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Voices in Urban Education
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Community Partners
VUE Number 7, Spring 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Using Community Assets to Build an "Education System"
By Hal Smith
Hal Smith is a former Senior Research Associate, Annenberg Institute for School Reform. > Complete Biography
The imperative to raise achievement for all students provides an opportunity to go beyond a school system and create an education system: a web of connections between schools and community partners that provide the support children and youth need.
Education reformers increasingly speak of “the community.” Sometimes the attention to this mythic group comes from a desire to garner additional resources to enhance teaching and learning. Other times the desire is much more focused on building support for a specific reform approach.
Yet few people can articulate just who the “community” is. Is the community a geographic designation, referring to a surrounding neighborhood or set of neighborhoods? Is the community the individual parents and students of a district? Is it the larger municipal and business elite responsible for the civic life of a given locale?
This lack of specificity has led to a number of approaches and rationales for involving communities in school reform, with mixed results. But the instinct to involve the community in education reform is right. There is a pressing need to identify new opportunities where all of a community's assets can be brought to bear on the positive academic, social, and vocational development of its children and youth. At the same time, increased accountability must be married to deep and widespread ownership of educational policy and practice to ensure successful outcomes.
To realize the promise of education practice, therefore, it is necessary to reframe the relationship between schools and communities. Only a set of fully articulated relationships and robust connections – in fact, a system – can create educational excellence and opportunity. Through the system, practices and policies that previously were isolated become a coherent and intentional network of pathways that provide both expanded and enhanced opportunities for young people. Perhaps a look at preceding generations’ framing of the connections between public schools and communities can offer insight into the possibilities of the system I propose – an education system.
Communities and Education: Historical Perspective
In their earliest incarnations, public schools were tightly tied to the cities, towns, and villages that sponsored them. Absent any centralized direction, schools and their curricula were representations of locally defined morals, interests, and desired outcomes. Over time, schools grew into larger, more independent systems, under the leadership of professional educators, and began to innovate and differentiate in ways unimaginable at the outset of public education.
Archives
Community Partners
VUE Number 7, Spring 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Using Community Assets to Build an "Education System"
By Hal SmithHal Smith is a former Senior Research Associate, Annenberg Institute for School Reform. > Complete Biography
The imperative to raise achievement for all students provides an opportunity to go beyond a school system and create an education system: a web of connections between schools and community partners that provide the support children and youth need.
Education reformers increasingly speak of “the community.” Sometimes the attention to this mythic group comes from a desire to garner additional resources to enhance teaching and learning. Other times the desire is much more focused on building support for a specific reform approach.
Yet few people can articulate just who the “community” is. Is the community a geographic designation, referring to a surrounding neighborhood or set of neighborhoods? Is the community the individual parents and students of a district? Is it the larger municipal and business elite responsible for the civic life of a given locale?
This lack of specificity has led to a number of approaches and rationales for involving communities in school reform, with mixed results. But the instinct to involve the community in education reform is right. There is a pressing need to identify new opportunities where all of a community's assets can be brought to bear on the positive academic, social, and vocational development of its children and youth. At the same time, increased accountability must be married to deep and widespread ownership of educational policy and practice to ensure successful outcomes.
To realize the promise of education practice, therefore, it is necessary to reframe the relationship between schools and communities. Only a set of fully articulated relationships and robust connections – in fact, a system – can create educational excellence and opportunity. Through the system, practices and policies that previously were isolated become a coherent and intentional network of pathways that provide both expanded and enhanced opportunities for young people. Perhaps a look at preceding generations’ framing of the connections between public schools and communities can offer insight into the possibilities of the system I propose – an education system.
Communities and Education: Historical Perspective
In their earliest incarnations, public schools were tightly tied to the cities, towns, and villages that sponsored them. Absent any centralized direction, schools and their curricula were representations of locally defined morals, interests, and desired outcomes. Over time, schools grew into larger, more independent systems, under the leadership of professional educators, and began to innovate and differentiate in ways unimaginable at the outset of public education.
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