Voices in Urban Education has succeeded in bringing together disparate voices. Authors have included students, parents, education practitioners, community leaders, researchers, district and state officials, mayors, and even a top official from Her Majesty’s government in England. Many of these voices are seldom heard in national education policy discussions.

As we intended, the voices did not always agree. Community leaders, for example, sometimes spoke of their frustrations with district officials who appeared resistant to community involvement; district officials, for their part, spoke of community groups’ narrow interests. Issues of race and class often reared their heads.

Yet, as we hoped, these disagreements also created opportunities for common ground. One instance comes to mind. In an issue on community engagement, Norm Fruchter and Richard Gray (2006) of the Community Involvement Program (then at New York University, now a part of the Annenberg Institute) wrote of the role of community groups in organizingparents and community members. In the same issue, Donald McAdams (2006), a former school board member from Houston and the director of the Center for Reform of School Systems, wrote that school boards should take the lead. Yet, in an interview for the VUE Web site, Fruchter and McAdams saw virtually eye to eye. What appeared to be a conflict paled in comparison with the common ground.

VUE has also had some success in meeting the Institute’s goal of informing the national dialogue. Although our data on its impact are limited, we know that we have received numerous requests for copies from district and community leaders holding meetings, professors leading classes, and, we’re proud to say, from the Obama Administration’s transition team developing policies for the new President. VUE articles have been cited in other journals and publications, and the Web page is the most-visited section of the Annenberg Institute’s site.

These accomplishments have been enormously gratifying. Yet VUE has also produced another accomplishment that the Institute might not have anticipated when we launched the publication: the development of an idea for a new kind of education system. This idea, which the Institute calls a “smart education system,” is now the focus of its work. This issue of VUE examines the notion through a range of articles that represent highlights from the first twentyfive issues.

Simply put, a smart education system links a high-functioning school district with a web of supports for children and families that collectively develop and integrate high-quality learning opportunities in all areas of students’ lives – at school, at home, and in the community. Such systems actively engage youths and community members in the development and implementation of services, to ensure that they meet community needs. Community members provide pressure and support; districts and service providers are accountable to the community for improving a broad range of outcomes for children and youth.

This idea has gained prominence in the education reform debate nationally. Policy-makers from across the political spectrum have increasingly recognized the importance of linking improved schooling with supports for learning and development outside of schools. Other organizations, such as the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education agenda and the Time, Learning, and Afterschool Task Force, a panel convened by the Mott Foundation, have outlined similar ideas.

This issue of VUE describes some of the components of a smart education system, from a range of perspectives.

• Michelle Fine, Janice Bloom, and Lori Chajet, in the first issue, draw on youth voices to challenge some of the assumptions in education reform policy. Engaged and organized students are key to smart systems, because they bring perspectives that adults seldom see. According to students, the authors found, the physical and instructional conditions in schools make it impossible to achieve the ambitious goal of ensuring that all students learn to high levels. At a time when districts, states, and the federal government were seeking to hold schools accountable for student results, the students made clear that governments need to be accountable for providing the means for students to succeed. (Rethinking Accountability, VUE 1, Spring 2003)

  > Full article, PDF

• Glynda Hull and Jessica Zacher, in an issue on adolescent literacy – one of the best-selling issues – broaden the definition of literacy to encompass higher-level abilities that schools seldom address, and they suggest that after-school programs might be ideal settings for helping develop such abilities. By analyzing a digital poem written by a fifteenyear- old student from Oakland, Asia Washington, Hull and Zacher show how the student’s afterschool program helped her develop the digital iteracy skills that are increasingly vital in what the authors call the “visual age.” The VUE Web site includes Asia’s digital poem. (Adolescent Literacy, VUE 3, Winter/Spring 2004)

  > Full article, PDF
  > Watch Asia’s digital poem

• Michael Grady, Ellen Foley, and Frank Barnes, in an issue celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, consider the role of districts in promoting the twin goals of equity and excellence. Although smart education systems take into account students’ learning outside of school, schools remain central to the vision. And “smart districts” are essential to ensure that all students have the opportunities and resources they need to succeed. The authors suggest that strengthening the effectiveness of school districts can help fulfill the promise of Brown v. Board. This issue of VUE was cited as one of the top reports of the year by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. (Beyond Brown v. Board, VUE 4, Summer 2004)

  > Full article, PDF

• Bill Purcell highlights the critical role of mayors in smart systems. Much of the writing about mayoral involvement in education focuses on mayoral control of school systems. But Purcell, then the mayor of Nashville, notes that mayors who do not control schools can wield a great deal of influence by mobilizing parents and community members. In Nashville, Purcell’s efforts to organize “first day” celebrations and make the system more transparent helped strengthen public support for the schools – and led to a substantial increase in funding. (Engaging Communities, VUE 13, Fall 2006)

  > Full article, PDF

• Joanna Brown highlights the role of community organizing in supporting educational improvement. In the case of Chicago, the community organizing group not only pressed for better schools, but also developed a unique resource by preparing parents to be teachers. This article highlights a major tenet of smart education systems: that community organizations and agencies bring to bear assets that can enhance educational opportunities for children and youth. And as a six-year study conducted by Annenberg Institute researchers later found, community organizing yields real improvement in educational outcomes. (Skills for Smart Systems, VUE 17, Fall 2007)

  > Full article, PDF

• Warren Simmons urges federal policy-makers to consider equity and community engagement to ensure that system improvements have the capacity to deliver supports that can meet the needs of all students. He outlines the principles of smart education systems and suggests that policies that support these principles will result in improved outcomes for all children and youth. (The Evolving Federal Role, VUE 24, Summer 2009)

  > Full article, PDF

While all of these elements are critical, the goal is to create a smart education system – a coherent organization that ensures that all young people have access to the services and supports they need. So far, this goal has remained elusive – although Great Britain, highlighted in VUE 21, an issue not represented here, comes close with its Every Child Matters agenda (Rothman 2008). The interest in the concept suggests that communities on this side of the Atlantic might approach that goal in the next few years, and future issues of VUE will highlight them.

The success of VUE has been personally and professionally gratifying to me. As I leave the editorship, I want to thank the Annenberg Institute for its strong and unwavering support for the publication; the communications staff, designers, and illustrator for their tireless work in producing consistently high-quality publications and Web sites; the authors, for their professionalism and willingness to add their voices to the conversation; and the readers who make the conversation happen. I look forward to joining your ranks.

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References

Fruchter, N., and R. Gray. 2006. “Community Engagement: Mobilizing Constituents to Demand and Support Educational Improvement,” Voices in Urban Education 13 (Fall).

McAdams, D. R. 2006. “Urban School Boards and Their Communities,” Voices in Urban Education 13 (Fall).

McAlister, S., K. Mediratta, and S. Shah. 2009. Rethinking the Teacher Pipeline for an Urban Public School System: Chicago ACORN. Providence, RI: Brown University, Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

Rothman, R., ed. 2008. “A Smart System in London.” Voices in Urban Education 21 (Fall).

Drawing on the voices of youth in New York and California, the authors find that the promises for improvement in current education policy represent a cruel hoax. Young people want a better education, but they are denied even the most basic conditions for learning.

Three days after taking office in January 2001, as the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush announced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), his framework for bipartisan education reform that he described as “the cornerstone of my administration.” President Bush emphasized his deep belief in our public schools, but an even greater concern that “too many of our neediest children are being left behind…. The NCLB Act… incorporates principles and strategies includ[ing] increased accountability for states, school districts and schools; greater choice for parents and students, particularly those attending low-performing schools; more flexibility…” (U.S. Department of Education 2002, p. 1)

A re the President and the nation in a position to reach the stated goals of No Child Left Behind? This essay addresses this question through an accountability exercise. The authors join those who challenge the high-stakes standardized-testing implications of NCLB (Elmore 2002; Meier 2002), but in this essay we focus our concern on the NCLB promise of “choice” and “flexibility” to “our neediest children.”

Drawing on data from poor and working-class youth of color from California and New York City, we analyze accountability from the “bottom.” As you will read, these students yearn for a high-quality education. They believe deeply that they are entitled to a slice of the American dream. Yet they have been startled awake by their investigations into the quality of their education, as they recognize how public education in the United States has been redlined, with race, ethnicity, and class determining young people’s access to high-quality schooling.

With the youth in these two contexts, we find the stated intent of NCLB – to support parents and students in ow-performing schools – to be stunning and timely. Two of the Act’s provisions, however, high-stakes testing and choice (specifically, the opportunity for students in low-performing schools to transfer to better-performing schools), reveal the cruel betrayal of NCLB for poor and working-class youth. For these students and their families, the language of “choice” rings brutally hollow. Systematic policies of inequitable urban school financing, maldistribution of quality teachers, and lack of access to rigorous curriculum ensure that the privileged remain privileged, while poor and working class students lag behind, all too predictably “failing” tests that seal their fates, with no choices in sight. “Choice” in this context sounds like an ideological diversion – a crumb held out to desperate students and parents whose real problem is underfunded schools (Kozol 1991).

Economist Albert Hirschman (1990) theorizes that members of declining social organizations may engage in any of three psychological relations with their organizations: exit, voice, or loyalty. In school systems plagued by structural inequities, most poor and workingclass youth sadly, if understandably, exit prior to graduation (see Fine 1991). This was true before the introduction of high-stakes testing, and drop-out ates have dramatically spiked, especially in low-income communities of color (Fine & Powell 2001), since the tests have been put in place. Exit reigns in hese schools, and those exiting have migrated into prisons, where 70 percent to 80 percent of young inmates have neither General Educational Development (GED) certificates nor high school diplomas (Fine et al. 2001). Some teens we’ve spoken with capture this trend as they see it: “There are two tracks now in high school – the college track and the prison track.”

But the voices you will encounter in this essay are not voices of despair spoken by dropouts (another critical voice of accountability). Instead you will hear from students who have remained in underfunded schools, narrating a blend of yearning and betrayal, outrage and loyalty, the desire to believe and the pain of persistent inequities. Remaining loyal, in Hirschman’s terms, these youth did not walk from their schools. It has not escaped their attention, however, that America has walked away from them, refusing the obligation to provide poor and working-class youth of color quality public education (Anyon 1997; Darling-Hammond 2001; Fine & Powell 2001; Kozol 1991; Mizell 2002; U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey 2000; U.S. Department of Labor 2001).

In such an America, any discussion of accountability requires a view from the bottom, told through the eyes of poor and working-class youth of color who want simply to be educated. We provide this view by bringing together college faculty, graduate students, teachers, and high school students, who work collectively to chronicle the uncomfortable truths of the accountability question (see Wells & Serna 1996 for parallel sets of issues concerning accountability and school integration).

You will hear, in this short essay, from high school students in two distinct settings. Across both settings, these young women and men are eloquent about the absence of distributive justice, that is, the unfair distribution of educational resources throughout America; and about the absence of procedural justice, that is, being refused a fair hearing from educators and the courts (Deutsch 2002). They ask: Will adults stand with them for educational justice? Theirs are necessary voices in the accountability debates.

The Hollowing of the Public Sphere: A Violation of Distributive and Procedural Justice

In the early 1990s, one of us (Michelle) wrote Framing Dropouts (Fine 1991), which analyzed the ways that public urban high schools systematically exile youths of poverty and color, scarring souls and minds in the process. This essay may sound redundant – an echo produced a decade later or an echo of W.E.B. DuBois’s (1935) question “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” almost seventy years later. But we believe, with concern, that the stakes for undereducated youth and for dropouts are far more severe today than they were in the past. For students of color and poor students, resources are woefully inadequate, access to higher education is increasingly low, and stakes for exclusion are rising. The economy remains hostile to young people without high school degrees (Poe-Yamagata & Jones 2000). Young women and men of color, even with high school degrees or some college, fare far worse than their white peers; those without a high school degree have little chance of entering the legitimate economy (Hochschild 1995, forthcoming).

We situate this work in California and New York because these states perversely represent “cutting edge” states in which historic commitments to affirmative action (in California) and remediation (in New York) in higher education have been retrenched, wrenching generations of African Americans and Latinos out of even dreams of college and university (Hurtado, Haney & Garcia 1998). The public sphere of K–12 education has been hollowed; the academy has been bleached; the prison populations have swelled. California and New York, then, offer us an pportunity to ask how youth of color and poverty, now denied equal opportunity, assess the policies and practices of public education. These are perfect – if distressing – sites for reconceptualizing accountability from the bottom.

Today’s visual age demands a broadened view of literacy that encompasses understanding and using new technologies. After-school programs can provide venues where young people can develop this form of literacy and express their newly created identities.

“How much is a life worth?” asked Asia Washington, a fifteen-yearold resident of Oakland, California, in her digital movie about current threats to life – wars, terrorism, drugs, violence, a lack of belief in self – and about the universal need for love, acceptance, and understanding.¹ Articulate and confident, a budding filmmaker, and a participant in an evening multimedia and literacy program called DUSTY (Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth), Asia began her movie by querying the worth of a life, and ended it with the answer: “Priceless.” With this choice of words, she smartly appropriated the language of a recent credit card commercial to serve her own ends.We, in turn, borrow from Asia and ask, What is the value of after-school programs? What is their worth, especially as spaces in which we might foster powerful literacy practices among young people?

In this essay we draw on Asia’s digital movie, along with our experiences in conceptualizing, participating in, and documenting after-school programs, to discuss new kinds of literacy.² We advocate recognizing new communications strategies arising from multimodal and multimedia composing, including the juxtaposition of visuals with print, audio, and music, as well as the appropriation of words, compositional techniques, and images from popular culture, as illustrated by Asia’s movie. We believe that such communicative channels are pervasive, potentially effective, and, most important, satisfying aspects of literacy,especially for youth (Buckingham 2000). And we believe that many outof- school programs are well suited to foster these new forms of literacy.

¹ We thank Asia Washington and her mother, Sonja Stewart, for sharing their insights about multimedia composing and about Asia’s creative work with VUE’s larger audience. We would like to acknowledge the pivotal role of Michael James, director of the DUSTY programs, in making DUSTY a safe, creative, and innovative learning space for children, youth, and adults. Alberto (Beto) Palomar was the instructor for Asia’s Digital Visual (DV) poetry class; his skill and care as an instructor are well known and much appreciated. Korina Jocson was instrumental in beginning and sustaining DV poetry and is a fine poet and multimedia composer in her own right, as well as a literacy researcher.We thank each of these individuals, as well as the larger DUSTY staff and community. DUSTY development, operation, and research have been supported by a range of institutions and grants, all gratefully acknowledged. These include the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California’s UC [University-Community] Links project; the U.S. Department of Education; the Community Technology Foundation of California; the Oakland Fund for Children and Youth; the Robert Bowne Foundation; the Allen Temple Baptist Church; and the Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement.

² In keeping with our interest in exploring and promoting new forms of communication such as multimedia,multimodal composing, we have made available a CD of Asia’s movie, “How Much Is a Life Worth,” and audio tapes of interviews with Asia and her mother on line at www.annenberginstitute.org/VUE/spring04/video.html

We begin with an overview of the historical origins of after-school programs in the United States and a sketch of the current after-school landscape. We include a discussion of some of the debates that have arisen around literacy within and outside of school and some of the theories that we have found helpful in thinking about literacy, outof- school spaces, and the design of after-school programs for Asia and other children and youth. We then return to Asia’s digital movie and the question of worth.

A History of After-School Programs in the United States

After-school programs have existed in the U.S. since at least the late 1800s. They came about when the need for child labor decreased, and, at the same time, societal expectations that schooling should be compulsory grew. These shifts created a new temporal zone: the out-of-school hours. Youths must have found this freedom to play in the streets, escape crowded housing, and mix with a range of people greatly appealing; but adults came to regard unsupervised after-school time as worrisome – drawing children into potentially unsafe activities or making them vulnerable to new dangers such as street traffic (Halpern 2002).

Eventually, in response to these concerns and to those of educators and reformers who wanted to “improve” working-class children, outdoor or playground programs were developed, and those programs expanded to include indoor activities (Gagen 2000). The historical research of Robert Halpern (2002) provides an example of the sorts of activities and programs available at a boys’ club that first opened in Manhattan in 1876. Staffed by middleclass volunteers, the club included a fife, drum, and bugle corps; singing classes; wrestling; natural history studies; bookkeeping; writing instruction; and a reading room.

The long-term perspective on the after-school movement in the United States reveals several tensions that remain unresolved. First, after-school programs (particularly those serving low-income children) have always been underfunded and overly dependent upon volunteers. Yet they are regularly asked to assume more and more responsibilities, to take up the slack for overworked families, and to assist students whose schools struggle to help them.

Second, as the Manhattan example suggests, after-school programs have typically had a range of emphases – academic, athletic, artistic, social – and have used their flexibility in programming to distinguish their offerings from those of schools. But they face continued and increasing pressures to
serve as academic, test-heavy extensions of the school day (California Dept. of Education 2002; U.S. Dept. of Education 2000). Finally, there have long been conflicts between their regulatory functions and their commitment to youth development.On the one hand, for example, they are expected to ensure safety and socialization through the control of children’s and youths’ time and movement. On the other, program officials see their mission as enabling youths to grow toward adulthood by giving them the freedom to take ownership of their activities and products and placing their interests and desires in the foreground.

Interest in after-school programs has grown many-fold in the last decade. Driven by the much-publicized worry over “latchkey” kids forced to stay home alone in the afternoons while their parents work, along with concerns over youths’ safety in those hours, more and more public and community agencies have created after-school programs to provide safe and productive activities for adolescents (Fight Crime: Invest in Kids 2000). These programs have also been aimed at improving students’ academic achievement and reducing the fiscal and societal costs associated with poor school performance (University of California 2002), although there is some debate over how effective afterschool programs are in improving academic knowledge and skills.

For whatever reasons, some three million to four million low-income and moderate-income children currently attend after-school programs (Halpern 2002), including large-scale efforts such as the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (U.S. Dept. of Education 2000) and New York City’s After School Corporation (After School Corporation 1999), as well as thousands of independent local efforts. And the need for these programs is expected to continue growing, regardless of whether funding is available (University of California 2002).

Three generations of children have enrolled in our nation’s schools since Brown v. Board of Education. Yet, we have fallen far short of Brown’s ideals for racial equality. The major challenge in education today – improving learning conditions for children in historically neglected and underfunded schools – requires new approaches to distributing resources and supports.

This year the nation celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, honoring the ruling as a watershed event in American history that set us on a path toward racial justice and equality. In the stroke of their pens, the nine justices obliterated America’s legalized system of racially segregated public schools.

Tempering these commemorations is the recognition that we, as a society, have fallen far short of the ideals of racial justice embodied in Brown. The stark fact is that since that day in May 1954, two generations of schoolchildren have passed through our nation’s public schools and a third generation has now matriculated – yet today we still see school systems that are separate and unequal. Underfunded urban districts struggle through problems endemic to communities of concentrated poverty. Meanwhile, other school systems enjoy a markedly higher quality of instruction, better facilities, safer environments, and better-prepared teachers, and they place their graduates on secure pathways to college, careers, and civic life.

Throughout this fifty-year struggle, America has pursued many avenues forsecuring equal protection for children of color. In this article, we trace the evolution of these three generations of society’s attempts to respond to the mandates of Brown v. Board – and examine the causes and consequences of their shortcomings. We then turn our attention to a contemporary approach in which the school district is a principal lever of equity as we strive toward the twin goals of results and equity at scale.

In pledging our support for these goals, we believe we are holding fast to the principles underlying the Brown decision. As Chief Justice Earl Warren noted in delivering the unanimous opinion of the court, the aim of ending segregation was not just to eliminate the disparities in resources and educational quality that characterized White and Black schools; it was also to affect the “intangible” qualities that make segregation particularly pernicious. Chief Justice Warren argued: “To separate [children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

First Generation: A Decade of Avoidance

Charles Ogletree and others have documented the systematic resistance by states and school districts to school integration in the immediate aftermath of the Brown decision. These critics have argued that the court’s subsequent “all deliberate speed” guidance in Brown II (see Ogletree 2004) encouraged public officials to delay any action to dismantle dual school systems; in worst cases, the decision sanctioned legislative resistance that became common throughout the South. Closing public schools and replacing them with private “resistance academies” was a tactic introduced by the Virginia state legislature that later spread throughout the South (Bickel 1964). Students from closed public schools received a state voucher that covered tuition to attend these newly privatized schools, which were shielded from federal law and court jurisdiction.

At the same time, southern communities, and, later, those in the North, attempted to gerrymander student attendance zones to create firewalls between Black and White communities and protect the status quo of dual systems. All in all, these strategies in the decade before the Civil Rights Act lent credence to the popular southern manifesto “as long as we can legislate, we can segregate” (Meador 1959).

The effect of this defiant inaction in the first decade was profound: a full decade after the Brown decision, only 2 percent of Black children in the South attended integrated schools (Woodward 1974). Indeed, the Black children of Topeka, Kansas, and Clarendon County, South Carolina, and the other plaintiffs who prevailed in the original Brown v. Board of Education received no material relief at any time during their school years.

Second Generation: Affirmative Desegregation in South and North

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several key decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court began to change this dynamic of delay and resistance. Green v. County School Board in 1968 and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1971 helped establish standards of evidence for finding school districts liable for constitutional violations and defined the scope of remedy.

These decisions and others in the early 1970s triggered the acceleration of desegregation in the South. The most common approach to desegregation taken by the courts involved reconfiguring
student attendance patterns to ensure racially integrated student bodies and, later, teaching faculties. These decisions ushered in the busing era in the South in the late 1960s and, within five years, in northern cities.

During Brown’s second generation, the federal courts assumed a more activist stance, finding scores of school boards and states in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The struggle shifted to how defendant states, school districts, and elected officials responded to their obligations to provide adequate remedy in the face of near-constant monitoring by plaintiffs and judicial supervision. The Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s clarified local and state responsibilities regarding the scope and expected pace of relief. A strengthening civil rights movement also heightened the public’s consciousness about racial equality.

With this added pressure, educators developed new strategies to promote racial integration of the schools in order to augment citywide busing plans. Magnet schools with specialized educational programs were introduced to encourage the voluntary transfer of students to enhance racial balance. The Detroit desegregation decision in the mid-1970s created a precedent for allowing some schools in a district to remain segregated on the condition that the district and state provide substantial compensatory educational services to these schools (Milliken v. Bradley 1974; Milliken II 1977). These educational measures included preschool, all-day kindergarten, lower class sizes, after-school programs, and summer instruction.

The boldest innovations were metropolitan plans that encouraged the voluntary enrollment of suburban students in city schools and city students in the suburbs for purposes of improving racial balance on both ends. Boston’s METCO program is perhaps the best known of these interdistrict plans. The St. Louis interdistrict program, at its peak, hosted 20,000 students, making it the largest program of its type (Grady & Willie 1986).

The second-generation response to Brown had a dramatic impact on racial integration. The percentage of African American children attending integrated schools increased throughout the 1970s and 1980s, cresting at 44 percent by 1988 (Orfield & Lee 2004). However, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1991 decision in Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, which released school officials there from further court supervision, we saw a reversal in these patterns, beginning in the 1990s. This was followed quickly by other courts’ declaring school districts “unitary” – that is, no longer operating two segregated school systems.

Today the percentage of Black students in integrated schools in the South has slipped to a pre-1970 level of 30 percent (Orfield & Lee 2004). Thus, by the late 1980s, American public schools began a pattern of “resegregation.” This time, segregation was not due to the pre-Brown legally enforced and statesponsored system of separate school systems for Black and White children, with an explicitly racist rationale. Rather, it was due to a combination of demographic trends, residential housing patterns, and federal court decisions releasing school districts and states from further desegregation obligations. During this same period, efforts to close the achievement gap between White children and children of color stalled, after two decades of marked progress. These simultaneous trends throughout the 1990s toward resegregation and flat achievement have caused some scholars and policy leaders to call for bold action (Orfield 2004).

After years of mistrust between the schools and community residents, the mayor of Nashville set out to rebuild confidence by opening schools to families and city residents, and the effort has paid off in increased support.

After a campaign in which he pledged to make education the top priority of the city, Mayor Bill Purcell of Nashville began, soon after taking office in 1999, to engage the entire community and rebuild public support for Nashville Public Schools. Through activities such as First Day, a civic celebration timed to commemorate the beginning of the school year, and a campaign to encourage parents to bring their children to school on the first day, Mayor Purcell has generated substantial support for the schools. And, in turn, the city has raised the school’s budget by more than 42 percent since he took office.

Mayor Purcell has a long history of involvement in education. As a state legislator, he sponsored the state’s education reform act. He was director of the Child and Family Policy Center at the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies. And he is the parent of a child in the Nashville Public Schools.

Voices in Urban Education editor Robert Rothman spoke with Mayor Purcell about the challenges and rewards of strengthening the relationship between schools and a city community.

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What was the relationship between the community and the schools like when you took office?

I think, in retrospect, there was a significant amount of mistrust between the community and the schools. This went both ways. Schools wanted – genuinely wanted – the support of the larger community, but had an ambivalent attitude towards the active presence and involvement of parents. Parents felt that.

The school system had a great commitment to sharing the good news and good stories about the schools.

Parents knew that. But they also knew that the schools were very reluctant and, in fact, did not share the shortcomings that the parents and their students knew the schools suffered.

That, frankly, combined with the fact that the community’s efforts to support the schools overall were not coordinated by the district, was at the heart of what I would describe as mistrust.

There were plenty of people trying hard to reverse this. The Chamber of Commerce actually had begun, almost ten years before I took office, to work to change this dynamic. And there were lots of people of good will on all sides of the equation trying to reverse this. But at the core, “mistrust” would describe the overall relationship.

And you saw a concrete example of that mistrust in a letter from your daughter’s school.

Oh, yes. I can still see the letter. I can see it in my hands in the kitchen as I’m sitting at the table reading, “Congratulations. School starts in two weeks.” (Of course, that was a traditional school communication at that time; they let you know only two weeks in advance.) The only printing in bold face was the admonition that on the first day of school, no parent shall enter the building. There was nothing else in bold face.That was the one thing they wanted to be sure you took away: you weren’t to go into that place on that day.

There was no suggestion that there was another day they encourage you to come in. They wanted to be darned sure you didn’t come in on that day. And while that doesn’t describe every principal in every school, that was the overall feeling that probably encapsulates the culture of the district as well as any other.

Education: The Most Important Thing a City Does

How did you go about trying to change that relationship?

I started in earnest as a candidate. I started out almost two years before the election saying, from the beginning, that education was the most important thing that this city did. Period. And I never left that message, from the moment I announced that I wanted to be mayor to the moment I was elected.

Having been elected, I continued at every opportunity to reaffirm that message. If there’s one thing that I think we have established firmly, it’s that education is now the most important thing that we do; it always was the most important thing that we do; and it always will be the most important thing that we do. This will never change, in this city or any other city that wants to be successful.

Then, in affirmation of that message, I became personally and highly focused on the schools themselves. I started talking early on about the importance of being in the schools. I had committed to visiting every school in the city during my first year as mayor – at that time there were 127 schools in the city – and I made those visits. I walked through every kitchen and every classroom in every section of the building and sent reports back to the school system about what I was seeing. I tried to make sure that every teacher and principal knew that I was there.

Welcoming Parents into the Schools

I made those visits myself and, during that period of time, pushed the First Day initiative. There was some initial reluctance. When I first met with the then–school superintendent, he thought it was a good idea, but why don’t we do it on the first in-service training day in October? And I said, “Why would you choose that?” And he said, “Well, because there are no students in the building.”

And I remember sitting there thinking, “I must not be explaining myself.” Because that’s exactly not what I want to do. I think parents should be in the building when there are kid there and teachers there and learning isgoing on. I think it ought to happen as soon in the school year as possible. That’s the first day.

And, to the superintendent’s credit, he relented, or agreed, depending on your perspective, I suppose, and said it was something they would try.

Accountability, with Support

We then offered a full-blown performance audit on the entire system, and offered to raise the funding for this from outside the school system. Normally, performance audits are paid for by the entity that’s being audited, but in this case I felt that it was an innovation for the city, as a whole, and the school system, specifically, so I should raise the money outside. It was about $500,000, as I recall, and half of it came from general government and half from foundations here in Nashville. They agreed to this, and we began the performance-audit process, which, ruthfully, culminated in a very important report and an important level of understanding and attention to the school system.

That was the process in the first eighteen months that I was mayor.

First Day: Engaging the Community

How have these efforts developed? I understand First Day is now a major
event in the city.

In terms of First Day, we now have roughly 21,000 parents and students appearing at the festival, which we hold, presently, on the day before school starts. From the first year, we had a higher level of attendance on the first day than we’ve ever had. In fact, the first year, they found, I think, 400 students who, traditionally, would have missed the first day – parents were out of town, they didn’t get the message, some problem – 400 kids who statistically never would have appeared on the first day, and some of them not for several weeks, were in school. We immediately noticed, because of this attention, higher PTA and PTO membership and participation.

And the combination of all of these things really allowed us to do one of the most important things, which
was significantly increase overall investment in our schools. That investment is financial: the school budget in the city of Nashville went from $397 million annually in the year that I came into office in 1999 to a total of $563.2 million for the current year, 2006–2007.

We’ve had significant capital investments, which we began doing, on my watch, annually.We’ve done, basically, six annual installments totaling $361.6 million.

As a result, I think you’d find here a much higher level of personal investment: investment by individual
parents, investment by the business community overall. Our public alliance for education has raised $4 million, which is something that wouldn’t have happened before; it couldn’t have happened before.

The Ultimate Goal: Improved Student Achievement

Were there other goals you had for engaging the community in the schools?

Ultimately, we all want performance to improve across the board. We have, still, a distance to go on that. I think what we find is a much higher level of trust in the results the system itself is producing.

In Tennessee, I sponsored, as House majority leader, the Education Improvement Act, which passed in 1992, and which started regular testing here. It was one of the earliest efforts in the country to bring regular and honest reports to parents. And it does so down to the subject and grade level, so you can tell how the third grade in your child’s school is doing, and teachers and principals have information about the performance of individual teachers and classrooms.

The first year we had that in place was 1995. As a result of this process, I think we have a higher level of press interest and parental belief about what the school system itself is saying about how it’s doing, about its accomplishments and its shortcomings. And a general belief that we have to do better and we can do better and we will do better.

At different points in our history, we weren’t sure we could do better. At different points in our history, we were pretty satisfied we wouldn’t do better overall. But, at this point, I think there is a general expectation in the community as a whole that we should, can, and will – and that we will do this in every school, not simply in certain sections of the city or certain magnet schools, but that, in fact, we can accomplish it across the entire system.

Investment won’t continue without success, and I’m satisfied that success won’t continue without investment of all the kinds I listed: money, and people, and general good will.

Successful Schools, Successful City

Now that the community is at this stage, what are the next steps? I think the most important thing for me to imprint permanently is the notion that this is the way that schools – and the city in which they are located – succeed. You can’t ever go back. There never will be a time when these schools aren’t the most important thing that we have to attend to.

And that’s, frankly, what I’m busily doing this next year. I have one more year as mayor, and my strong commitment is to make sure that’s a permanent part of the culture of this city. Because I care a lot about the schools and because I don’t think the city can continue to succeed without it.

The good news for us is that, with this focus, there have been other visible signs of success for the city. The last two years in a row we’ve been the number-one city in America for the expansion and relocation of businesses. Last year, we were the number-one city in America for corporate headquarters relocation. Kiplinger’s magazine, two months ago, said we were the city in America that anyone should choose to live in – the number-one choice. These are indications, I think, along with lots and lots of individual decisions by corporate leaders to bring their headquarters here, that, in fact, this city is leading in a way we didn’t lead before in America. This has everything to do with what we’ve been doing, first and foremost, focusing on education.

That connection is clear now, and my goal is that it is never forgotten or lost.

An effort to engage parents in Chicago schools results in benefits to both the schools and the parents.

On any given day, in nine public schools in Chicago’s Logan Square community, about 170 parent mentors and parent tutors are in elementary school classrooms tutoring children; every evening two or three teams of parents and teachers make Literacy Ambassador home visits; about eighty mentors and several hundred other parents are attending school-based community centers to learn English or learn skills, while another sixty parents are in college classes to become bilingual teachers.

Most of these parents are immigrant mothers or the daughters of immigrants. Their schools are part of a network of schools serving low-income, largely Latino children, brought together by the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) to create schools as centers of community – and serve the needs of the immigrant students.

Enter an LSNA school and you see mothers sitting in hallways with small groups of students who are intently reading out loud.A mother comfortably enters the principal’s office to remind her of a meeting. Mothers meet in a corner of the cafeteria to plan a family reading night for all. As a teacher passes by she calls – “Cati, your son was looking for you upstairs.” In the evening, 1,000 families participate in classes and activities held at the schools and managed by parents.

LSNA is the forty-five-year-old community organization of Logan Square, a mixed-income, majority Latino immigrant neighborhood of 84,000 residents on Chicago’s northwest side. LSNA has forty member organizations, including churches, social service agencies, block clubs, and nine large public schools (two K–8, four K–6, one 7–8, and two high schools.) Some 8,300 students, 90 percent of whom are from low-income Latino families, study in these schools.

For more than fifteen years, LSNA has been organizing community members around education issues. In doing so, we started with some basic principles. First, as part of the 1989 Chicago school reform movement, which established elected parent-majority Local School Councils (LSCs), we knew that the Councils needed an organized community in order for their formal authority to select and hire principals on four-year contracts to be meaningful. Second, as the community group for a particular neighborhood, we had a vision of opening the doors of fortress schools and helping them function as centers of community. Third, as organizers, we were committed to listen to and value what residents wanted and to build on community strengths.

We also suspected that disparities of education, language, and income were only some of many factors that created barriers to parent involvement in schools. And we believed that transformational learning happens through experience, by doing. We also knew that we would have to raise the money to pay for whatever we built.

However, we never imagined the full results that could be achieved by deeply tapping into the strengths and skills of parents.

Building a Successful Collaboration between Schools and Parents

In the early 1990s, LSNA built a coalition of principals, teachers, and parents to address school overcrowding. This coalition represented an early version of the shift in strategy more community organizations are making – from confrontational organizing against school administrations to a sometimes complex but highly productive inside-outside collaboration in which ideas, buildings, and power are shared by the schools and the community, particularly parents.

LSNA’s new school-community collaboration was successful. By 1996 LSNA had won five large building additions and two new middle schools. At the coalition’s insistence, the buildings were built so that they could be used as community centers in the evenings. The social trust built by common struggle and victory laid the basis for the collaborative community-building efforts that followed.

Parents as Leaders: The Parent Mentor Program

The Parent Mentor Program was launched in 1995 and has served as the open door for many parents, particularly mothers, to become involved in their children’s schools. It began in one school, Frederick Funston, a pre-K through grade 6 school. Principal Sally Acker, who had been active in the overcrowding campaign, asked LSNA to develop a “parent mentor” internship program to involve non-working mothers and help them further their education and find jobs.

Fifteen Funston mothers were recruited into the program, trained, and placed in classrooms to work two hours daily with students under the direction of a teacher. LSNA’s initial one-week training helped mothers to see themselves as leaders, reflect on their skills, set personal goals, and commit to achieving them. It also provided the space within which to develop strong cohorts; mothers, isolated by such factors as their immigrant experience, lack of English, and small children shared common experiences and found personal support from each other.

Every applicant was accepted, regardless of education or language (many spoke only Spanish), and each was placed in a classroom where she could be helpful. They attended weekly workshops on a variety of topics and reflected together on their classroom experiences. They wrote journals. They held potlucks. They helped each other pursue their goals, usually involving learning English or returning to school. At the end of 100 hours they received a $600 stipend.

Changing the Family-School Relationship: Community Learning Centers

The parent mentors at Funston also helped plan the Community Learning Center (CLC) that was established as a result of the successful anti-overcrowding campaign. The mentors surveyed their neighborhood door-to-door, asking over five hundred families what programs they needed in an evening school-community center. LSNA raised funds to keep Funston open until 9:00 p.m. with adult education and children’s programming and hired two parents to run the CLC.

The CLC helped change the way families and school staff saw the school. Not only was the center accessible to parents (the school was close to home; classes and childcare were free; and children were tutored while their parents studied), but parents who walked freely in and out of the CLC began to see the school building as partly theirs and education as something that united their family. The CLC held Thanksgiving and Christmas parties to bring participants together. Daytime teachers got to know parents by teaching English or classes to prepare for General Educational Development (GED) tests at night, and some of the most popular classes were taught by parent mentors – whether Mexican folk dance for children or sewing for adults. The CLC was overseen by advisory boards that included parents as well as principals.

Federal policies should address community engagement and equity in order to build “smart education systems” that improve outcomes for urban children and youths.

TThe brief economic boom of the 1990s brought an infusion of hope and energy to urban communities. The well-being of children and families in urban America were buoyed by an expanding, though increasingly stratified, labor market, housing redevelopment, and the entrepreneurial spirit brought by a new immigrants from Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, and the remnants of the former Soviet Union. During the 1990s, federal and state policies also began to treat cities more like catalysts for social and economic development, as opposed to indigent kin. As a result, urban communities experienced a brief renaissance marked by declining rates of teenage pregnancy, infant mortality, crime, and violence and rising incomes and population growth.

Public policy during that period was marked by an alliance between the public, on the one hand, and the political, financial, and business establishments, on the other. Together, these groups pushed an agenda that emphasized the wisdom and effectiveness of the private sector while dismissing the benefit of government and the public sector. The pursuit of excellence was extolled over the pursuit of equity in every sector, including education. Moreover, individual (private) accomplishment was privileged over community (public), with the latter perceived as an impediment to innovation and growth.

The recent economic bust has effectively destroyed the public’s trust in the establishment and called into question these public policy assumptions. The nation has now experienced, if not completely learned, the harsh lessons of individual gain untethered from community well-being, as we witness home foreclosures, job losses, withered pensions, and an uncertain future that once seemed filled with promise, even if it was only attainable for a few.

The recent economic recession – for the poor, it’s a depression – threatens to slow the pace of improvement in central cities that were beginning to reestablish themselves as founts for economic, cultural, and community renewal, where families seeking opportunity and inspiration joined with others to transform their lives and to forge a new society (Annenberg Institute for School Reform 2001). As this recession has painfully revealed, the transformative power of urban life is tapped more deeply by some and remains beyond the grasp of far too many. High proportions of low-income African American and Latino youth in urban areas continue to have their progress impeded by high rates of incarceration, displacement created by gentrification, and the lost opportunity caused by being on the wrong side of the achievement gap, the new “track” demarcating the fate of privileged and disadvantaged communities. These forces weaken and obscure the pathways to success available for disadvantaged youth as they seek to become more productive and engaged members of society, a task made more daunting in urban school systems, whose halting progress in closing the achievement gap is threatened by the loss of tax revenue caused by the downturn.

The Standards Movement: Reshaping the Federal Role

A Nation At Risk engendered a significant shift in the federal role in education in a manner unseen since the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. The Brown decision, while groundbreaking in significance for African Americans, followed a historical path of asserting federal involvement to address equity by eliminating legal barriers to access and/or by allocating resources to support specific groups. Traditionally, the federal government has left decisions about educational quality for all students, such as academic standards, assessment, curriculum and instruction, and school design, largely up to states and school districts (Ogletree 2005;Fuhrman & Lazerson 2005). The Brown decision, after all, mandated integration with the expectation that greater access to schools would ensure greater quality. But the decision stopped well short of requiring the government to ensure that equity fostered quality, as the intervening years demonstrated so strikingly.

A Nation At Risk changed that dynamic. It inspired the standards movement, and the federal legislation it spawned (e.g., Goals 2000, the Improving America’s School Act, No Child Left Behind) used federal Title 1 funds and other resources as leverage explicitly to improve quality by encouraging states to adopt voluntary national standards; embed these standards in accountability systems; and intervene in failing schools so that all students would receive the supports they need to meet national goals and standards.

While the deadline for meeting these goals and standards has shifted from the year 2000 to NCLB’s 2014 deadline, the emphasis on all has remained constant, while acceptance of an increased federal role has gained wider acceptance. The debate instead has turned to how the federal government should exert its influence, not whether or not it should. Moreover, with the recent passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the federal government has taken unprecedented steps to increase funding for states and districts as it reshapes its approach to how the funds should be used.

Gaps in the National Agenda: Community Engagement and Equity

ARRA’s incentive grants focus on key levers for change – educator quality, data systems, innovation, technology, more rigorous core standards and assessments, and improvement of low-performing schools. Yet, this comprehensive technical agenda has two troubling oversights – a lack of attention to the need for community engagement, coupled with an implied, rather than explicit, emphasis on equity.

Community Engagement
Despite President Obama’s background as a community organizer, the strategies outlined in ARRA proceed as though education reform occurs in a political, social, and cultural vacuum, as if communities take up reforms based on clear and objective results alone. This belief that success sells itself represents what Paul Hill and his colleagues would call a “zone of wishful thinking” – an implied assumption that is usually held despite abundant evidence to the contrary (Hill, Campbell & Harvey 2000).

This belief that successful results compel widespread adoption has undermined the efficacy of too many research-based designs/strategies/programs and What Works clearinghouses to name here. Coburn’s (2003) seminal article on scale emphasized the importance of building ownership both inside and outside the system as a key ingredient for taking reform to scale – a point underscored in Paul Hill and colleagues’ case studies of districts whose reforms were weakened or undone by leadership instability and/or opposition from forces threatened by change (Hill, Campbell & Harvey 2000). If states and districts pursue the agenda outlined in ARRA but ignore the need to garner community ownership, they will find themselves vulnerable to resistance or skepticism sparked by poor communication and a failure to obtain prior involvement. Predictably, this resistance often comes from groups that the reform is intended to help the most – communities whose students’ performance lies on the wrong side of the achievement gap. Their concerns, however, are often left out of early planning and decision-making tables where the agenda is set, as opposed to announced.

Undoubtedly, ARRA’s priorities were guided by research and informed by extensive meetings with elected officials, commissioners and superintendents, researchers, union leaders, the philanthropic community, and leaders of Washington-based think tanks and advocacy groups. And, given the constricted timeline for moving from planning to action, little effort was devoted to garnering knowledge and ownership beyond civic and political elites to involve those most dependent on urban systems for their children’s and community’s well-being: low-income families, African Americans, Latinos, and recent immigrants.

As a result, as usual, these critical constituencies will be asked to support reforms designed by “others” rather than participate in their development (Stone et al. 2001; Hirota and Jacobs 2003). The frustration, lack of knowledge, and distrust produced by this ngagement gap positions poor parents and communities of color as an untapped and vulnerable resource that can be mobilized to oppose promising innovation based on poor political execution and unintended consequences overlooked by elites lacking in-depth knowledge and experience of the challenges and assets that exist in these communities.

Equity – Where Art Thou?
In addition to diminishing political support and overlooking valuable assets, shortchanging the engagement of low-income families and communities of color in the reform of school systems their children attend, ARRA also repeats the reform movement’s mistake of pursuing solutions intended to work for all students. This approach, while admirable, obscures the fact that urban districts, in particular, need help in delineating and developing supports that work for particular groups of students that are present in large numbers – English language learners, students with disabilities, recent immigrants, over-age and under-credited students, and students challenged by early parenthood, childcare and work responsibilities, previous incarceration, violence,health concerns, and other factors that contribute to the achievement gap and a lack of engagement.

While some of the Obama administration’s agenda reflects an understanding of the particularly needs of urban communities – especially the “Promise Neighborhoods” initiative, modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone – the need for differentiated supports should be a priority rather than an afterthought in efforts to redefine standards, design new assessments, and turn around failing schools. Rather than lying on the periphery, equity as well as excellence should be a design principle that guides work both on what Richard Elmore calls the technical core of education – curriculum, instruction, and assessment – and on the supports students need to develop the social, cultural, and other forms of capital they need to become active participants in their own learning (Gordon & Bridglall 2005).

Unfortunately, the failure to address both the engagement and equity gaps has been a recurring theme in recent accounts of reforms in districts such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New Orleans – communities whose districts are operating a mix or portfolio of schools, with some being operated and supported by the district (and/or state, in the case of New Orleans), and some operated by organizations with charters or agreements waiving some district policies and practices (Aspen Institute and Annenberg Institute
2006; Gold et al. 2007; Cowen Institute 2008). Grassroots and civic leaders in these communities, as well as many educators in the schools, often lament the lack of attention paid to local values and traditions in the design of new schools and programs. They also express concerns that the new approaches replicate previous patterns of privilege due to a failure to consider basic issues such as transportation, access to information, and differentials in power, status, and fiscal resource that, if left unaddressed, reinforce old inequities.

Each of these reports underscores the importance of dealing with equity and community engagement as a top priority to ensure that system improvements or reinventions have the capacity to provide supports that can be differentiated – for example, more time for greater outreach to inform planning and decision making; targeted interventions for students with disabilities, English language learners, and over-age/under-credited students; supports for struggling, as well as highly effective educators; and curricula that embrace local aspirations as well as national ones. For instance, the absence of resources and strategies to support arts, culture, and community service are a prominent critique of existing reforms, a fault that ARRA seems to share rather than ameliorate.

Specifically, these conceptions focus more on leadership than on leaders; that is, they look at leadership functions rather than the individuals who perform them. In so doing, these researchers, notably James Spillane of Northwestern University, have suggested that leadership is actually distributed across organizations, and that these functions are not necessarily performed by those at the top of an organizational chart.

This idea has enormous implications for the way schools and districts are run and the way school and district leaders are prepared. Instead of issuing orders down the chain of command, leaders set the vision and hold people accountable for achieving it. Many people throughout the organization take the lead in coming up with ideas and seeing projects through. Leaders – all of them – need a new set of skills.

The notion of distributed leadership also has particular importance in districts that form partnerships with community organizations and agencies to support children, youth, and families. These systems, which the Annenberg Institute for School Reform calls “smart education systems,” recognize that schools are not solely responsible for children’s development and academic growth. And in sharing responsibility, these systems also share leadership functions.

This issue of Voices in Urban Education examines the idea of leadership in smart systems from a range of perspectives.

• Deborah King and Margaret Balch-Gonzalez lay out the need for a new concept of leadership to ensure that school systems prepare all students to succeed and suggest some strategies for put- ting those ideas into practice.
• James Spillane argues that leading and managing instruction requires a new mindset for school leaders, one focused on diagnosis and design.
• Andrew Lachman, Richard Lemons, Margaret Terry Orr, and Mónica Byrne-Jiménez describe an initiative to prepare school leaders in four Connecticut districts.
• Philip Weinberg discusses his school’s partnership with a nonprofit organization under a city policy to connect schools with groups in order to provide support and assistance.
• Ben Sherman talks about his role as a leader in a school with multiple partners that provide support for student learning in and out of school.

These articles illustrate many of the ways leadership takes shape in schools and school systems. And they highlight the fact that the current generation of leaders might not be prepared for this new reality. Weinberg and Sherman, for example, both say that their preparation programs focused more on management than on leadership, and that they learned how to operate as leaders through their experience as apprentices in schools. New preparation programs, such as the Connecticut program, might succeed in preparing a new generation of leaders who are equipped to take on these responsibilities.

Yet initial preparation might not be enough. Leaders need ongoing support as well. The turnover of superintendents remains high, and principals increasingly are burning out and retiring early. New York City’s school-support organizations offer an example of one kind of response, but in other districts, such support is hard to come by, particularly in these tough budget times. Yet, if we believe that leadership is critical, support for leaders should be a high priority.