important to distinguish between community engagement and community organizing. Community organizing is usually the mode of constituencies that feel like the school system has short-changed them, both historically in terms of resource provision and outcomes. Often what happens when a community engagement effort tries to bring in constituencies who have really been short-changed by the school system, they want to bring a set of demands to the table which the table may not be interested in. That's a conflict we've bumped into lots of places.
Community engagement really is useful for a certain range of things. Community organizing is useful for another range of things. One ought not confuse them or try to put them together.
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© 2006 Annenberg Institute for School Reform AISR_Info@brown.edu
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