Voices in Urban Education

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Skills for Smart Systems
VUE Number 17, Fall 2007

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EXCERPT:
Partners for Change: Public Schools and Community-Based Organizations

Some of the research upon which this article rests was collected with Soo Hong, Carolyn Leung, and Phitsamay Sychitkokhong Uy, doctoral students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

By Mark R. Warren
Mark R. Warren is an associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
> Author's bio

> Full article [PDF: 9 pages]

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Community-based organizations can play important mediating roles to break down isolation and connect schools and the communities they serve.

What sense does it make to try to reform urban schools while the communities around them stagnate or collapse? Conversely, can community building and development efforts succeed in revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods if the public schools within them continue to fail their students? Urban schools and communities share a common fate. Yet, until recently, school reformers and community builders have worked in isolation from each other.

Indeed, twenty years ago, one would be hard-pressed to find a community-based organization (CBO) that was actively working on education issues. Now, however, most CBOs realize that educational success provides the key to the future economic well-being of the children they serve. Furthermore, many would like to attract middle-class families back into their urban neighborhoods, and they would like to keep families who improve their status from leaving the neighborhood behind. They cannot achieve those goals if neighborhood schools are failing.

Many public schools, for their part, find themselves disconnected from the neighborhoods they serve. As Pedro Noguera (1996), among others, has noted, teachers and school staff typically commute to their schools and have little understanding of or connection with the lives of their students outside of school in their families and neighborhoods. Yet, educators increasingly realize that they cannot succeed without a more holistic approach. They understand that children cannot learn well if they lack adequate housing, health care, nutrition, and safe and secure environments – or if their parents are over-stressed as a result of low wages and insecure employment (see, for example, Duncan & Brooks-Gunn 1997). And they increasingly recognize that parental involvement in the education of children can improve learning (Henderson & Mapp 2002).


Community-Based Organizations as Relational Intermediaries

School leaders typically lack expertise in how to provide services to families or engage them in meaningful ways. Many CBOs, however, have established roots in neighborhoods around schools and stronger connections to families. More than schools, CBOs have an appreciation for the cultural and social assets of communities, and this is critical to fostering meaningful partnerships between schools and families. As a result, CBOs can play an important intermediary role in building relationships between families and their children's schools where they do not typically exist.

As school and CBO leaders have come to understand their mutual interests, a wide range has emerged of initiatives that seek to forge collaborations between CBOs and public schools. These partnerships can take different forms, but it is useful to contrast service and organizing approaches; schools have much to gain from both types of partnerships. My research has focused on the value of the social relationships built through both types of these collaborations.